The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (4 page)

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 philosophises 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 favour. 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 realised.’

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 emphasise 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 civilisation 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 colour 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 humour. 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 shellfish. 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 realise 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 realise 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 threshold 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 then 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: