Chapter I: Part 1

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

THE
WOMAN
OF
ANDROS

BY
THORNTON WILDER

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.