CHAPTER X
He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening, however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight.
She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so transmute the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had passed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose dreams not only come true but surpass themselves. His dreams had been only shabby travesties of the reality. He recalled the subtle fragrance of her hair, the flash of her amber eyes, the sensuous delicacy and softness of her limbs and bosom, the melodious timbre of her voice. And he paused longer than usual as he reflected with sudden amazement that she was his for the taking. The taking! How deliciously mysterious she had been as she made it clear he must take her away, far away, where nobody knew who she was, where they could be happy for ever together! How she had played upon the strong chords of his heart as she spoke of her despair, her loneliness, her conviction that she was destined for ill fortune! She injected a strange strain of tragic intensity into the voluptuous abandon of her voice. She evoked emotions tinged with a kind of savage and primitive religious mania as she lay in his arms in the scented darkness of that garden and whispered in her sweet twittering tones her romantic desires. And the thought that she was even now lying asleep in another room, the morning sun filtering through green shutters and filling the chamber with the lambent glittering beam-shot twilight of a submarine grotto, was like strong wine in his veins. She depended on him, and he was almost afraid of the violence of the emotion she stirred in him. She had touched, with the unerring instinct of a clever woman, his imagination, his masculine pride and the profound sentimentalism of his race towards her sex. She revealed to him a phase in her character so inexpressibly lovely and alluring that he was in a trance. She inspired in him visions of a future where he would always love and she be fair. Indeed, Mr. Spokesly's romantic illusions were founded on fact. Evanthia Solaris was possessed of a beauty and character almost indestructible. She was preëminently fitted to survive the innumerable casualties of modern life. She was a type that Ada Rivers, for example, would not believe in at all, for girls like Ada Rivers are either Christian or Hebrew, whereas Evanthia Solaris was neither, but possessed the calculating sagacity of a pagan oracle. Such a catastrophe as the departure of the consuls had enraged her for a time, and then she had subsided deep into her usual mysterious mood. So his illusions were founded on fact. She could give him everything he dreamed of, leaving him with imperishable memories, and passing on with unimpaired vitality to adventures beyond his horizon. There was nothing illogical in this. Being an adventuress is not so very different from being an adventurer. One goes into it because one has the temperament and the desire for adventure. And Evanthia was by heredity an adventuress. Her father belonged to that little-known and completely misunderstood fraternity—the comitadji of the Balkans. It is not yet comprehended by the western nations that to a large section of these southeastern people civilization is a disagreeable inconvenience. They regard the dwellers in towns with contempt, descending upon them in sudden raids when the snows melt, and returning to their mountain fortresses laden with booty and sometimes with hostages. They maintain within political frontiers empires of their own, defying laws and defeating with ease the police-bands who are sent to apprehend them. They have no virtues save courage and occasionally fidelity and no ideals save the acquisition of spoil. They invariably draw to themselves the high-spirited youths of the towns; and the girls, offered the choice of drudging poverty or the protection of a farmer of taxes, are sometimes discovered to have gone away during the excitement of a midnight foray. So had Evanthia's mother, a lazy, lion-hearted baggage of Petritch whose parents had breathed more easily when they were free at last from her incessant demands and gusts of rage. But the man who had carried her off into the mountains was nearing the end of his predatory career, and very soon (for he had no enemies, having killed them all) he was able to purchase a franchise from the Government and turn tax-farmer himself. He was so successful that he became a rich man, and the family, fighting every inch of the way, took a villa in Pera. It was there Evanthia was educated in the manner peculiar to that part of the world. When she was eighteen she could make fine lace, cook, fight, and speak six languages without being able to write or read any at all. The villa in which they lived was for ever in an uproar, for all three gave battle on the smallest pretext. They lived precisely as the beasts in the jungle live—diversifying their periods of torpor with bursts of frantic vituperation and syncopating enjoyment. Neither European nor Asiatic, they maintained an uneasy balance on the shores of the Bosphorus between the two, until Evanthia's mother, a vigorous, handsome brunette trembling with half-understood longings and frustrated ambitions in spite of her life of animal indolence, suddenly ran away and took her daughter with her. She had fallen in love with a Greek whom she had met in Constantinople, a man of forceful personality, enormous moustaches, and no education, who was selling the tobacco crop from his estate in Macedonia. Evanthia's father, now a man of nearly sixty, did not follow them. He suffered a paroxysm of rage, broke some furniture, and made furious preparations for a pursuit, when one of the servants, a tall, cool Circassian girl with pale brown eyes and an extraordinarily lovely figure, broke in upon his frenzy and told him an elaborate story of how his wife had really gone to France, where she had previously sent a sum of money, and how she herself had been implored to go with them but had refused to desert her master. It was quite untrue, and took its origin from the French novels she had stolen from her mistress and read in bed; but it hit the mark with the man whose only domestic virtue was fidelity. And the Circassian creature made him an admirable companion, ruling the villa with a rod of iron, inaugurating an era of peace which the old gentleman had never experienced in his life.
Evanthia had to adjust herself to new and startling conditions. The swart Hellene stood no nonsense from his handsome mistress. He beat her every day, on the principle that if she had not done anything she was going to do something. When Evanthia began her tantrums he tried to beat her, too, but she showed so ugly a dexterity with a knife that he desisted and decided to starve her out. He cheerfully gave her money to run away to Saloniki, laughing harshly when she announced her intention of working for a living as a seamstress. She arrived in Saloniki to hear stirring news. She was about to enter a carriage to drive to the house of a friend of the Hellene, a gentleman named Dainopoulos, when a young man with glorious blond hair and little golden moustache, his blue eyes wide open and very anxious, almost pushed her away and got in, giving the driver an address. This was the beginning of her adventures. The young man explained the extreme urgency of his business, offered to do anything in his power if she would let him have the carriage at once. She got in with him, and he told her his news breathlessly: War. It seemed a formidable thing to him. To her, life was war. She had no knowledge of what war meant to him in his country. To her London, Berlin, Paris were replicas of Constantinople, cosmopolitan rookeries where one could meet interesting men. Saloniki immediately became a charming place for Evanthia Solaris. The young man was the vice-consul. His father was a wealthy ship-chandler at Stettin, and he himself had been everywhere. It was he who first confirmed her vague gropings after what one might call, for want of a better word, gentility. She was shrewd enough to suspect that the crude and disorderly squabbling in the Pera villa, or the grotesque bullying on the tobacco plantation, were not the highest manifestations of human culture. As has been hinted, she was sure there were people in the world who lived lives of virtuous ease, as opposed to what she had been accustomed. Their existence was confirmed by her new friend. He was the first man she had liked. Later she became infatuated with him. In between these two periods she learned to love someone in the world besides herself.
It would not do to say that she, in her barbaric simplicity, assumed that all Englishwomen lay on their backs and had angelic tempers. But she did arrive at a characteristically ecstatic conclusion about Mrs. Dainopoulos. That lady was so obviously, so romantically genteel that Evanthia sometimes wanted to barter her own superb vitality for some such destiny. She never considered for a moment, until she met Mr. Spokesly, the chances of being adored as Mr. Dainopoulos adored his wife. She knew Mr. Dainopoulos would never dream of adoring a woman like herself. She regarded him with dislike because he betrayed no curiosity about herself and because he obviously knew too much to be hoodwinked by her arts. He even ignored her rather amusing swagger when she paraded her new acquisition, a handsome vice-consul. She knew he would not have tolerated her at all had not his wife expressed a desire to have her remain. Mrs. Dainopoulos had no intention of countenancing evil; but she had been humane enough to see, when Evanthia told her story, how impossible it was for a girl with such a childhood to have the remotest conception of Western ideals. Mrs. Dainopoulos, in fact, belonged to the numerous class of people in England who manage "to make allowances," as they call it, for others. And possibly, too, Evanthia, with her bizarre history and magical personality, possibly even her naïve assumption that she was destined to be mistress of men, appealed to the Englishwoman's flair for romance. Evanthia, contrasted with Haverstock Hill, was wonderful. And to Evanthia, the victim of sudden little spurts of girlish posing, pathetic strivings after an imaginary western self, the invalid woman was a sympathetic angel. She never laughed when Evanthia pretended an absurd lofty patriotism or inaugurated a season of ridiculous religious observances, dressing in white and holding a crucifix to her breast. She did not deride Evanthia's remarkable travesty of English dress, or Evanthia's embarrassing concoctions in the kitchen. These gusts of enthusiasm died out, and the real Evanthia emerged again, a velvet-soft being of sex and sinuous delicacy, of no country and no creed, at home in the world, a thing of indestructible loveliness and problematic utility.
And now, while Mr. Spokesly stood at his window gently rubbing his chin and looking down into the dew-drenched garden, Evanthia was lying in another room, smoking a cigarette and meditating. She had a very astute and clearly defined plan in her mind, and she lay thinking how it could be carried out. Unhampered by so many of our modern educational distractions and complexes, her mental processes would have exacted the admiration of the London School of Mnemonics. The apparent impossibility of leaving Saloniki and reaching Constantinople meant nothing at all to her. It had always been an almost impossible task to go anywhere if one were a woman. Women, in her experience, were like expensive automobiles. They were always owned by somebody, who drove them about and sometimes ill-treated them and even rode them to destruction, and who lost them if they were not carefully guarded. Moreover, the parallel, in her experience, went farther, because she observed that nobody ever thought less of them because they were costly to run. Evanthia was now like an ownerless machine of which no one perceived the value or knew how to start. She had been getting accustomed to the notion that independence had its pleasures and defects. She lay thinking with quiet efficiency, until her cigarette was burned down, and then suddenly sprang out of bed. With extraordinary speed and quietness, she rolled up her great masses of black hair, slipped into a yellow kimono and Turkish slippers, and went downstairs. The contrast between her pose, with nothing save the slow curl of smoke coming from the deep pillow to show she was alive, and the sharp vitality of her movements in the kitchen, was characteristic. She could not help doing things in a theatrical way. Mr. Dainopoulos was much nearer the mark than even he knew, when he said in his caustic way that Evanthia imagined herself a queen. There were times when she thought she was an empress walking down ivory staircases strewn with slaughtered slaves. She had a way of striding to the door when she was angry and turning suddenly upon him, her head lowered, her amber eyes full of a lambent, vengeful glare. Mr. Dainopoulos would remain as impassive as a dummy under this exhibition of temperament, but his attitude was artistically correct. She might be exasperated with him, but she really regarded him as a dummy. He represented the cowed and terror-stricken vassal shrinking from the imperial anger. And now she moved in a majestic way here and there in the great stone kitchen, making black coffee and spooning out some preserved green figs into a plated dish. This she arranged on a tray. In imagination she was a great lady, a grand-duchess perhaps, taking refreshment to a secret lover. She loved to figure herself in these fantastic rôles, the rôles she had seen so often at the cinemas. The exaggerated gestures and graphic emotions came naturally to a girl at once theatrical and illiterate. She walked away with the tray in her hand, ascending the stairs as though rehearsing an entrance, and stood stock still outside Mr. Spokesly's door, listening.
Mr. Spokesly was listening, too. He had heard the slip-slop of the loose slippers, the tinkle of spoon against china, and then a faint tap. He went over to the door and pulled it open.
"You!" he said, with a thrill. He could not have said a word more just then. She smiled and held a finger to pursed lips to enjoin silence. He stood looking at her, hypnotized.
"Drink coffee with me?" she whispered sweetly, holding up the tray. And then she moved on along the passage, looking back over her shoulder at him with that smile which is as old as the world, the first finished masterpiece of unconscious art.
She led the way to a darkened room, set the tray down, and pushed the green shutters away, revealing a wooden balcony with chairs and a green iron table. Below, in the hush of early morning, lay the road, and beyond the trees and houses that followed the shore they could see the Gulf, now streaked and splotched with green and gray and rose. The early morning, charged with the undissipated emotions of the night, is a far more beautiful hour than the evening. To Evanthia, however, who had always dwelt amid scenes of extravagant natural beauty, this exquisite sunrise, viewed as it were in violet shadow, the invisible sun tingeing the snow of the distant peaks with delicate shell-pink and ivory-white, the vessels in the roadstead almost translucent pearl in the mist, the shore line a bar of solid black until it rose ominously in the sullen headland of Karaburun—all this was nothing. To Mr. Spokesly it was a great deal. It became to him a memory alluring and unforgettable. It was a frame for a picture which he bore with him through the years, a picture of himself on a balcony, listening to a girl in a yellow kimono while she whispered and whispered and then sat back in her chair and raised her cup to drink, looking at him over the rim of it with her brilliant amber eyes.