The woman of Andros

By Thornton Wilder

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Title: The woman of Andros

Author: Thornton Wilder

Release date: February 23, 2026 [eBook #78024]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930

Credits: Sean/IB, Dori Allard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN OF ANDROS ***




Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores:
_italics_.




                      [Illustration: (colophon)]




                                  THE
                                 WOMAN
                                  OF
                                ANDROS


                                  BY
                            THORNTON WILDER


[Illustration: (picture of a woman in Greek dress sitting in a chair)]


                MCMXXX--ALBERT & CHARLES BONI--NEW YORK




                          COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY
                      ALBERT & CHARLES BONI, INC.


             MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




The first part of this novel is based upon the _Andria_, a comedy of
Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to
us, by Menander.




The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night
crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in
darkness. The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar
held for a long time a gleam of red and orange, while across from
it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue pockets in their shining
sides. The caves that surround the Neapolitan gulf fell into a
profounder shade, each giving forth from the darkness its chiming or
its booming sound. Triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from
Egypt, but with the coming on of night they seemed to regain their
lost honors, and the land that was soon to be called Holy prepared
in the dark its wonderful burden. The sea was large enough to
hold a varied weather: a storm played about Sicily and its smoking
mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the water lay like a wet
pavement. A fair tripping breeze ruffled the Aegean and all the
islands of Greece felt a new freshness at the close of day.

The happiest, and one of the least famous of the islands, Brynos,
welcomed the breeze. The evening was long. For a time, the sound of
the waves, briskly slapping against the wall of the little harbor,
was covered by the chattering of women, by the shouts of boys, and by
the crying of lambs. As the first lights appeared, the women retired;
as the air was filled with the clangor of the shop fronts being put
into place, the boys’ voices ceased; and finally only the murmur
of the men in the wineshops, playing at games with ivory counters,
mingled with the sounds from the sea. A confused starlight, already
apprehensive of the still unrisen moon, fell upon the tiers of small
houses that covered the slope and upon the winding flights of stairs
that served as streets between them.

The wineshops stood about the roughly paved square at the water’s
edge and in one of them the five or six principal fathers of the
island sat playing. By the time the moon had risen, two of these,
Simo and Chremes, had outstayed their companions. Simo was the
owner of two warehouses; he was a trader and had three ships that
passed continually to and fro among the islands. The men had
finished playing; the counters lay on the table between them and
they sighed into their beards as they thought of the long walk
through the ghostly olive trees to their homes. Simo was more tired
than usual: whereas the law of moderation teaches us that the mind
cannot be employed for more than three hours daily over merchandise
and numerals without soilure, he had that day spent five hours in
argument and traffic.

“Simo,” said Chremes suddenly, with the air of a man bracing himself
to an unpleasant and long deferred task, “your boy is twenty-five
now--”

Simo groaned as he saw the subject arising that he was never able to
look in the face.

“It’s four years,” continued Chremes, “since you first said that a
young man mustn’t be forced into marriage by his old people. And
certainly no one has been trying to force Pamphilus. But what is
he waiting for? He helps you in the warehouse; he exercises in the
field; he dines at the Andrian’s. How many years must that kind
of life go on before you agree with me that he would be better off
married to my daughter?”

“Chremes, he must come to me of his own accord. I will not be the
first one to speak about it to the boy.”

“First! It won’t be speaking of it first, Simo. It has been
understood between our families for years that he will marry
Philumena. It’s being spoken of all the time. The young people tease
him about it from morning to night. He knows perfectly well that my
daughter is ready to marry him. It’s sheer laziness on his part.
It’s sheer unwillingness to take on the responsibilities of being
a husband and a father and the foremost young householder on the
island.”

“He’s a young man who knows what he means to do. I will not coerce
him.”

“Then it’s settled that he doesn’t want to marry my daughter. It’s
a humiliation for her to be waiting all these years for him to make
up his mind, and her mother’s been after me to close the matter for a
long time. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but you’ll be throwing away a
good thing through sheer hesitancy, both of you. Philumena is by far
the healthiest and the prettiest girl on any of these islands. And
she’s clever at everything that is expected of a woman in the home.
The uniting of our two families has advantages, Simo, that I don’t
have to point out to you. But this lapse of time has made it clear
that your son is going to wait until his fancy has been caught by
some other girl, I suppose. So be it! From this very night my wife is
going to start looking about for some other young man.”

“Chremes, Chremes, he’s only twenty-five. Let him play about a
little longer. Why must they become husbands and fathers so soon?
He’s good and he’s happy. So is your daughter. Let them be awhile.”

“Grandchildren!--that’s what I want to see. There shouldn’t be a long
step between the generations. It’s bad for customs and manners.”

“You’ll make a greater mistake by hurrying than by delaying.”

“Well,” Chremes continued, “there’s another reason why I want the
matter settled soon. And that is this: we don’t like the visits that
Pamphilus is paying to the Andrian woman. Naturally, Simo, it’s hard
for me to be severe about it, because my own son goes there too. But
it’s natural that a father should be more exacting in regard to his
son-in-law than in regard to his son.”

Simo looked more uncomfortable than ever and remained silent. Chremes
went on:

“I don’t think you like this resort to foreign women any more than
I do. Our islands have always been famous for strict and good
behavior. If the devil was in us as boys we could always follow some
shepherdess up a dark road. But this Andrian has brought the whole
air of Alexandria to town with her, perfumes and hot baths and late
hours.”

Simo stroked his cheeks a moment and then replied in a low grunting
voice: “Well, if it isn’t one thing, it’s another, I suppose. I don’t
know anything about this Andrian. The women seem to talk of nothing
else from morning to night, but one can’t believe what they say.”

Thus invited, Chremes launched into his exposition with considerable
relish, examining Simo’s face from time to time to see if the
details were arousing in him the interest they held for himself. “Her
name is Chrysis, and I don’t know what she means by calling herself
Andrian. The island of Andros was never famous for such airs and
graces as she puts on. She’s flitted from Corinth and Alexandria, you
may be sure. She should have stayed in her cities instead of burying
herself in our town and reciting poetry to our young men. Yes, yes,
she recites poetry to them like the famous ones. She has twelve or
fifteen of them to dinner every seven or eight days,--the unmarried
ones, of course. They lie about on couches and eat odd food and talk.
Presently she rises and recites; she can recite whole tragedies
without the book. She is very strict with the young men, apparently.
She makes them pronounce all the Attic accents; they eat in the
Athenian mode, drinking toasts and wearing garlands, and each in turn
is elected King of the Banquet. And at the close, hot towels are
passed around for them to wipe their hands on.”

Simo did not concede to Chremes the pleasure of his close interest;
his eyes were lowered and his face wore the same bored expression
that it brought to all island gossip. Chremes decided to be less
expansive and added with easy indignation: “As for me, Alexandria
is Alexandria and Brynos is Brynos. A few more imported notions and
our island will be spoiled forever. It will become a mass of poor
undigested imitations. All the girls will be wanting to read and
write and declaim. What becomes of home life, Simo, if women can read
and write? You and I married the finest girls of our time and we’ve
been happy. We can at least provide one more generation of good sense
and good manners on this island before the age arrives when all the
women will have the airs of dancers and all the men go about waiting
on them.”

Simo knew the answer to this, but he repressed it. Chremes, more than
any man on the island, was ruled by his wife. In fact from her loom
in the shadow, Chremes’s wife tried to rule the whole island, using
her harassed husband as her legislative and punitive arm. Simo asked:

“What happens after the banquet?”

“Each boy pays for his plate, and pays right smartly too, and from
time to time one or another is graciously permitted to stay until
morning. That’s all I know.”

“Is your son at all these dinners?”

“He was quarreling or something,--or perhaps he drank too much, I
don’t know. At all events, he was expelled for a time. Thrown right
out into the street, he was, by the other guests. But he’s made his
peace with her again.”

“Do you talk to him about this ... this Chrysis?”

“Why, no. I pretend to know nothing about it.”

“Is my son always there?”

“They say he’s practically always there.”

There was a long pause. The boy who attended in the wineshop went out
into the moonlight and started putting up the shutters. Presently he
returned and whispered to Simo that an old woman was waiting outside
to speak to him and that she had been waiting there for some time.
This was unusual on Brynos, but Simo took pride in never betraying
any surprise. He nodded slightly and continued staring before him.

“Are there any other women at the Andrian’s?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Some say there are and some say there aren’t. But
there’s a houseful of some sort. In fact it’s a kind of hospital for
the old and the lame and the ... all kind of old battered pensioners.
The house is way up at the edge of the town....”

“I know where it is.”

“... and the people, whoever they are, never come into town. They
never even go out on the road by day. Oh, you can be sure the
townspeople talk of nothing else.”

Chremes rose and put on his cloak. He saw that Simo was as far as
ever from committing himself. “Well, that’s how it stands,” he said.
“I hope that in another ten days you can give me a more definite
answer. My wife is after me a good deal, Simo, and she says that I’m
to tell you this, that unless Pamphilus stops those visits all idea
of a marriage between himself and Philumena is impossible. And that
any such marriage must be definitely settled pretty soon or you’ll
have to start finding some other girl one-tenth as good.”

For the first time Simo bestirred himself and said slowly: “You and
your wife will be throwing away a good thing too, Chremes. It’s
precisely because Pamphilus is a great deal more than an ordinary
island boy that I can’t speak to him as I could to another son. There
are more sides to Pamphilus than you imagine.”

“Yes, Simo, we know that he’s a fine young man. But we also know,
if you will forgive me, that there’s a strain in Pamphilus of the
... the undecided, the procrastinating. To do his best and to take
his place, Pamphilus must be urged on by someone, like yourself,
whom he admires. And he’s not as interested in this island and in
what it stands for as he should be. Do you know the young priest
of Æsculapius and Apollo? Well, there is something of the priest
in Pamphilus. Such people aren’t interested in putting their foot
forward. They haven’t yet come to see what life is about.”

Chremes went out and plodded home along the rocky road. Simo sat on
a minute longer. What a bad ending to a bad day, he thought. The two
men had grown up on the island together. For thirty years they had
been its leading citizens. They knew one another too well. In their
conversation they had let play the faint antagonism that always lay
between them. This boasting about their children,--how vulgar, how
un-hellene. How unphilosophic. Yet that was true: there was something
of the priest in Pamphilus.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Simo turned to the old woman who was hiding in the shadow by the
door. “You wanted to speak to me?” he asked roughly.

Between fright and suspense--for she had been waiting there for the
greater part of two hours--Mysis was barely able to find her voice.
“My mistress wishes to speak to you, sir,--Chrysis, the Andrian,” and
she pointed with both hands towards the waterfront.

Simo grunted. Looking up he saw the beautiful woman leaning against
the parapet at the water’s edge fifteen paces away. Her head and body
were wrapped in veils, and she waited calmly and impersonally in the
moonlight as though two hours were but a moment in her serenity.
Below her in the little protected harbor the boats knocked against
one another in friendly fashion, but all else was still under the
melancholy and peace of the moon. Simo approached her without
deference and said: “Well?”

“I am--” she began.

“I know who you are.”

She paused and began again. “I am in an extremity. I am driven to
ask a service of you.” Simo pushed his lips forward, raised his
eyebrows, and lowered his eyes wearily. She continued in an even
voice without anxiety or suppliance: “A friend of mine is very ill
on the island of Andros from which I come. Twice I have sent this
friend money by the hands of various sea-captains going between the
islands. I know now that the captains are dishonest and that my money
never reaches him. All that I ask is that you put your frank upon the
package of money and it will reach him.”

Simo did not like to see women carrying themselves, as this Andrian
did, with dignity and independence. His antagonism was increased; he
asked abruptly: “Who is this friend?”

“He was formerly a sea-captain,” she replied, still without
servility. “But now he is not only ill; he is insane. He is insane
by reason of the hardships he endured in the war. I have put him in
charge of some people, but they will only be kind to him as long as I
send them money for it. Otherwise they will put him away on a small
island nearby with the others. You know such islands ... where basins
of food are left for them every few days ... and where--”

“Well,” said Simo harshly, “since your friend has lost the use of
his reason and since he cannot realize the conditions under which he
lives, it is best that you leave him upon the island with the others.
Is that not so?”

Chrysis tightened her lips and looked far out over his head. “I have
no answer for that,” she replied. “It may be true for you, but it is
not true for me. This man was once a very famous sea-captain. You may
have known him. His name was Philocles. Now I think I am his only
friend, unless you choose to help him also.”

Simo did not acknowledge having known him, but the tone in his next
words was less vindictive. “When would you like this money to go?”

“I ... I have some money ready now, but I would prefer to send some
in ten days.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Chrysis, daughter of Arches of Andros.”

“Chrysis, I will do this for you, and I will even add to the sum. In
return you will do a favor for me. You will refuse my son entrance
into your house.”

Chrysis moved slightly to one side and stretching her arm along the
parapet looked down into the harbor. “Favors cease to be favors when
there are conditions attached to them, Simo. Magnanimity does not
bargain with its powers.” These maxims were almost murmured; then she
raised her head and said to him: “I cannot do that, unless I tell
your son that it is because you have ordered it.”

Simo’s slightly cynical superiority over the rest of the world
reposed on the fact that he had gone through life without ever having
been surprised as unjust, untruthful, or ungenerous. Angry, but with
himself, for having been caught at this disadvantage, he replied:
“That is not necessary. It would be quite simple for your servant to
tell him that you do not wish him to come into the house.”

“I could not do that. There are several young men on the island to
whom my door, for one reason or another, is closed. I cannot do
that to Pamphilus without giving him a reason. If you understood the
spirit of our group you would not wish me to do that; I think that
there we are not lacking in respect for one another. I hardly know
your son; I have scarcely exchanged twenty words with him; but I know
that he is by far the first young man among my guests.” Suddenly
the image of Pamphilus rose up before her and she was filled with
an excitement and joy in praising him, and for that very reason she
subdued herself and added in a lower voice: “He is old enough to make
decisions for himself. And if I do this, he must understand.”

Simo was aware that some strange wise praise of his son hovered
between them and his heart almost stopped beating for pleasure,
but from his lips there rushed the brutal phrase he had prepared a
moment before: “Then you must send your money to Andros some other
way.”

“Very well,” she said.

They stood looking at one another. Simo suddenly realized that he
lived among people of thin natures and that he was lonely; he was
out of practice in conversing with sovereign personalities whose
every speech arose from resources of judgment and inner poise. With
his wife, with Chremes, with the islanders one could talk with half
one’s mind and still hold one’s authority, but here in a few moments
this woman had caught him twice at a disadvantage. Chrysis saw this
and came to his aid; she broke the silence that was leaving him
obstinate, angry, and small.

“It is perhaps his younger brother whose life can be arranged for
him; your Pamphilus deserves to be better understood than that.” And
her tone implied: “You and he are of one measure and should stand on
the same side.”

Simo preferred talking about his sons to any other activity in the
world, but his emotions were very mixed as he assembled an answer to
this remark:

“Well, well ... Andrian, I will frank your money for you. I have
boats going to Andros every twelve days. One went off today.”

“I thank you.”

“Could I ask you ... euh ... not to mention this to Pamphilus?”

“I shall not.”

“Well ... well, good night.”

“Good night.”

Simo trudged home in an unaccustomed elation. It made him happy to
hear Pamphilus praised and “probably this woman was an exceptional
judge of persons.” He had made a fool of himself, but in good hands
one does not mind. “Life ... life ...,” he said to himself, hunting
for a generalization that would describe its diversity, its power of
casting up from time to time on the waves of tedious circumstance
such star-like persons. The generalization did not arrive, but he
walked on in a bright astonishment. How he would like to hear her
read a play; he used to be interested in such things and when his
journeys took him to an island that was large enough to have a
theatre he never missed an opportunity to hear a good tragedy.

As he entered the courtyard of his farm he saw Pamphilus standing
alone, looking at the moon.

“Good evening, Pamphilus,” he said.

“Good evening, father.”

Simo went to bed, deeply moved with pride, but for form’s sake he
repeated anxiously to himself: “I don’t know what I’ll do with him. I
don’t know what I’ll do with him.”

And Pamphilus stood looking at the moon and thinking about his father
and mother. He was thinking about them in the light of a story that
Chrysis had told. As the banquets drew to a close she liked to move
the conversation away from local comment and to introduce some debate
upon an abstract principle. (She cited often the saying of Plato
that the true philosophers are the young men of their age. “Not,”
she would add, “because they do it very well; but because they rush
upon ideas with their whole soul. Later one philosophizes for praise,
or for apology, or because it is a complicated intellectual game.”)
Pamphilus remembered that on one evening the conversation had turned
upon the wrong that poets do in pretending that life is heroic. And
a boy from the other end of the island had said, half-mockingly and
half-hopefully: “Well, you know, Chrysis ... you know, life in a
family is not in the same world as life in Euripides.”

Chrysis sat a moment searching for her answer, then she lifted her
hand and said: “Once upon a time--”

The table burst out laughing, but with an affectionate laugh of
mock-repudiation, because they knew that she liked to cast her
remarks into the form of fables and to begin them with this childish
formula. Pamphilus heard again her beautiful voice saying:

“Once upon a time there was a hero who had done a great service to
Zeus. When he came to die and was wandering in the gray marshes of
Hell, he called to Zeus reminding him of that service and asking a
service in return: he asked to return to earth for one day. Zeus was
greatly troubled and said that it was not in his power to grant this,
since even he could not bring above ground the dead who had descended
to his brother’s kingdom. But Zeus was so moved by the memory of
the past that he went to the palace of his brother and clasping his
knees asked him to accord him this favor. And the King of the Dead
was greatly troubled, saying that even he who was King of the Dead
could not grant this thing without involving the return to life in
some difficult and painful condition. But the hero gladly accepted
whatever difficult or painful condition was involved, and the King of
the Dead permitted him to return not only to the earth, but to the
past, and to live over again that day in all the twenty-two thousand
days of his lifetime that had been least eventful; but that it must
be with a mind divided into two persons,--the participant and the
onlooker: the participant who does the deeds and says the words of so
many years before, and the onlooker who foresees the end. So the hero
returned to the sunlight and to a certain day in his fifteenth year.

“My friends,” continued Chrysis, turning her eyes slowly from face to
face, “as he awoke in his boyhood’s room, pain filled his heart,--not
only because it had started beating again, but because he saw the
walls of his home and knew that in a moment he would see his parents
who lay long since in the earth of that country. He descended into
the courtyard. His mother lifted her eyes from the loom and greeted
him and went on with her work. His father passed through the court
unseeing, for on that day his mind had been full of care. Suddenly
the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be
said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of
our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every
moment. And not an hour had gone by before the hero who was both
watching life and living it called on Zeus to release him from so
terrible a dream. The gods heard him, but before he left he fell upon
the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be
realized.”

It was with such eyes that Pamphilus now saw his father pass into
the house and that he had seen his mother moving about, covering
the fire and going about the last tasks of the day. And it was in
the light of that story that his eyes had been opened to the secret
life of his parents’ minds. It seemed suddenly as though he saw
behind the contentment and the daily talkativeness into the life
of their hearts--empty, resigned, pathetic and enduring. It was
Chrysis’s reiterated theory of life that all human beings--save a
few mysterious exceptions who seemed to be in possession of some
secret from the gods--merely endured the slow misery of existence,
hiding as best they could their consternation that life had no
wonderful surprises after all and that its most difficult burden was
the incommunicability of love. Certainly that explained the humorous
sadness of his father and the fretful affection of his mother. And
now as his father passed him in the courtyard this interpretation
shook him more forcibly than ever. What can one do for them?
What--to be equal to them--can one do for oneself? He was twenty-five
already, that is--no longer a young man. He would soon be a husband
and a father, a condition he did not invest with any glamour. He
would soon be the head of this household and this farm. He would
soon be old. Time would have flowed by him like a sigh, with no plan
made, no rules set, no strategy devised that would have taught him
how to save these others and himself from the creeping gray, from the
too-easily accepted frustration.

“How does one live?” he asked the bright sky. “What does one do
first?”

                  *       *       *       *       *

Chrysis’s view of human experience expressed itself, as we have seen,
in fables, in quotations from literature, in proverbs and in mottoes.
Herself she summed up in a word: she regarded herself as having
“died.” Dead then as she was, the inconveniences of her profession,
the sneers of the villagers, the ingratitude of her dependents, no
longer had the power to disturb her. The only thing that troubled
her in her grave was the recurrence, even in her professional
associations, of a wild tenderness for this or that passerby, brief
and humiliating approaches to love. These experiences and any others
that were able to depress her, she now dismissed as weakness, as
pride, as an old, rebellious and unwhipped vanity. The morning after
the conversation with Simo at the water’s edge she awoke strangely
troubled; but she resolved not to examine the new dejection. It
floated all day above her head,--a voice repeating: “I am alone. Why
have I never seen that before? I am alone.” Indeed the profession
she followed was one of those that emphasize the dim notion that
lies at the back of many minds: the notion that we are not necessary
to anyone, that attachments weave and unweave at the mercy of
separation, satiety and experience. The loneliest associations are
those that pretend to intimacy.

But she had discovered two ways of mitigating this unresponsiveness
and instability in the world she lived in. The first was the
development she brought to the institution of the hetaira’s banquet.
She took endless pains over these reunions and to the wide-eyed
guests they seemed indeed all that one could conceive of wit and
eloquence and aristocratic ease. Great talkers are so constituted
that they do not know their own thoughts until, on the tide of their
particular gift, they hear them issuing from their mouths. Chrysis
gave herself that luxury, the luxury of talking to these young men
from her whole mind. Much of it lay beyond their reach; but her
refusal to condescend, her assumption that the analysis of ideas and
of masterpieces was their natural element, excited them. She knew
that apart from her beauty she was not particularly fitted for her
calling; she lacked the high spirits that please the customers of
middle age; but younger men, who still approach love with a touch of
awe, are not so disappointed with those common exercises when they
find them invested with melancholy, dignity and literature. Perhaps
the maturity of a civilization can be judged by this trait, by
observing whether the young men first fall in love with women older
or younger than themselves; if in their youth their imaginations pass
their time in hallowing the images of prattling unnourishing girls
their natures will be forever after the thinner. But even at their
best Chrysis’s guests seemed remote and immature to her and finally
she discovered a second way of making life more stable and her
friends more constant: she adopted stray human beings that needed her.

In the inner monologue of her thoughts Chrysis called these
dependents her “sheep.” And although they were gathered into her
shelter from places and moments of fearful extremity, they became
accustomed to their new comfort with extraordinary rapidity. In
fact their past trials began to take on a romantic color and when
anything in the present situation did not suit them they had been
known to regret the lost felicities of the slave-markets, the mills
and the massacred villages. For Chrysis human nature no longer had
many surprises and the manner in which the sheep scolded and even
condescended to their shepherd did not deject her. She loved them and
was sufficiently repaid by occasional hours of a late afternoon when
the odd group would sit in the garden, weaving in amity and humor.
Such hours almost resembled life in a home.

There was to be a banquet that evening, so shaking her head at the
shadow that hovered above her she descended into the town to do
the marketing. She was accompanied by Mysis and the porter,--Mysis
carrying a net to hold the fruit and the salad-greens, and the
porter a large jar to be filled with salt-water and then with
fish and shell-fish. Chrysis moved slowly down the long twisting
flights of stairs. She was wrapped about by a great scarf of antique
finely-wrinkled material and wore a broad-brimmed Tanagran hat of
woven straw. The one hand that appeared outside the folds of her
scarf carried a small wooden fan. It was her business to be invested
with the remoteness and glamour of a legend, for at that time Greek
taste turned upon a nostalgia for the antique; it was her business
to be as different from other women as possible and to convert that
difference into money. The shops and temporary booths were all on
the open square at the water’s edge and there in the bright sunlight
the most excitable and loquacious of races was enjoying its morning
tumult; but as this calm and day-dreaming figure appeared above
them a hush fell upon the bargainers. This was the very deportment
the Greek women lacked and sighed for. They were short and swarthy
and shrill, and their incessant conversation was accompanied by
the incessant play of their hands. The whole race was haunted by a
passionate admiration for poise and serenity and slow motion, and
now for an hour the Andrian’s every move was followed by the furtive
glances of the islanders, with mingled awe and hatred. The Brynians,
when she appeared, felt themselves to be provincial and commercial.
From time to time some of the young men who had been guests at her
house approached her and spoke to her. Then it was that the unmarried
girls and the young wives of the island gazed with consternation and
fallen jaw at the way she smiled and talked and dismissed their
brothers and their future husbands. Philumena, in the shadow of an
awning, leaned back against a wall and watched the stranger; turning
her head slightly she could see Pamphilus at the tally-desk in the
door of his father’s warehouse. Her eyes fell on her rough gown and
her red arms and a long slow blush mounted to her face. But all the
while Chrysis’s heart had been growing heavier. “I have lived alone
and I shall die alone,” it said, and groaned within her.

As she returned to her house from the market she fell into a feverish
monologue. “The fault is in me. It’s my lack of perseverance in
affection. I know that. Now, Chrysis, you must begin your life over
again; you must assemble some plan. You must devote yourself with all
your mind to your sheep. You must break down all their coldness and
wilfulness. You must make yourself love them again. You must bring
back the happiness you felt with each one of them when you first
knew them. It is routine, it is the daily contact that has spoiled
all that. It’s cowardly of me to be able to love people only when
they are new. Now, now, Chrysis!--arise!” For the hundredth time she
was visited by hope and courage. She would win in this thing. As she
approached the house she was all but stumbling in her eagerness;
she would create a home. “If I love them enough, I can understand
them,” she muttered. “One never learns how to live, or one’s lights
on living arrive too late, when one has spoiled the surrounding
situation, spoiled it beyond repair. But I am to be on the earth for
fifty years, and I must do it.”

Chrysis did not realize what took place in the house during her
absences, and that when she left it the house was empty. The
personalities of her flock were extinguished. They fretted; they
hovered about the gates peering in the direction from which she
would return, and their minds ceased to act save in terms of that
resentment which is the complement of devotion. She did not realize
that this wasting of love in fretfulness was one of the principal
activities on the planet. When she was away fear descended upon
them; their dependence upon her was so great that even her temporary
absences reminded them of the destitution from which they had
been lifted,--circumstances so fearful that their conscious minds
never revisited them, but which hovered in the distance enriching
their present ease and hardening their self-centredness. All this
antagonism therefore met her in a flood as she stumbled across the
threshhold of her home. By the middle of the afternoon she was saying
to herself, almost in a panic: “It is impossible. I can do nothing.
They even hate me. But fortunately I am dead. It is not my pride that
is hurt. I am at peace in the ground. Yet oh! if only we had some
help in these matters. If only the gods were sometimes present among
us. To have nothing to go by except this idea, this vague idea, that
there lies the principle of living!”

During the banquet she looked about her for comfort. “It is also
cowardly of me to be happy only at the banquets where I can lead the
conversation and display my thoughts and be admired.” But tonight
even that exhilaration was wanting; her guests seemed younger and
remoter than ever, and she in turn was capricious and all but
irritable. It was to be expected, therefore, that the conversation
would take turns little likely to comfort her.

Niceratus, one of the more assured of her guests, asked her what life
would be like in two thousand years.

“Why,” she said at once, “there will be no more war.”

“I should not wish to be alive in a world where there was no war,” he
replied. “That would be an age of women.”

Now Chrysis was jealous of the dignity of women and lost no occasions
to combat such hasty disparagements. She leaned forward and asked
encouragingly:

“You wish to serve the state, Niceratus?”

“I do.”

“And you admire courage?”

“I do, Chrysis.”

“Then go bear children,” she replied, turning away.

Niceratus found this remark unseemly and left the house. (He absented
himself from the two successive banquets, but later returned and
asked her pardon for making a personal grievance out of a difference
of opinion. Confessions of error always gave Chrysis great pleasure.
“Happy are the associations,” she would say, “that have grown out of
a fault and a forgiveness.”)

The conversation then turned upon the plays concerning Medea and
Phaedra which she had read to them at an earlier banquet and upon
all manifestations of extravagant passion. The young men declared
that the problem was not as complicated as it appeared to be and
that such women should have been whipped like disobedient slaves
and shut up in a room with a jar of water and a little plain food
until their pride was subdued. They then recounted to her, almost in
whispers, the story of a girl from a village on the further side of
the island whose behavior had thrown her family and her friends into
consternation. The girl had continued for a time, glorying in her
disorders, until one morning, rising early, she had climbed a high
cliff near her home and thrown herself into the sea. A silence fell
on the company as all turned inquiringly to Chrysis asking for the
explanation of such a reversal.

To herself she said: “Do not try to explain to them. Talk of other
things. Stupidity is everywhere and invincible.” But their continued
expectancy prevailed upon her. She seemed to struggle with herself
for a moment, deeply troubled, and then began in a low voice: “Once
upon a time the great army of women came together to a meeting. And
they invited to this meeting one man, a tragic poet. They told him
that they wished to send a message to the world of men and that he
was to be their advocate and mouthpiece. ‘Tell them,’ said the women
eagerly, ‘that it is only in appearance that we are unstable. Tell
them that this is because we are hard-pressed and in bitter servitude
to nature, but that at heart, only asking their patience, we are as
steadfast, as brave and as manly as they.’ The poet smiled sadly,
saying that the men who knew this already would merely be ashamed to
be told it again, and the men who did not know it would learn nothing
through the mere telling; but he consented to deliver the message.
The men at first were silent, then one by one they broke out into
laughter. And they sent the poet back to the army of women with these
words: ‘Tell them not to be anxious and not to trouble their pretty
heads with these matters. Tell them that their popularity is not
dying out, and let them not endanger it through heroics.’ When the
poet had repeated these words to the women, some blushed with shame
and some with anger; some rose with a weary sigh: ‘We should never
have spoken to them,’ they said. They went back to their mirrors and
started combing their hair and as they combed their hair they wept.”

Chrysis had barely finished this story when a young man who had
hitherto taken little part in the conversation suddenly launched
into a violent condemnation of her means of livelihood. This youth
was of that temper that seeks to mould the lives of others abruptly
to certain patterns of its own choosing. He now commanded Chrysis
to become a servant or a sempstress. The other guests began to
whisper among themselves and to avert their faces from confusion
and anger, but Chrysis sat gazing at his flashing eyes and admiring
his earnestness. There was a certain luxury in having an external
mortification added to an inner despair. She was already troubled by
her recent discomfiture of Niceratus and now chose to be magnanimous.
She arose and approached the young fanatic; taking his hand she
smiled at him with grave affection, saying to the company: “It is
true that of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward
age.”

But these incidents were not of a nature to distract her mind from
the protracted oppression of the day. “Vain. Empty. Transitory,” the
voice within her repeated. But just as she was about to finish the
day with the comprehensive summary that she had nothing to lend to
life and no place to fill, her eyes fell upon Pamphilus. It was his
custom, through lack of self-confidence, to take the last seat at the
remote end of the room. The guests acknowledged his preëminence among
them, but when one evening they had wished to elect him King of the
Banquet he had furtively and savagely intimated to them his refusal
and the votes had passed to another. But Chrysis’s eyes had often, as
now, rested upon that head bent forward to receive her every word and
that received each one with so earnest a frown.

“That is something!” she said to herself suddenly and for a moment
her heart stopped beating.

She had intended to recite to them _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes that
evening, but she now changed her mind. She felt the need to nourish
her heart and those watchful eyes with something lofty and deeply
felt. Perhaps what she called the “lofty” was in this world merely a
beautiful form of falsehood, cheating the heart. But she would try
again tonight and see whether, after so dejected a day, it woke any
stir of conviction. “What shall I read?” she asked herself as the
tables were being removed. “Something from Homer?--Priam begging of
Achilles the body of Hector? No.... No.... Nor would they understand
the _Oedipus at Colonus_. The _Alcestis_? The _Alcestis_?”

One of the shyer guests, seeing her deliberating over the choice of
the evening’s declamation, timidly asked her to read the _Phaedrus_
of Plato.

“Oh, my friend,” she said, “I have not seen the book for several
years. I should be obliged to improvise long stretches in it....”

“Could you ... could you read the opening and the close?”

“I shall try it for you,” she replied and rising slowly disposed the
folds of her robe about her. The servants withdrew and silence fell
upon the company. This was the moment (on happier evenings) that she
loved; this hush, this eagerness, this faintly mocking affection.
What drives them--she would ask herself--in the next fifteen years to
become so graceless ... so pompous, or envious, or so busily cheerful?

At first all went well. The boys listened with delight to the
account of how other young men gathered in the streets and palaestra
of Athens to hear the arguments of Socrates. Listening, they agreed
that nothing in the world was more to be prized than a beautifully
ordered speech. Then followed the description of the walk that
Socrates and Phaedrus took into the country. “_This is indeed a
rare resting-place. This plane-tree is not only tall, but thick and
spreading. And this agnus castus is at the very moment of flowering
and its shade and its fragrance will render our stay the more
agreeable. These images and these votive-offerings tell us that the
place is surely sacred to some nymphs and to some river-god....
Truly, Phaedrus, you are an admirable guide._”

From there she passed to the close:

“_But let us go now, as the heat of the day is over._

“_Socrates: Would it not be well before we go to offer up a prayer to
the gods of this place?_

“_Phaedrus: It would, Socrates._

“_Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place,
grant that I may become beautiful in the inner man and may whatever I
possess without be in harmony with that which is within. May I esteem
the wise men alone to be rich. And may my store of gold be such as
none but the good may bear. Phaedrus, need we say anything more? As
for myself I have prayed enough._

“_Phaedrus: And let the same prayer serve for me, for these are the
things friends share with one another._”

All went well until this phrase. Then Chrysis, the serene, the
happily dead, seeing the tears that stood in the eyes of Pamphilus,
could go no further, and before them all she wept as one weeps who
after an absence of folly and self-will returns to a well-loved place
and an old loyalty. It was true, true beyond a doubt, tragically
true, that the world of love and virtue and wisdom was the true world
and her failure in it all the more overwhelming. But she was not
alone; he too saw the long and failing war as she did, and she loved
him as though she were loving for the first time and as one is never
able to love again. That was sealed; that was forever assigned.

After a few moments she collected herself and quieted the guests
who had risen in concern about her. “Sit down, my friends. I am
ready now,” she said smiling. “I shall read you _The Clouds_ of
Aristophanes.”

But it was some time before the laughter rose among the couches, the
laughter that was a just tribute to the divine wit of the poet of
_The Clouds_.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Brynos rose with the dawn, and it was not many hours later that the
morning’s work was over. Several days after the conversation recorded
above, Pamphilus, having helped his father in the warehouse and being
in no mood for exercising in the field, started out to walk to the
highest point on the island. It was early Spring. A strong wind had
blown every cloud from the sky and the sea lay covered with flying
white-tipped waves. His garments leapt and billowed about him and his
very hair tugged at his head. The gulls themselves, leaning upon the
gusts, were caught unawares from time to time and blown with ruffled
feathers and scandalized cries towards the violet-blue zenith.
Pamphilus led his life with much worry and self-examination and all
the exhilaration of wind and sun could not drive from his mind the
anxious affection with which he now turned over his thoughts of
Chrysis and Philumena and of the four members of his family. He was
straying among the rocks and the lizards and the neglected dwarfed
olive trees, when his attention was suddenly caught by an incident on
the hillside to his left. A group of boys from the town was engaged
in tormenting a young girl. She was retreating backwards up the slope
through a disused orchard, shouting haughtily back at her pursuers.
The boys’ malice had turned to anger; they were retorting hotly and
letting fly about her a few harmless stones. Pamphilus strode over
to the group and with a gesture ordered the boys down the hill. The
girl, her face still flushed and distrustful, stood with her back
against a tree and waited for him to come towards her. They looked at
one another for a moment in silence. Finally Pamphilus said:

“What is the matter?”

“They’re just country fools, that’s all. They’ve never seen anyone
before who didn’t come from their wretched Brynos.” And then
from rage and disappointment she began to cry uncontrollably and
despairingly.

Pamphilus watched her for a time and then asked her where she had
been going.

“Nowhere. I was just going for a walk and they followed me from the
town. I can’t do anything. I can’t go anywhere.... I wasn’t hurting
them. I was just going for a walk alone and they called names after
me. They followed me way up here; I called names at them and then
they started throwing things at me. That’s all.”

“I thought I knew everyone on the island,” said Pamphilus
thoughtfully, “but I have never seen you before. Have you been here
long?”

“Yes, I’ve been here almost a year,” she replied, adding
indistinctly, “... but I hardly ever go out or anything.”

“You hardly ever go out?”

“No,” and she fumbled with her dress and stared at the sea, frowning.

“You should try to know some of the other girls and go out for walks
with them.”

This time she turned and looked into his face. “I don’t know any
of the other girls. I ... I live at home and they don’t let me go
out of the house, except when I go out for walks nights with ...
well, with Mysis.” She continued to be shaken with sobs, but she was
adjusting her hair and the folds of her dress. “I don’t see why they
have to throw stones at me,” she added.

Pamphilus looked at her in silence, gravely. Presently he collected
himself and said: “There’s a big smooth stone over there. Will you go
over there and sit down?”

She followed him to the stone, still busy with her hair and drawing
her fingers across her eyes and cheeks.

“I have a sister just about your age,” said Pamphilus. “You can begin
by knowing her. You can go for walks with her and then you wouldn’t
be a stranger any more. Her name is Argo. You’d like one another,
I know. My sister is weaving a large mantle for my mother and she’d
like you to help her with it and she could help you with yours. Are
you making a mantle?”

“Yes.”

“That would be fine,” said Pamphilus, and from that moment Glycerium
loved him forever.

“I probably know your father, don’t I?” he asked.

“I have no father,” she replied, looking up at him weakly, “I am the
sister of the woman from Andros.”

“Oh ... oh...,” said Pamphilus, more astonished than he had ever been
in his life. “I know your sister well.”

“Yes,” said Glycerium. Her bright wet eyes strayed over the streaked
sea and the blown birds. “She doesn’t want anyone to know that I’m
there. All day I stay up on the top of the house or work in the
court. Only at night I’m allowed to go for a walk with Mysis. Even
now I’m supposed to be in the house, but I broke my promise. She has
gone to the market and so I broke my promise. I wanted to see what
the island and the sea look like by day. And I wanted to look across
to Andros where I come from. But the boys followed me here and threw
stones at me and I can never come again.”

Here she fell to weeping even more despairingly than before and
Pamphilus could do nothing but say “Well” several times and “Yes.” At
last he asked her what her name was.

“Glycerium. Chrysis went away from home a long time ago and I was
living with my brother and he died and I couldn’t live with him any
more. And I had nowhere to go or anything, and one day she came back
and took me to live with her. That’s all.”

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“Oh, no.”

“Who is Mysis?”

“Mysis isn’t Greek. She is from Alexandria. Chrysis found her. All of
them in the house,--she just found them somewhere. That’s what she
does. Mysis was a slave in the cloth mills. Sometimes she tells me
about it.”

Pamphilus still gazed at her, and bringing back her wandering evasive
glance from the sea she looked at him from her thin face and enormous
hungry eyes. Even a long glance did not now embarrass them.

“Do you want me to ask Chrysis to let you go about the island by
day?” he asked.

“If she doesn’t want it, we mustn’t change her. Chrysis knows best.”
She turned away from him and said in a lower voice, dreamy and
embittered: “But what can become of me? Am I always to stay locked
up? I am fifteen already. The world is full of wonderful things and
people that I might never know about. I know it was wrong of me to
break my promise; but to live for years without ever knowing new
people,--to hear them passing the door all day, and to see them a
long ways off. Do you think I did very wrong?”

“No.”

“I don’t know anyone. I don’t know anyone.”

“Well ... well, you’ll come to know my sister. That will be a
beginning,” he said, taking her fingertips thoughtfully and
wonderingly in his.

“Yes,” she said.

“Everything is beginning over again. I’m your friend. Then my sister.
Soon you will have a great many. You’ll see.”

“But where will I be five years from now and ten years from now,”
she cried, staring about her wildly. “I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’m
unhappy. Everyone in the world is happy except me.”

The caress of the hands in first love, and never so simply again,
seems to be a sharing of courage, an alliance of two courages against
a confusing world. As his hand passed from her hair to her shoulder,
she turned to him with parted lips and hesitant eyes, then suddenly
bound both her arms about his neck. Into his ears her lips wildly and
all but meaninglessly repeated: “Yes. Yes. Yes. I can’t stay there
forever. I should never know anyone. I should never see anybody.”

“She will let you come to see me,” he said.

“No,” said Glycerium. “But I’ll come by myself. I mustn’t ask her.
She would not let me come. She always knows best. And the boys can
throw their stones. I don’t mind if you’re here. What ... what is
your name?”

“My name is Pamphilus, Glycerium.”

“Can ... can I call you by it?”

It was not at this meeting, nor at their next, but at the third,
beneath the dwarfed olive trees, that those caresses that seemed to
be for courage, for pity and for admiration, were turned by Nature to
her own uses.

These conversations took place in the early Spring. One afternoon
in the late Summer Chrysis slipped out of her house and climbed the
hill behind it. She was filled with a great desire to be alone and
to think. She looked out over the glittering sea. The winds were
moderate on that afternoon and before them the innumerable neat waves
hurried towards the shore, running up the sands with a long whisper,
or discreetly lifting against the rocks a scarf of foam. In the
distance a school of dolphins engaged at their eternal games led the
long procession of curving backs. The water was marbled at intervals
with the strange fields and roadways of a lighter blue; and behind
all she beheld with love the violet profile of Andros. For a time she
strayed about upon the crest of the hill, making sure that no one
was watching or following her, then descending the further side she
sought out her favorite retreats, a point of rock that projected into
the sea and a sheltered cove beside it. As she drew near the place,
she stumbled forward, almost running, and as she went she murmured
soothingly to herself: “We are almost there. Look, we are almost
there now.” At last, climbing over the boulders she let herself down
into an amphitheatre of hot dry sand. She started unbinding her
hair, but stopped herself abruptly: “No, no. I must think. I should
fall asleep here. I must think first. I shall come back soon,” she
muttered to the amphitheatre, and continuing her journey she reached
the furthermost heap of stones and sat down. She rested her chin upon
her hand and fixing her eyes upon the horizon she waited for the
thoughts to come.

The first thing to think about was her new illness. Several times
she had been awakened by a wild fluttering in her left side that
continued, deepening, until it seemed to her as though a great stake
were being driven into her heart. And all the day the sensation
would remain with her as of a heavy object burdening the place
where this trouble lay. “Probably ... very likely,” she said to
herself, “the next time I shall die of it.” At the thought a wave
of anticipation passed over her. “I shall probably die of it,” she
repeated cheerfully and became interested in some crayfish in the
pool at her feet. She plucked some grasses behind her and started
dragging them before the eyes of the indignant animals. “Nothing in
life could make me abandon my sheep, but if I die they will have
to fall back on Circumstance as I did. Glycerium, what will become
of you? Apraxine, Mysis...? There are times when we cannot see one
step ahead of us, but five years later we are eating and sleeping
somewhere.” (It was humorous, pretending that one’s heart was as
hard as that.) “Yes,” she said aloud, to the pain that trembled
within her, “only come quickly.” She leaned forward still dragging
the stems before the shellfish: “I have lived thirty-five years. I
have lived enough. _Stranger, near this spot lies Chrysis, daughter
of Arches of Andros: the ewe that has strayed from the flock lives
many years in one day and dies at a great age when the sun sets._”
She laughed at the deceptive comforts of self-pity and taking off a
sandal put her foot into the water. She drew herself up for a moment,
asking herself what there was left in the house for the colony’s
supper; then recollecting some fish and some salad on the shelf, she
returned to her thoughts. She repeated her epitaph, making it a song
and emphasizing, for self-mockery, its false sentiment. “O Andros, O
Poseidon, how happy I am. I have no right to be happy like this....”

And she knew as she gazed at the frieze of dolphins still playing in
the distance that her mind was avoiding another problem that awaited
her. “I am happy because I love this Pamphilus,--Pamphilus the
anxious, Pamphilus the stupid. Why cannot someone tell him that it
is not necessary to suffer so about living.” And the low exasperated
sigh escaped her, the protest we make at the preposterous, the
incorrigible beloved. “He thinks he is failing. He thinks he is
inadequate to life at every turn. Let him rest some day, O ye
Olympians, from pitying those who suffer. Let him learn to look the
other way. This is something new in the world, this concern for
the unfit and the broken. Once he begins that, there’s no end to
it, only madness. It leads nowhere. That is some god’s business.”
Whereupon she discovered that she was weeping; but when she had dried
her eyes she was still thinking about him. “Oh, such people are
unconscious of their goodness. They strike their foreheads with their
hands because of their failure, and yet the rest of us are made glad
when we remember their faces. Pamphilus, you are another herald from
the future. Some day men will be like you. Do not frown so....”

But these thoughts were very fatiguing. She arose and, returning
to the amphitheatre, laid herself down upon the sand. She murmured
some fragments from the Euripidean choruses and fell asleep. She
had always been an islander and this hot and impersonal sun playing
upon a cold and impersonal sea was not unfriendly to her. And now
for two hours the monotony of sun and sea played about her and wove
itself into the mood of her sleeping mind. As once the gray-eyed
Athena stood guarding Ulysses--she leaning upon her spear, her great
heart full of concern and of those long divine thoughts that are
her property--even so, now, the hour and the place all but gathered
itself into a presence and shed its influence upon her. When her eyes
finally opened she listened for a time to the calm in her heart.
“Some day,” she said, “we shall understand why we suffer. I shall be
among the shades underground and some wonderful hand, some Alcestis,
will touch me and will show me the meaning of all these things; and I
shall laugh softly for hours as I do now ... as I do now.”

She arose and binding up her hair prepared to ascend the slope. But
just as she turned to leave the place, there visited her the desire
to do something ceremonial, to mark the hour. She stood up straightly
and held out her arms to the setting sun: “If you still hear prayers
from the lips of mortals, if our longings touch you at all, hear me
now. Give to this Pamphilus some assurance--even some assurance such
as you have given to me, unstable though I am--that he is right.
And oh! (but I do not say this from vanity or pride, O Apollo,--but
perhaps this is weak, this is childish of me, perhaps this renders
the whole prayer powerless!) if it is possible, let the thought of me
or of something I have said be comforting to him some day. And ...
and....”

But her arms fell to her side. The world seemed empty. The sun went
down. The sea and sky became suddenly remote and she was left with
only the tears in her eyes and the longing in her heart. She closed
her lips and turned her head aside. “I suppose there is no god,” she
whispered. “We must do these things ourselves. We must drag ourselves
through life as best we can.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

Chrysis had made the mistake of accustoming the members of her
household to her invariable presence and now while she slept they
became increasingly indignant at the length of her absence. In twos
and threes they hovered about the door peering to the right and to
the left with mingled scorn and alarm.

“When she comes in, see that no one says a word to her,” directed
Apraxine, a tall lame woman whom Chrysis had found beaten and left
for dead at the edge of the desert below the terraces of Alexandria.

“Pretend you don’t see her.”

“... to go sallying off a whole day without a word to a soul.”

“I’m sure I don’t wish to stay in a house where I count for nothing.”

“... less than nothing, it seems.”

Presently however something happened that distracted their minds from
their resentment. A new sheep arrived at the fold.

Simo’s frank had carried to Andros the money that Chrysis intended
for the support of the stricken sea-captain. But Philocles’s
guardians had long since tired of their charge and become
discontented with the intermittent payments. They decided to take
advantage of this sum of money to ship him off to Brynos. It was
necessary for this purpose to wait for a lucid interval in the
patient’s condition. Such a moment finally arrived; they hurriedly
made up his bundle, brushed his hair, and led him down to the
waterfront, where they found the captain of a boat sailing between
the Cyclades who was willing to undertake the commission. And thus it
was that on the afternoon of Chrysis’s retreat to solitude Philocles
arrived on Brynos. A boy who attended at one of the wineshops in
the town was directed to escort him to her house, and suddenly
the childlike sea-captain was thrust into the courtyard among the
conspiring pensioners.

Ten years before Philocles had been the greatest navigator on the
Mediterranean, first in skill and experience and first in fame. He
had been many times to Sicily and to Carthage; he had passed through
the Gates of Hercules and visited the Tyrian mines in Britain. He had
sailed westward for months across the great shelf of water, seeking
new islands, and had been forced to turn back by the visible anger
of the gods. In the present age men were captains or merchants or
farmers, but in the great age men had been first Athenians or Greeks,
and the islanders regarded Philocles as of that order, a belated
giant. He was already in middle life when Chrysis first knew him--she
had been a passenger on one of his trips to Egypt--and it astonished
her to find someone laconic in a chattering world and with quiet
hands in a gesturing civilization. He was blackened and cured by
all weathers. He stood in the squares of the various ports of call,
his feet apart as though they were forever planted on a shifting
deck. He seemed to be too large for daily life; his very eyes were
strange--unaccustomed to the shorter range, too used to seizing the
appearances of a constellation between a cloud and a cloud, and the
outlines of a headland in rain. Wind, salt and starvation had moulded
his head, and his mind had been rendered, not buoyant, but rich and
concentrated by the enforced asceticisms of a prolonged duty and of
long sea voyages. He had been one of the persons whom Chrysis had
most loved in all her life and it was she who had discovered his
secret, the secret that it was neither adventure nor gain that drove
him along his adventurous life. He was passing the time and filling
the hours in anticipation of release from a life that had lost its
savor with the death of his daughter. These two saw in one another’s
eyes the thing they had in common, the fact that they had both died
to themselves. They lived at one remove from that self that supports
the generality of men, the self that is a bundle of self-assertions,
of greeds, of vanities and of easily-offended pride. Three years
before, Philocles had been forced to captain some ships of a city
at war. He had been captured and mutilated and what was left of so
kingly a person was a timorous child.

The sheep examined the newcomer who had been thrust so abruptly into
their midst. They questioned him and amused themselves with his
answers. Then they gave him a bench in the sunlight where he might
whisper to his heart’s content.

The sun set and soon after Chrysis came stumbling through the door,
laughing apologetically and pushing back her hair. “Forgive me,
O my dear friends, forgive me. I fell asleep on the sand and I’m
very sorry I’m so late.” (The men and women raised their eyebrows
cynically and went on with their work.) “Apraxine, has anything
happened?” (Apraxine cleared her throat with Alexandrian hauteur and
became absorbed in looking for a thread on the ground.) “Now we must
find something particularly rare for supper.”

The sheep exchanged pitying glances over all this tawdry artifice
and when Chrysis passed into the house they burst into laughter.
The laughter was condescending, but the soul had returned to the
community. Finally at a signal from Apraxine, Glycerium went to
the door and announced to Chrysis that Philocles had arrived from
Andros. He had seen her pass and some twinge of memory had set him
trembling. He rose and walked unsteadily to the middle of the court.
She saw him standing before her, haggard, with hollow puzzled eyes
and with untrimmed beard.

She went forward repeating, “My dear friend, my friend!” but as she
embraced him a loud voice within her seemed to say: “Something is
going to happen. The threads of my life are drawing together.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

That night Chrysis was awakened from a light and feverish sleep by
the instinctive knowledge that someone was near her. She raised
herself on one elbow and peered towards the faint glimmer of the door.

“Who is it? Who is there?” she said.

A figure seemed suddenly to rise from the threshhold. “It’s I,
Chrysis. It’s Glycerium.”

“Is something the matter? Is someone ill?”

“No ... it’s only....”

“Light a lamp, my child. What do you want?”

“Chrysis, are you angry with me for waking you up? I couldn’t sleep,
Chrysis, and I had to come into your room.”

“But why are you crying, my dear, my dove? Come now and sit on the
edge of the bed. Of course I’m not angry with you.” Glycerium sank
upon the floor beside her. “No, no,--the floor is cold. Come sit up
here. Your hair is wet! Tell me now, what is making you unhappy?”

“Nothing.”

“What? Then you have something to tell me?”

“No ... I don’t know what ... I just want you to talk to me.”

“Well, I have something to tell you.” Chrysis was stroking
Glycerium’s hair, delicately following with her finger-tips the
strands as they passed above and behind the ear, when suddenly
Glycerium threw her arms about her sister’s neck and sobbed
uncontrollably. Chrysis continued gravely with her caress, thinking
that she was merely dealing with one of the meaningless accesses of
despair that descend upon adolescence when the slow ache of existence
is first apprehended by the growing mind. “There!” she murmured in
a rhythmic undertone, “Sh ... sh ... sh ... sh.... We love you. We
all love you in this house. Our beautiful Glycerium, our gentle,
our very beautiful Glycerium ... sh ... sh ... there! Are you
comfortable now? I have some good news for you. (No, no, there is
plenty of room.) This is it: Beginning tomorrow you are going to lead
an altogether different life. I am going to let you wander all over
the island alone. And when Mysis and I go to market you can go with
us. You may climb the hills if you like, and you may explore along
the water’s edge,--I shall even show you the secret of the secrets
of my heart,--a beautiful hidden shelter by the sea where one can be
perfectly alone.... Well? are you pleased? Doesn’t this news make you
happy?”

“Yes, Chrysis.”

“Now! I thought it would make you very happy and all you say is: Yes,
Chrysis!”

“Chrysis, tell me: what will become of me?”

Chrysis changed her position and in the dark shut her eyes a moment.
“Oh, my dear, my dear ... that’s what everyone asks, everyone on
earth. Well, first you tell me: what do you want to become?”

“I want to marry someone and ... and be in his home. Chrysis, tell
me: can I marry someone? Without a father and a mother and without
anything, is it possible that I can marry someone?”

“My dear, there is always....”

“Chrysis, I’m grown-up now. I’m fifteen. Please tell me the truth. I
must know. Don’t say something merely to quiet me. I must know the
truth. Can a man ever ask me to marry him? Why are you waiting so
long to answer me?”

“I have been planning to have a long talk with you about all these
things. But not now. Wait a short time; wait until you have had a
week, two weeks, of this new life when you will be free to wander all
over the island. Then you will be able to understand better what I
have to say.”

Glycerium paused a moment. “I know, I know,” she said, her face
against Chrysis’s shoulder. “That means that no one will ever be able
to marry me.”

“No, no, I don’t say that....”

Glycerium rose and stood in the middle of the room. “I understand,”
she said in the darkness.

Chrysis raised herself again on one elbow and said slowly: “We are
not Greek citizens. We are not people with homes. We are considered
strange, only a little above the slaves. All those others live in
homes and everyone knows their fathers and their mothers; they marry
one another. They think we would never fit into their life. Although
all that is true,--”

“But there are stories,” said Glycerium, “of men who even married
girls that had been slaves.”

“Yes, if a young man should fall in love with you, it is possible
that he would take you into his home. That is why I have tried to
take such care of you and why I have kept you hidden here in the
house. Through the young men who come to the banquets, the island
knows that you are here and that you have been carefully protected.
And now that you are to walk about the island freely you must be a
hundred times more careful than other girls. You are beautiful and
you are good, and before all their unfriendly eyes you must show them
your modesty and your goodness. That is all there is to say and to
hope, my child.”

“Perhaps, Chrysis ... it is best that I do not go about the island
freely, after all.”

“No, no. You will feel like going out. It will come gradually. But
now you must go to bed and to sleep, my darling. All these things
will solve themselves as best they can. All you can do for the
present is to be yourself, your very self, my Glycerium.”

Glycerium moved unsteadily towards the bed: “Chrysis, I must tell you
something.”

“Yes?...”

“You will be angry with me, Chrysis.”

“Why....”

“May the gods protect me, I ... I have been talking with Mysis and
now I know that I am going to be the mother of a child.”

There was silence for a moment followed by the sound of Chrysis
putting her feet upon the floor. “Where is Mysis? Let me get up.”

“It is true, Chrysis. I broke my promise the times when you were
away. I used to go out over the hills.”

“Oh, my child, my child!”

“But he loves me. He will marry me. He loves me, I know.”

“Who is it? What is his name?”

“It is Pamphilus, son of Simo.”

Chrysis grew rigid in the darkness. Then she slowly put her feet back
into the bed. Glycerium continued wildly: “He loves me. He will take
care of me. He has told me so a hundred times. Chrysis, what shall I
do? What shall I do? I am afraid.”

A low moan at the door revealed the fact that Mysis had accompanied
her younger mistress to this interview and was kneeling outside the
door without the courage to enter.

After a moment Chrysis said in a light impersonal voice: “Well, you
... go off to bed now and go to sleep. Yes. We’ll both be catching
cold here. It’s late. I think it must be almost morning.”

“I cannot sleep.”

“Everything will be all right, Glycerium. I can’t talk any more now.
I’m not well. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Glycerium left the room, trembling.

In her darker hours Chrysis carried on what she called a “dialogue
with Fate.” And now as she turned to the wall she said: “I hear you.
You have won again.”

Before long the pain in her side became fixed and unremitting, and
Chrysis knew that her life was drawing to a close. She took to her
bed and her thoughts no longer clung to the world about her. Now
when her courage was being undermined by her pain she dared not
ask herself if she had lived and if she were dying, unloved, in
disorder, without meaning. From time to time she peered into her mind
to ascertain what her beliefs were in regard to a life after death,
its judgments or its felicities; but the most exhausting of all our
adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the
last halls where belief is enthroned. She resigned herself to the
memory of certain moments when intuition had comforted her and she
quieted her heart with Andrian cradle-songs and with fragments from
the tragic poets. She saved her strength to fulfill a last desire,
one that may perhaps seem unworthy to persons of a later age. Her
mind had been moulded by formal literature, by epics and odes, by
tragedies and by heroic biography, and from this reading she had been
imbued with the superstition that one should die in a noble manner,
and in this high decorum even the maintenance of her beauty played a
part. The only terror left in the world was the fear that she might
leave it with cries of pain, with a torn mind, and with discomposed
features.

The news spread about the island that the Andrian was gravely
ill. The young men who had been her guests were confused by the
discrepancy between their mothers’ sarcasms and the respect that
Chrysis had inspired in themselves, but some brought shy offerings
of wine and cheese to her door. For such brief interviews she
raised herself on one elbow and sought to recover her light-spoken
graciousness. But most of the young men stayed away; it required
a maturer mind than they could summon to hold side by side their
memories of sensual pleasure and their respect due to the dying.

Pamphilus had other reasons for staying away. It seemed more and more
unlikely that he would ever be permitted to marry Glycerium. But
one morning he appeared at Chrysis’s house and asked to see her. He
traversed the court, picking his way among her motley and dismayed
pensioners, and his eyes fell upon Glycerium. She was seated beside
Philocles at her sister’s door, silent and without hope. Pamphilus
stopped for a moment on one knee before her and took her hands in
his. “Do not be afraid,” he said in a low voice. “No harm will come
to you.” She derived no courage from his words; she lifted her
eyes and scanned his face. Her mouth trembled, but no words came
and her eyes returned to the ground. Pamphilus passed into the room
where Chrysis lay; for a moment he could distinguish nothing in the
darkness. Presently he became aware of the priest of Æsculapius and
Apollo bending over a brazier in the corner, and finally he saw
Chrysis smiling at him gravely from the bed. He sat down beside her
in silence; each waited for the other to begin.

“We are sorry, all of us are sorry, Chrysis,” he said at last, “to
hear that you have been so ill.”

“Thank you, Pamphilus. Thank them all.”

“There ... there has been so much rain. When the sunlight returns you
will feel better at once.”

“Yes, it has always been the sunlight that has done me the most
good. You are all well on your farm?”

“Yes, the gods be praised.”

“The gods be praised. I shall never forget a favor your father did
for me.”

Pamphilus was struck with amazement. “My father?”

“Oh, forgive me ... I remember now I promised him not to mention it
to you. Oh, my illness has made me forget that. I am ashamed, I am
ashamed. But now I had better add that it was a small commission he
did for me by one of his boats going to Andros. I would not have him
think me unfaithful to my promise. I beg of you earnestly not to tell
him that I spoke of it.”

“Indeed, I shall not tell him, Chrysis.”

There fell another pause between them, while her strengthless hands
lightly pressed upon the bed in her self-reproach.

“Yes,” said Pamphilus. “When there is more sunlight you will feel
better at once. The sky has been overcast for a long time. I cannot
remember when it has been overcast so long.”

To themselves they both cried: “How shall we ever get out of this?”

“We have missed the banquets. I would like to tell you again,
Chrysis, what great pleasure they gave me. I have been looking
forward to the next one when you promised to read us I forget what
play.”

“It was to have been the _Ion_ of Euripides.”

“Yes.”

“This,” said Chrysis, glancing towards the priest with a smile, “this
is my Ion.”

But perhaps the words were ill-chosen. She thought she saw the priest
frowning as he bent over his work. “Forgive me,” she said to him
abruptly, “if I have offended you. I did not mean it ill.”

But the tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Life, Pamphilus,” she
said, “is full of mistakes, but the wrongs we do to those we love and
honor are more than we can endure.” The priest approached the further
side of the bed and adjusted the pillows; he whispered a few words
into her ear and went back to his brazier.

“Am I tiring you?” Pamphilus asked.

“No, no. I am very happy that you have come.” To herself she thought:
“Time is passing, and what are we saying! Is there not something
heartfelt that I can find to say to him, something to remember, for
him and for me?” But she distrusted the emotion that filled her
heart. It was perhaps mere excitement and pain; or a vague and false
sentiment. Probably the best thing to do was to be stoic; to be brave
and inarticulate; to talk of trivial things. Or was it a greater
bravery to surmount this shame and to say whatever obvious words the
heart dictated? Which was right?

Pamphilus was thinking: “She is dying. What can I say to her? But I
have never been able to place words rightly. I am dull. I am nothing
to her but the man who has wronged her sister.” Aloud he said in a
low voice: “I shall marry Glycerium if I can, Chrysis. At all events
you may be sure that no harm will come to her.”

“Though I love her dearly,” replied Chrysis, finding her words with
great difficulty “I shall not urge you. I ... I no longer believe
that what happens to us is important. You will marry Glycerium or
another. The years will unfold these things. It is the life in the
mind that is important.”

“I shall do what I can for her.”

“You have only to be yourself without fear, without doubting,
Pamphilus.”

“Chrysis, you will forgive me for having spoken to you so little at
the banquets ... and for having sat at the further end and ... that
is the way I am. It was not because I did not respect you. I cannot
talk as those others can. I am only a listener. Even now I cannot say
what I mean. But I followed all that you said.”

The pain in Chrysis’s side seemed to increase beyond all endurance.
“Oh, friend,” she said, “do not distrust. These things are not so
unsatisfactory ... so interrupted as they seem to be.” The priest
had been watching her; she made a slight sign to him. “I do not wish
you to go away,” she continued to Pamphilus, almost in a whisper,
“but it is best that I sleep now.” Then raising herself on one elbow
she breathed in anguish: “Perhaps we shall meet somewhere beyond life
when all these pains shall have been removed. I think the gods have
some mystery still in store for us. But if we do not, let me say now
...” her hands opened and closed upon the cloths that covered her,
“... I want to say to someone ... that I have known the worst that
the world can do to me, and that nevertheless I praise the world and
all living. All that is, is well. Remember some day, remember me as
one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the
bright and the dark. And do you likewise. Farewell.”

Simo arose early to witness Chrysis’s funeral. The Greeks, for
reasons that lay deep in their sense of the fitness of things and
in their superstition, conducted their funerals in the hour before
dawn, and it was therefore still profound night when the little
procession of her household prepared to pass through the streets
of the town. When Simo arrived at the square he found that many of
the men of Brynos had already gathered there and, drawing the folds
of their rough cloaks about them, were standing talking together
in low voices. The men of his own age had brought their curiosity
and contempt with them and were congratulating themselves on the
island’s happy deliverance from the foreign woman; but the younger
men who had known Chrysis stood with sullen faces, their throats
rigid with antagonism at the glee of their elders. Simo took his
place in silence beside Chremes, but refused to respond to the
latter’s animated comment. Presently as the sounds of the flute and
the mourners were heard approaching he discovered Pamphilus standing
beside him, as silent as himself.

Mysis herded the shuffling and stumbling company before her as best
she could. Philocles walked with lifted knees, as children do in a
procession. In one hand he held some grasses and with the other he
clutched the mantle of his companion, the old doorkeeper; but he was
continually straying off, or standing still to gaze with wide dazzled
eyes at the torches that preceded him or at the laughing by-standers.
Behind him the deaf and dumb Ethiopian girl could scarcely be
restrained from running forward to walk beside her sleeping friend,
Chrysis, whose rebuke had been so terrible when she had done wrong
and whose smile had been sufficient compensation for her imprisonment
in silence. Glycerium walked with lowered eyes, lost to hope and
lost to the decorum that now required of her the wailing and the
distraught gestures of a conspicuous mourner. All these passed
forward under the bright stars that had received the first intimation
of day and shone with a last heightened brilliance, and under the
long garlands of smoke that hung above the company in that windless
air.

As the onlookers accompanied the procession into the open country,
Simo’s attention was fixed upon Glycerium, by reason of her
condition, which was apparent to all, of her resemblance to her
sister, of the dejection that invested her, and of the beauty and
modesty of her bearing. And he became aware that his son also was
watching the girl. In fact, during the whole journey, Pamphilus
bent upon her his burning eyes, trying to intercept her glance and
to communicate to her his encouragement and his love. But not until
they reached the heaped-up wood whereon the bodies of a goat and
a lamb were laid beside that of Chrysis, and not until the fire
had touched it, did she raise her eyes. Then as the sound of the
wailing increased in shrillness and the sound of the flute floated
piercingly above all, she turned to Mysis and began to speak wildly
into her ear. But the words of her vehemence were not heard in that
din, nor were Mysis’s words of encouragement. Glycerium was trying
to draw herself away from the supporting arm of the other and the
slow faltering struggle of the two women was lighted up by the
rising flames. Pamphilus, in the intensity of his concentration upon
the suffering of the girl, moved slowly forward, his hands held out
before him. And now he heard the words that she was repeating: “It’s
best. It’s best so!” Suddenly Glycerium pushed the older woman away
from her and with a loud cry of “Chrysis!” stumbled forward to fling
herself upon the body of her sister.

But Pamphilus had foreseen this attempt. Running across the sand,
he seized her by her disheveled hair and drew her back and into his
arms. The touch of that encircling arm released her tears. She laid
her head against his breast as one who had been there before and was
returning home.

The scandal of this embrace was felt at once by all the by-standers
and chiefly by Chremes, who turned upon Simo with his protest and
astonishment. But Simo had moved away and was walking slowly home
through the breaking dawn. Now he understood the Pamphilus of the
last months.

The islanders discussed interminably the surprising event that had
taken place at Chrysis’s funeral. They watched with hushed excitement
the chill that had fallen across the relations between the families
of Simo and of Chremes. Rumor presently asserted that Pamphilus had
promised to acknowledge the child, though no one, naturally, even
discussed the possibility of a marriage. Readers of a later age will
not be able to understand the difficulties that beset the young man.
Marriage was not then a sentimental relation, but a legal one of
great dignity, and the bridegroom’s share in the contract involved
not so much himself as his family, his farm, and his ancestors.
Without the support of his parents and without a residence in their
home a young man was a mere adventurer, without social, economic
or civil standing. A marriage was only possible if Simo declared
it to be so. The customs of the islands encouraged fathers in the
luxuries of blustering and tyranny, but Simo’s relations with his
son had always been strangely impersonal. He was confused by his
own deference for his son, by what he thought was his own weakness.
Yet Simo’s silence did not have the air of a final refusal; it even
seemed to imply that the decision, with all its possibilities of
lifetime regret and of a lifetime’s contention on the farm, rested
with Pamphilus.

One day several months after Chrysis’s funeral Pamphilus betook
himself to the palaestra for some exercise. He entered the low door
and, nodding to a group of friends that sat scuffling under an awning
at the edge of the enclosure, he walked across the hot red sand.
The old attendant at the door who had won a laurel wreath in his
youth came trotting across the burning ring after him and as soon
as Pamphilus had seated himself on a marble bench began kneading
his calves and ankles. In the centre of the field Chremes’s son was
going through the motions of hurling an imaginary discus; thirty and
fifty times he turned with lifted knee, trying to fix in his muscular
memory the perfect synchronization of the gestures. Two other young
men were practicing a festival dance, interrupting their work from
time to time to criticize one another’s slightest deviation from a
harmonious balance. The young priest of Æsculapius and Apollo was
running around the course. Pamphilus sent the attendant away and
lying down on his cloak let the sunlight beat upon him. He did not
think about his problem, but left his mind a blank, suffused with a
dull misery that identified itself with the drowsy heat. Presently he
placed his elbow on the ground and raising his head rested his cheek
upon his hand and watched the priest of Apollo.

The priest never entered the competitive games, but he was
undoubtedly first upon the island for endurance and second only to
Pamphilus in swiftness. Save on the days of festival he appeared for
exercise daily and ran six miles. He preserved a perfect temperance:
he drank no wine; he lived on fruit and vegetables; he awoke with the
sun and unless there was some call to attend the sick he went to
sleep with it. He had taken the vow of chastity, the vow that forever
closes the mind to the matter, without wistful back-glancing and
without conceding the possibility that circumstance might yet present
a harmless deviation, the vow which, when profoundly compassed, fills
the mind with such power that it is forever cut off from the unstable
tentative sons of men. His office required his passing so much time
among the sick and the distressed that he had become inadequate to
the cheerful and the happy and no one on the island knew him very
well. But he had a strange power over the sick and the demented and
only in their hours of confession and despair was the shutter of
his impersonality lifted; such as had known him then followed him
ever after with their eyes, in gratitude and in astonishment. He
was only twenty-eight, but he had been sent to Brynos by the priests
that attended the great mysteries of Athens and Corinth as a signal
honor; for the shrine on Brynos was one of particular significance
in the legend of Æsculapius and his father Apollo. Pamphilus had
never spoken to him beyond the salutations of the field, but he
would rather have known him than anyone in the world, and he in turn
watched Pamphilus with grave interest. Now Pamphilus lay following
him with his eyes and wishing he had his own life to live over again.

Suddenly he became aware that someone was shaking him by the
shoulder. It was one of his companions. “Here comes your father,”
said the boy and went back to the awning. Pamphilus rose to his feet
and waited respectfully as Simo approached, preceded by the old
attendant.

“Stay where you are. Lie down again,” said Simo; “I’ll sit here on
this bench. I want to talk to you.”

Pamphilus lay down, his face turned away towards the track.

Simo wiped his face with the hem of his skirt. “I won’t be long, my
boy.... But we must consider this matter somehow ... after all.” He
was not sure of himself. He blew his nose. He coughed several times
and roughly adjusted the folds of his gown. He repeated “Very well”
and “Now” and waited in vain for Pamphilus to say something. At last
he launched forth among his prepared introductions:

“Well now, my boy, I assume you want to marry the girl. Hm....”

Pamphilus put his head down between his folded arms as though
he were going to sleep. He sighed in anticipation of all the
irrelevancies he was about to hear. In his heart he knew he had only
to say yes or no and his father would accede to his wish.

“I don’t wish to coerce you. I think you are old enough to see the
good and the bad for yourself. But for a few moments now I want to
talk all around the matter. I want to put the other side of the case
in its plainest terms and leave it there for a while. May I do that?”

“Yes,” said Pamphilus.

“Well, to begin with, it’s only right to face the fact that there is
no outward obligation to marry the girl. I’ve looked into the matter.
She is not a Greek citizen. She happens to have been brought up in a
sheltered manner, or so I take it. This Chrysis seems to have tried
to prevent the girl’s falling into her way of life; but that does
not alter the fact that she is a mere dancing girl. Now, mind you, I
can see that she is modest and well-mannered. She appears to be just
such a person as our own Argo. But she could never have hoped for
anything above the situation she is now in. The world is full of just
such likable stray girls as this Glycerium, but we cannot be expected
to welcome them into the fabric of good Greek family life. You may be
sure that Chrysis knew perfectly well that Glycerium must some day
become a hetaira like herself, or a servant.”

Simo paused. He could see the back only of his son’s head, but he was
able to imagine upon his face the set unhappy expression they had all
been obliged to watch there for the last weeks. He coughed again and
abruptly flung himself upon another of his openings:

“No doubt you feel yourself fairly bound to her by a promise--but
a promise, Pamphilus, in which you failed to consider the rest of
us, and especially your mother. If you decided to marry the girl,
your mother and sister would try to live with her as peaceably as
possible, we know; but it would be a good deal to ask of them. You
know them. This girl does not understand the first thing about our
island manners. She doesn’t know how simple and monotonous our
women’s lives are. I expect that life with the Andrian and with that
strange company at the house on the hill was an odd affair. She’d be
unhappy with us. And even if she didn’t contradict your mother all
day ... and worse ... she’d become silent and sullen. Pamphilus, they
would never grow fond of one another. It would be better to be cruel
to her now and let her alone, than to set up discord, a lifetime of
discord on our farm.”

For a moment his memory failed him, but he rallied and continued:

“Well, even assuming that your mother and sister came to like her and
to accept her cordially in the home, all her life she would have to
endure something insulting in the manner of the other women on the
island. We men do not take that interest in social discrimination, my
son, but women ... women with their few interests and ... and so on
... they enjoy having someone to ignore or to stare down. It warms
them. Glycerium is not a Greek citizen. Her sister was a hetaira. All
her life she would be obliged to endure their looking at her with
straight lips and (I can see them) with half-closed eyes. But even
that is not the chief thing.”

He hoped that the suspense in this splendid transition would be
reflected in some change in his son’s position, but the young man lay
motionless. Simo’s weary eyes turned slowly about the palaestra.

“The girl is not strong. The women of the village seem to know
something about it. She’s a quick nervous high-strung girl and she’d
bring you a series of thin and sickly children. You and I know those
homes. She’s not unlike our neighbor Douro’s wife; isn’t she? and
the uneven health of such women--even though they’re often more
likable, yes, more likable, than the Philumenas--takes the shape
of complaining and quarrelsomeness. And in their children. One has
no right to bring into the world those children that cannot join
others in their games, silent children who go through life regularly
subject to fevers and coughs and pains. The most important thing
in life is a houseful of strong healthy boys. Take Philumena, now.
You do not ‘love’ Philumena, as the poets use the word. Well, when
I married your mother perhaps I did not ‘love’ her in that sense.
But I grew to love her and ... euh ... now I cannot imagine myself
as having been married to anyone else, as satisfactorily married
to anyone else. Philumena is handsome. But most important of all,
Philumena is strong. So ... so, Pamphilus, does what I am saying seem
to have some truth in it?... Pamphilus?”

But Pamphilus had fallen asleep.

His last thought had been the recollection of one of Chrysis’s
maxims, an ironic phrase which he had chosen to take literally: _The
mistakes we make through generosity are less terrible than the gains
we acquire through caution._

Simo was not vexed. He sighed. Looking up he saw the priest of
Æsculapius and Apollo running around the course. He recalled the day
several months before when he and Sostrata had taken Pamphilus’s
sister to the temple. For two days and two nights, Argo had been
suffering from an ear-ache, and although they knew that the priest
was often ungracious when his attention was asked on smaller ills
they ventured to present her to him. The hour at which he was
accustomed to receive the sick was a little after sunrise and there
they found his colony. There were invalids brought to him on beds;
there were sufferers from tumors, from protracted languors, from
sore eyes; there were the possessed. Simo and Sostrata had passed
their lives without ailments. They regarded them, like poverty, like
uncleanliness, as mere bad citizenship; they were on the point of
returning home, so great was their distaste for such manifestations.
The priest required that the guardians who had brought their sick
to him should retire to a distance during his interviews, and Simo
and Sostrata had withdrawn with an ill grace to a nearby grove. Argo
seemed not to share her parents’ revulsion from these matters; even
before she approached the place (her fingers pressed upon her ear)
she had been subdued to awe and when her turn came she told her
little story with caught breath. The priest gently touched her ear,
reciting a charm. He poured in some oil and looked deeply into her
shy eyes. And gradually as he gazed at her a smile appeared upon his
lips and slowly she smiled in return. True influence over another
comes not from a moment’s eloquence nor from any happily chosen word,
but from the accumulation of a lifetime’s thoughts stored up in the
eyes. And there is one thing greater than curing a malady and that
is accepting a malady and sharing its acceptance. The ear-ache did
not abate at once, but Argo pretended to her parents that it did, for
the other healing they would not have understood; and all night long
instead of complaining she pressed against her ear the little bag of
laurel leaves he had given her and talked to herself, rehearsing that
interview and that glance. Thereafter she never had any conversation
with the priest, but when she happened to meet him upon the road, her
heart was filled with excitement; she gave him a shy greeting and
her eyelids fluttered in a quick intimate glance and he in turn let
fall upon her a faint allusion to his smile. Her parents were amused
by this bond; the priest had brought out in their daughter a side
they had never known in her, and one that sent messages all along her
life. Henceforth she even stood up straighter. One day a cousin who
lived on the other side of the island came to a meal with them and
let fall a remark in disparagement of the priest, saying that he was
a comfort chiefly to old women who imagined themselves to be ill.
Argo’s eyes grew dark and her lips straight with anger. She refused
to eat another mouthful and forever after the poor foolish cousin
could never draw a word from her and never knew why. All this now
returned to Simo’s mind as he watched the priest.

“People like that,” he thought to himself, “have some secret about
living. Why don’t they tell it to us outright, instead of wrapping
it up in mystery and ceremonial? They know something that prevents
their blundering about, as we do. Yes, what am I doing here,” he
added, pushing out his lower lip, “but playing the fool? Blundering,
advising in things I know nothing about.” He looked long at his
sleeping son. “Pamphilus has some of that secret, too. And that
woman from Andros had it, too. Chremes was right, though he meant
it ill: there is something of the priest in Pamphilus, something of
the priest trying to make its way in him. Let me get up and go away
before I say anything more.”

So he arose and a little guiltily left the field.

Pamphilus’s mind was all but made up, yet still under the burden
of perplexity and self-reproach he decided to seek still more light
on his problem and a last reassurance by reviving a custom that had
been in frequent use among the Greeks of the great age, but which
had fallen off at the time of the events of this story. It consisted
merely in abstaining from speech and from food from one sunrise to
the next and in either passing the night in the temple enclosure or
in arriving there before the dawn that closed the watch. There was
not thought to be any particular magic in the practice: it cleared
the mind of bodily fumes, it removed it from the commerce of the
day and prepared it perhaps for a significant dream. The watcher
guarded his fast and his silence, but the Greek mind did not approve
of heightening the experience by any further self-denial. One moved
about the home as usual, exercised in the palaestra or worked at
the loom; one slept. If some uninformed person spoke to the watcher,
he drew his finger across his lips and the condition of the vow was
understood. Athletes still observed it several days before a race;
brides on the eve of their wedding; old ladies who hoped to recover
some lost trinket, or to recapture in a dream the features of some
all-but-forgotten love; and devout soldiers about to set forth upon
an expedition. It was indeed little short of odd that a healthy young
man in the even current of life should revive this custom, but the
islanders were still sufficiently religious to respect the habits
that had expressed the spiritual life of their glorious grandfathers,
and made no comment.

By mid-afternoon hunger had gained upon him and his dejection had
increased a hundred-fold. Whichever choice he made would involve
the unhappiness of others. Under the weight of the alternatives even
the memory of Glycerium lost for a time any tender association. He
climbed over the remoter parts of the island, gazing absently out
to sea and idly plucking the grasses among the rocks where he sat.
He came to the spot where he had first seen Glycerium and stood for
a time, quiet as the stones about him, asking himself whether the
associations in life are based upon an accidental encounter or upon a
profound and inner necessity. When he returned to the farm his mother
and sister felt the desolation that invested him and moved about
with hushed steps. The very slaves went about their tasks on tiptoe
and finally withdrew in silence and in alarmed interrogation. During
the evening meal Pamphilus sat by the door with closed eyes. His
brother, returning, stepped over his feet with awed circumspection
(he too had made the watch only a few months before, but in pomp,
with twelve other youths on the occasion of their enrollment in
the League) and held himself at a distance, rendered uncomfortable
by so much seriousness in a good athlete. Of her own accord Argo
brought Pamphilus a bowl of water which he drank, smiling the while
intimately into her grave eyes; she returned to her place at the
table with great dignity and with secret excitement, as though she
had done something conspicuous. When Simo finally told her and her
brother to go to bed she slipped up to her father and laid her lips
against his ear: “What is it, father?” she whispered. “No, tell
me, what is the matter?” He took her hands and played with them a
moment; he raised his eyebrows wisely and told her to go to bed and
sleep well. From her bed in the darkness she noted the movements of
the family: that her mother took a cloak and went out into the garden
by the cliff, and that later her father did the same. With wide eyes
and cautious lifted ear she followed this unaccustomed nocturnal
roaming. She was filled with loving excitement; she kissed her doll
many times with violence and wept. She became aware that her younger
brother was venturing on hands and knees towards the moonlight in
the court: she too ventured out and they stared at one another, but
Pamphilus suddenly loomed up from the shadows and waved them back to
their beds.

Pamphilus wandered about the outer court. Again the moon was at the
full, throwing a milky blue mist over the tiers of olive trees that
climbed the hill across the road and casting black shadows among the
farm buildings. Its serenity contrasted strangely with the mysterious
excitement it awakened among the human beings it fell upon. Pamphilus
had seen his parents go into the garden, but he saw them now without
emotion, without pity. He returned to the house and lay down upon his
bed. Never had he been possessed by mood further from illumination.
Lying on his face he traced outlines upon the floor with his finger.

The shells gleamed on the path as Simo walked up and down; from
time to time he cast a furtive glance at his wife. She was sitting
on a bench of chipped and stained marble that had been his mother’s
favorite seat. It had been placed there generations before, under
a fig arbor blown down long since on a night of legendary storm.
It stood at the very end of the garden where a cliff broke down
to the sea, and from it one could hear forever the long spreading
whispers of the ebbing and the rising waves below. From that seat
his mother had directed the bringing up of five children, had dried
their tears and listened with nodding head to the absurd procession
of their shifting enthusiasms. “Viewed from a distance,” Simo said
to himself, “life is harmonious and beautiful. No doubt the years
when my mother smiled to us from that bench were as full of crossed
wills and exasperations as today, but how beautiful they seem in
memory! The dead are wrapped in love; in illusion, perhaps. They
go underground and slowly this tender light begins to fall upon
them. But the present remains: this succession of small domestic
vexations. I have lived such a life for sixty years and I am still
upset by its ephemeral decisions. And I am still asking myself which
is the real life: the present with its discontent, or the retrospect
with its emotion?” He looked again guardedly at Sostrata, who sat
fingering the folds of her cloak and expressing in every line of her
position her unfriendliness and her rebellion. “The fault is in me,”
he continued. “If I were wiser, I could do this thing. As the head
of the family I should be firmer. I should say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ clearly
and let Pamphilus bring in his little girl. I should weed out all
these hesitations. Even now she is waiting for me to make up her mind
for her; if I spoke distinctly, even against her will, she would
adjust herself without great effort. The house would find a way of
accepting the new member and things would run on smoothly enough.” He
was thinking of going towards her with smiling affection, suggesting
that at sixty they had earned the right to remain tranquil though
the house fell; but he foresaw that her pride would not accommodate
itself to any such resignation, and he continued up and down the
garden.

Indeed Sostrata did not wish Simo to speak to her. Her mind was
filled with one long obstinate exclamation at the stupidity of men.
Only a woman’s mind could foresee all the harm that would result from
such a marriage as the one now being weighed. It was the women of
the island that had measured all danger that came with the arrival
of the Alexandrian woman; and now she, the first matron of Brynos,
was being ordered to receive into her home the last offscouring of
that dispersed colony. She had anticipated all her life the rich
satisfactions of being a mother-in-law and a grandmother, though what
she anticipated was a daughter-in-law of straw. A Greek HOME, she
knew, was the only breakwater against the tide of oriental manners,
of financial fluctuation, and of political chaos. The highest point
towards which any existence could aspire was to be a member of an
island family, living and dying on one farm, respected, cautious, and
secretly wealthy; of a family stretching into the past as far as the
mossy funerary urns could record, and into the future as far as the
imagination could reach, that is to one’s grandchildren. Society was
similarity. These things she repeated to herself, and under the waves
of her indignation and self-pity--though the greater part of the time
she stood in awe of her husband and her son--all her gracious traits
disappeared, her beautiful eyes became harsh that for three days had
been bright with the angry tears of her inner monologue.

When after a long stretch of time Simo paused in his walk and
approached her with deferential hesitation, she arose abruptly and
walked past him into the house, breathing hard and trembling with
excitement.

At last Pamphilus arose and throwing his fleece-lined cloak over
his shoulder slowly and musingly walked through the little garden
in the court and passed through the outer gates of the farm. He was
strangely light-headed from hunger and dejection. He paused for a
moment to gaze at the rising hillside before him and its silvered
olive trees. To his eyes they seemed to be pulsating in even waves
of intensity, as though the whole earth and sky were on fire and
burning with a pale slow silver flame, the whole earth and sky,
unconsumed yet incessantly feeding the countless tongues of flame.
He was gazing at this serene conflagration when he became aware of
two dim figures in a pool of profound shadow at his right, leaning
against the pillar of the gate. Glycerium was pressing her cheek
against the stone and breathing her prayer towards the house within
and beside her Mysis, distraught and helpless, stood urging her
mistress to return home and to leave the ominous vapors of the night
and the jealous chill of the moon.

When Glycerium saw that Pamphilus was standing in the road and that
he had recognized her, she drew back into Mysis’s arms overcome with
shame; but slowly collecting herself she stretched forward a hand to
him and fixed her great eyes imploringly on his face.

Mysis whispered to her: “We must go home, my bird, my treasure.”

“Pamphilus,” said Glycerium, “help me!”

His heart contracted within him as he realized the extremity of
suffering that had led her thus far. He laid his finger gravely
across his lips. He did not smile, but approaching her he looked down
into her face with earnest reassurance and beckoned her to accompany
Mysis toward the town.

Glycerium pushed back the scarf from her forehead and fell upon one
knee before him, babbling incoherently: “I love you. I love you,
Pamphilus. You promised me that you loved me. What am I to do? What
is to become of me?”

Pamphilus looked at Mysis and again drew his finger across his mouth.

“Hush, my darling,” she said. “You see he has taken the vow and
cannot speak to us. And we must not speak to him. Look, he wants you
to start home with me.” She put her arm about the girl’s waist and
they began to move slowly toward the road.

“He promised me that he loved me,” muttered Glycerium, unable to see
for her tears, but permitting herself to be led forward. After a few
steps, however, she turned and, pushing Mysis aside, said: “No, no! I
wish to see him again.” She pressed her scarf against her mouth for a
moment and gazed at him, her whole soul in her eyes: “Pamphilus, do
not marry me, if it is not right. But do not leave me alone. Do not
leave me so long alone. Remember Chrysis. Remember the day you found
me being stoned by the boys. No, no, do not marry me, if your father
and your mother do not wish it, but let me know that ... that I am
still loved by you.”

At last he nodded and smiled and waved to her slowly.

“He is nodding his head, Mysis!” cried Glycerium.

“Yes, my treasure.”

“Look, Mysis, he is smiling at me. Can you see? Look very hard,
Mysis.”

“See, now he is waving to you. Wave to him again.”

Glycerium waved eagerly, like a child, until Pamphilus was out
of sight. It was a long walk home over uneven stones. Glycerium
talked excitedly of the smile, trying to estimate the exact shade
of intention and affection that lay in his waving to her and in the
nod of his head. They discussed the significance of his taking the
vow and they talked in general of the custom of taking the vow and
recalled all the occasions they could remember of this usage and the
results of each occasion. “All will be well, Mysis,” she repeated
feverishly. “You will see, believe me, all will be well.” But finally
they fell silent, and in the silence their fears returned and an
overwhelming weariness. As they reached the door of their house,
Glycerium paused with tight-drawn lower lip and with fear in her
eyes: “There is nothing to hope for,” she said. “The gods are angry
because I thought for a time that I was happy and that the world was
easy to live in. At that time I did not understand anything about
life and I said cruel things to Chrysis, because I thought the world
was easy to live in. And the gods are right. Oh, if I could speak to
her for only one moment and could tell her that now I understand her
goodness, her goodness. But Chrysis is dead!” She turned to Mysis,
but at these words Mysis had withdrawn from her and, beating upon
her forehead with the knuckles of her two hands, had fallen upon the
threshold of the house.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Pamphilus continued in the opposite direction. He wandered about the
upland pastures as he had done all day, and climbed to the highest
point on the island to gaze upon the moon and the sea. He tried to
lift his mind out of the narrow situation of his problem by thinking
of things not before him. He thought of the ships that under that
magical flowing light were making their way from port to port, each
one casting aside at its prow two glistening murmurous waves. It was
the hour when the helmsman in the security of the course falls into a
reverie, remembers his childhood or reckons up his savings. Pamphilus
thought of the thousands of homes over all Greece where sleeping or
waking souls were forever turning over the dim assignment of life.
“Lift every roof,” as Chrysis used to say, “and you will find seven
puzzled hearts.” He thought of Chrysis and her urn, and remembered
her strange command to him that he praise all life, even the dark.
And as he thought of her his depression, like a cloud, drifted
away from him and he was filled with a tremulous happiness. He too
praised the whole texture of life, for he saw how strangely life’s
richest gift flowered from frustration and cruelty and separation.
Chrysis living and Chrysis dying in pain; the thoughtful glance
that his father so often let rest upon him and the weary expression
on his father’s face when he thought himself unobserved; the shy
mystery of Glycerium. It seemed to him that the whole world did not
consist of rocks and trees and water nor were human beings garments
and flesh, but all burned, like the hillside of olive trees, with
the perpetual flames of love,--a sad love that was half hope, often
rebuked and waiting to be reassured of its truth. But why then a
love so defeated, as though it were waiting for a voice to come from
the skies, declaring that therein lay the secret of the world? The
moonlight is intermittent and veiled, and it was under such a light
that they lived; but his heart suddenly declared to him that a sun
would rise and before that sun the timidity and the hesitation would
disappear. And as he strode forward this truth became clearer and
clearer to him and he laughed because he had been so long blind to
what was so obvious. He strode forward, his arms raised to the sky in
joyous gratitude, and as he went he cried: “I praise all living, the
bright and the dark.”

The exhilaration gave place finally to a tranquil fatigue. As he
entered the shadowy temple he saw the priest sleeping before the
altar he tended. The priest opened his eyes a moment and above the
curve of his arm he watched the young man spread his cloak upon the
marble pavement and lie down upon it and fall asleep.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Simo was awakened a little before dawn by the sounds of shrill voices
and of unaccustomed movement in the outer courtyard. On approaching
he discovered that a clamorous old woman had entered the gates and
that a number of his slaves were trying in vain to quiet her and to
drive her back into the road. He recognized Mysis. With a gesture he
commanded the men to release her. “What is the matter?” he asked.

“I must see Pamphilus.”

“He is not here.”

“I cannot go away until I have seen him,” she replied, her voice
rising in feverish insistence. “A life depends upon it. I do not care
what happens to me, but Pamphilus must know what they have done to
us.”

Simo said quietly: “I shall have you whipped; I shall have you shut
up in a room for three days, if you continue to make this noise.
Pamphilus will be able to listen to you later in the morning.”

Mysis was silent a moment, then she raised her eyes and said
sombrely: “Later in the morning will be too late, and all will be
lost. I beg of you to let me see him now. He would wish it. He would
not forgive you for turning me away now.”

“Come, tell me what is the matter and I will help you.”

“No, it is you who have done this harm and now he alone can save us.”

Simo sent the slaves back to their quarters. Then he turned to her
again: “In what way have I harmed you?”

“You do not wish to help us,” she said. “The Leno’s boat has arrived
at the island and my mistress Glycerium and all the household of
Chrysis have been sold to him as slaves. We were awakened in the
middle of the night by the herald of the village and told to gather
our clothes together and to go down to the harbor. Glycerium is not
well now; she must not be driven so. I myself escaped through the
rows of a vineyard and have come to find Pamphilus. It was you who
have done this, for it was the Fathers of the Island who ordered that
we should be sold as slaves to pay our debts.”

This was true. He remembered having listened without interest to a
discussion of the matter, assuming that it would be carried out with
sufficient warning and delay to admit of Glycerium’s being separated
from the rest of the destitute company. The Leno’s boat visited
Brynos so seldom that it seemed to the Fathers of the Island that
they might yet be under the necessity of providing for the household
through many months while awaiting the arrival of this purchaser.

Suddenly a light dawned upon Mysis: “He is at the temple! How could I
have forgotten that he was under the vow of silence, and that he must
be there!” And turning she started to enter the road.

“You must not go to him at the temple,” said Simo sharply. “I shall
come down to the harbor with you now and buy your mistress from the
Leno.”

He returned to the house for his cloak, then walked into the town
with Mysis hurrying at his heels. Dawn was breaking as he descended
the winding stairs to the square. Against the streaked sky he saw the
mast of the Leno’s boat. The Leno was not only a dealer in slaves;
he was a wandering bazaar and sold foreign foods and trinkets and
cloths. If an island were large enough he came ashore and conducted
a fair and a circus. And now in the first cold light of morning Simo
could see on the raised portion of the deck a brightly colored booth,
a chained bear, an ape, two parrots, and other samples of the Leno’s
stock in trade, including the household of Chrysis. Philocles had
remained on shore and for two hours had been standing at the parapet
uttering short broken cries towards his companions. Being a Greek
citizen he could not be sold into slavery and was to be transported
later to Andros.

Simo descended the steps of the landing with Mysis and was rowed out
to the boat. While he concluded his transaction with the black and
smiling Leno Mysis sank upon her knees before Glycerium, telling her
of this good fortune. But Glycerium derived no joy from the news.
She sat between Apraxine and the Ethiopian girl, amid the bundles of
their clothes, and for weariness she could scarcely raise her eyes or
move her lips. “No,” she said, “I shall stay here with you. I do not
wish to go anywhere.”

Simo approached them. “My child,” he said to Glycerium, “you are to
come with me now.”

“Yes, my beloved,” Mysis repeated into her ear, “you must go with
him. All will be well. He is taking you ashore to Pamphilus.”

Still Glycerium remained with bent head. “I do not wish to move. I do
not wish to go anywhere,” she said.

“I am the father of Pamphilus. You must come with me and good care
will be taken of you.”

At last and with great difficulty she arose. Mysis supported her to
the side of the boat and there taking her farewell she whispered to
her: “Goodbye, my dear love. Now may the gods bring you happiness.
I shall never see you again, but I pray you to remember me, for I
have loved you well. And wherever we are, let us remember our dear
Chrysis.”

The two women embraced one another in silence, Glycerium with closed
eyes. At last she said: “I would that I were dead, Mysis. I would
that I were long dead with Chrysis, my dear sister.”

“You are to come with us too,” said Simo to Mysis, who having known
even greater surprises obediently followed him. The little group was
rowed in silence to the shore. The Leno’s oarsmen struck the water,
his bright colored sails were raised, and his merchandise left the
harbor for other fortunes.

The sun had already risen when Pamphilus returned with swift and
happy steps to his home. There he discovered Glycerium sleeping
peacefully under his mother’s care. There was not a sound to be heard
on the farm, for his mother, already invested with the dignity of her
new duties as guardian and nurse to the outcast girl, had ordered a
perfect quiet. Argo was sitting before the gate, her eyes wide with
wonder and pleasure at the arrival of this new friend. Simo had gone
to the warehouse and when he returned, for all his happiness, he
moved about with lowered eyes, driven by the constraint in his nature
to act as though nothing had happened.

In the two days that followed, all their thoughts were centred
about the room where the girl lay and all their hearts were renewed
under the fragile claims that Glycerium’s beauty and shyness made
upon them. Simo seemed, after Pamphilus, to have best understood
her reticence and to have been understood by her; a friendship
beyond speech had grown up between them. This flowering of goodness,
however, was not to be put to the trial of routine perseverance, nor
to know the alternations of self-reproach and renewed courage; for on
the noon of the third day Glycerium’s pains began and by sunset both
mother and child were dead.

That night after many months of drought it began to rain. Slowly at
first and steadily, the rain began to fall over all Greece. Great
curtains of rain hung above the plains; in the mountains it fell
as snow, and on the sea it printed its countless ephemeral coins
upon the water. The greater part of the inhabitants were asleep,
but the relief of the long-expected rain entered into the mood of
their sleeping minds. It fell upon the urns standing side by side
in the shadow, and the wakeful and the sick and the dying heard the
first great drops fall upon the roofs above their heads. Pamphilus
lay awake, face downward, his chin upon the back of his hand. He
heard the first great drops fall upon the roof over his head and
he knew that his father and mother, not far from him, heard them
too. He had been repeating to himself Chrysis’s lesson and adding
to it his Glycerium’s last faltering words: “Do not be sorry; do
not be afraid,” and he had been remembering how with the faintest
movement of her eyes to one side, she had indicated her child and
said: “Wherever we are, we are yours.” He had been asking himself
in astonishment wherein had lain his joy and his triumph of the few
nights before: how could he have once been so sure of the beauty of
existence? And some words of Chrysis returned to him. He recalled
how she had touched the hand of a young guest who had returned
from an absence, having lost his sister, and how she had said to
him in a low voice, so as not to embarrass those others present
who had never known a loss: “You were happy with her once; do not
doubt that the conviction at the heart of your happiness was as
real as the conviction at the heart of your sorrow.” Pamphilus knew
that out of these fragments he must assemble during the succeeding
nights sufficient strength, not only for himself, but for these
others,--these others who so bewilderingly now turned to him and
whose glances tried to read from his face what news there was from
the last resources of courage and hope, to live on, to live by. But
in confusion and with flagging courage he repeated: “I praise all
living, the bright and the dark.”

On the sea the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high
pastures the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him.
In the hills the long-dried stream-beds began to fill again and the
noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones
in the way, filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds
the moon soared radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking
mountains. And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the
land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing
its precious burden.




                         Transcriber’s Notes


Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences
within the text and consultation of external sources. Some hyphens
in words have been silently added when a predominant preference was
found in the original book. Except for those changes noted below, all
misspellings and inconsistent spellings have been retained.

  Page 60: “Phraedus: It would” replaced by “Phaedrus: It would”.
  Page 159: “grown up betwen” replaced by “grown up between”.

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.



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