to
edith heald
{49}
every few years, gathering his small savings together, he left intolerable salonika and went to athens where he dreamed away a month of spring on the acropolis, in the great weed-overgrown cemetery where remnants of ancient beauty lie broken and marred, and in the temple of jupiter in which he imagined he could hear faint music, and where, of a surety, he witnessed dim processional rites unseen by others. and always a few days were spent in eleusis—fever-stricken eleusis, so foul to-day, so fair yesterday: eleusis that still holds its mysteries known only to the gods: eleusis where, each morning at dawn, he issued from the muddy, sordid inn and, slipping off his white tunic, bathed in the ?gean, singing to himself and gazing long and long into the clear waters.
athens to him was a white paradise, and he would have left salonika years since to make his home there had not his bedridden mother clung with increasing fretfulness to the gaudy city where her forefathers had lived ever since the great exodus of jews from spain, centuries ago. to her son, salonika was hateful, for it was ever in conflict with his dreams, and dreams were his life. they kept his soul winging. whereas athens threw him into a quiet ecstasy. the present slipped into nothingness, and the past lived....
there was a certain marble figure in the museum which seemed to him to hold all ancient greece in its limbs and face.... a green lizard clinging, sun-smitten, to a white wall seemed to belong to a remote age; and a valley full of white butterflies—butterflies so thickly clustered that they looked like dancing snow—wa{50}s even now haunted by pan. and at night the moon on the marble of the parthenon made him giddy with the piercing realness of life....
but this evening he was at home, standing at his shop-door at the corner of the place de la liberté. he gazed with shy eagerness up venizelos street, that ill-paved gutter of a street where birmingham and hamburg jewelry compete with one another for jewish gold. here, every evening, he was to be seen, and, when no customer was in his shop bargaining for a cast of venus or for some piece of ivory carved by the dreamer’s sensitive hands, he would stand there in the daytime also, his rather tired eyes full of hunger. for—but it was not likely—she might come by day, though a years-old intuition insisted that the time of her arrival would be some evening between sunset and dark.
many people knew him and saluted him as they passed by: to these salutes he responded gravely, and a little dignified gesture of his hands spoke in duet with his voice: “god be with you! i pray you, do not speak to me.” hands so beautiful might well have made him vain, but he never thought of himself. and though he lived so intensely, he was very rarely conscious of his happiness except each night when, having closed the street-door, he sought his bed with strange relief.
venizelos street was never beautiful, or even picturesque, till the great fire of august 1917 came like a giant and, in a few hours, twisted it to fantastic shapes. and the dreamer loath{51}ed it, though he made himself spend many hours of each day in gazing upon its squalidness, his eyes ranging from the place de la liberté up to the point where the street narrows and the arcade and the bazaars begin. but he had one of the secrets of happiness: he could look at things and not see them: better, far better, he could see things that were not there. stein’s steel-walled shop did not exist: orosdi back had never been there with his wine and pickles: tiring was only the faint echo of a name. salonika’s life-blood moved sluggishly in that main artery; but the slowness was a predatory slowness—the cautious movement of men and women for ever on the prowl. sometimes his eyes would rest for a moment on the discontented rich as they sat on their little chairs outside floca’s, drinking syrups and haggling over prices. they were nearly as unreal to him as jesus christ is to the christian.
he rarely glanced towards the sea, for he was sure she would not come that way. the mountains were her home. she would come drifting like a wraith, and, leaving the mountains, place her tiny feet on the plain, flutter past lembet and karaissi, enter the town, and, turning to the left down rue egnatia, reach this ugly street that sloped to and ended in the tideless sea. surely, crocuses and anemones would bloom on the pavement when she came, and with her would come the stirring of a breeze. it must be so: he had pictured it so often. she had radiant eyes, he knew. she had always been y{52}oung, ever since the beginning of the world. youth was hers for ever. and her hair ... his heart leapt, for it seemed to him that her hand was about his heart: his heart cupped in her hand: a hand cool and, in some curious way, conscious of itself. her hair was in his eyes, blinding them. a great light shone about her.
when she came, she would not speak to him: but, all the same, she would know. that was what he was waiting for, living for: that she should know.
a complaining voice came from the room just above his head. turning swiftly, he passed through the shop where a few pieces of statuary gleamed white against the walls and shelves painted black, and quickly mounted the staircase.
“god be with you, mamma!” he breathed, as he bent over a little curled-up figure that lay on a bed near the window. the paralysed woman murmured a little something he could not hear.
“i am here,” he said. “feel me.”
and he placed a lean cheek against one of her hands.
a devastating weakness overcame her and she cried a little, but her weeping, suffocated by exhaustion, soon ceased. she lay still and seemingly asleep, and the dreamer, kneeling by her side, felt pity rising like a fountain in his heart. her sallow face was like his own, aristocratic, broad-brewed, patient. the eyes were still full of jewish ardour. he worshipped her always as a devotee worships the madonna. it was sh{53}e who had quickened his love for the beauty that lies behind beautiful things, who had taught him that all life was a seeming, who had added glamour and twilight and witchery to his entire environment.
“great little mamma!” he whispered.
she smiled wanly and opened her eyes for a brief instant.
“were you watching?” she asked.
at this he started guiltily, for he had told no one, not even his mother, why he stood nightly at the street-door.
“yes,” he said simply.
“my poor son!” she murmured, her face tense with anxiety. “what you wait for will never come.”
“no?... but if she did, and i were not there? you see how it is, mamma. i must be there.”
“yes, yes. one must always be there, waiting.”
her face composed itself, and, after waiting a few minutes, and thinking she slept, he tiptoed away, his heart rushing before him to welcome the lady of his dreams.
(yet how was it that, having reached the doorway and having darted a glance up the street, an expression of immeasurable relief lit his face when he had satisfied himself that she was not coming down that way?)
darkness was beginning, and demireps issued from side streets to the{54} place. greek women, flat-footed and unbeautiful, waddled by, virtuous and miserable in their virtue. they carried virtue with them like a shroud. the demireps, haughty and impudent, were like flowers in the dusk. lights appeared in the shop windows and the street traffic ebbed. plashing of waves against the quay almost level with the water less than a hundred yards away, could faintly be heard. the dreamer, looking towards the sea for a robbed minute, saw divine olympus, purple and august, glowing and dying in the glowing and dying sky. so all beauty faded and died, to be reborn richer for its ancestry, more wonderful for its age.
he sighed, and his hungry eyes sought his lady. his brain was washed clean of life: nothing dwelt in his mind but his dream. and unconsciously he clenched his hands to convince himself for a moment of his ecstasy, and to make that ecstasy more intense....
those gracious, tender figures on the acropolis! how chastely their garments hung! they had only life that was life, and perchance even now—oh, yes, now, for a faint slip of moon was gliding down the sky—they were walking, hand in hand, silently, in the parthenon. they mysteriously were she, his lady, his lady who must never speak to him, but who one day, or one evening like this, would appear among this depravity, and, looking on him, know and for ever remember....
the thought of olympus dying away in the south came to him, an{55}d he stole another glance at the mountain’s almost dead glory. its summit was white. a small boat heaped up with fruit was at the quay’s edge. golden oranges were massed together.... yes: she would wear golden sandals, and on her wrists would be gold, and gold would be on her hair.... his impressions mingled confusedly; thought lay dead.
i do not think that in all salonika, and perhaps in all the world, there was so happy a man that night as the dreamer in his hours of watching and longing.
he lingered in his doorway until the streets became silent. she was not coming. not to-night. she was not coming with her everlasting youth, bringing with her also his own renewed youth. for many years he had waited, but every night she had disappointed him.
the night was now full-starred, for the moon had gone. a dog, shapeless in the dark, nosed in the gutter. two whispering old men passed close by.
at length, exhausted by his vigil, the dreamer turned and re-entered his shop. his happiness, his sense of relief, was too great for expression. as he closed the door quickly behind him, it was as though he were shutting out the dreadful one. he stood dazed in the darkness. the oblong room in which he stood was perfumed and sweet. the white pieces of statuary standing against the walls made themselves just visible; they seemed made of mist, intangible; their outlines were blurred. rubbing his eyes, he stared at the statuary and smiled. then he stre{56}tched his arms to their utmost above his head and, bending his head back, turned his face to the ceiling. in utmost weariness he stretched himself and yawned.
and then, uttering a cry of delight, he rushed upstairs to his mother. he fumbled with a lamp and lit it. then he went to his mother’s bedside.
“oh, mamma, mamma,” he said, “she has not come. it has not happened. my dream has not come true. oh, i am so happy, so very happy!”
he kissed her cheek. her eyes, opened wide, searched him through and through, as they had done on so many occasions.
“oh, my son, my son!” she exclaimed, pityingly.
but he smiled with serene happiness, and taking a wisp of her meagre hair between his finger and thumb gently rubbed it.
“the gods be with you,” he said, “as they are with me.”
