The other clipping concerned the Festival of Classic Tragedies to be performed in Dodoni, Epirus, that August. My correspondent had underlined the name Elena Kondylis among the performing artists. She was the actress I had met at the Palandios dinner party. I read the letter quickly and was prepared on Palandios’ return to show him the clipping about the festival and to say that Elsa planned to attend it.
“Shepherded or unshepherded?” He waited shamelessly to make sure I got his pun and then answered himself. “Ridiculous question. She is, of course, hopeful that he will be able to accompany her….”
“Her very words,” I said and put the letter away.
“Elsa is worth cultivating, let me say, should you have any doubts about it. She is in her way every bit as nineteenth century as her husband. Let me see now to whom among our acquaintances back there she is comparable….” He coaxed me with his fingertips to come up with a name, presumably out of the Byron legend.
“Lady Melbourne?” I suggested.
“She’ll do,” he said without enthusiasm.
“He confided or at least hinted his every wickedness to her,” I elaborated by way of justifying my choice.
“The more I read of that correspondence, the more I’m convinced Byron was merely physicking himself. He was a great one for purges of all sorts.”
“We’ve got away from Elsa,” I said.
“Yes. Well. She carries on a voluminous correspondence with all sorts of important people and provokes—though I wouldn’t say for a moment she does it deliberately—the gossip in all of us. I find myself scribbling outrageous chitchat to her. My wife would be furious.”
“Would she?” I murmured. I could not imagine Madame Palandios being discomfited by anything so trivial, but it amused me to suppose that the old boy himself might need to think so.
The salad came, greens, cheese, olives, anchovies, peppers…. Palandios tossed it vigorously. “Salad and a fish, and the good wine of Samos. Will you be satisfied?”
“Eminently,” I said. I glanced at the festival clipping where it lay between us on the table. “Is Miss Kondylis a good actress?”
Palandios covered his mouth with his napkin and laughed. “My boy,” he said, “you are mystical. It was indeed on the subject of Miss Kondylis that I gossiped. Remember Constantin Helmi, the lawyer?”
I nodded. What I remembered particularly was his conversance with the Webb case.
“He is a very wealthy man,” Palandios said, “and a patron of classical theater.”
“So he also will be at Dodoni?”
“It is a very romantic setting.”
“Where in Greece is not?” I said.
He shrugged. “Possibly Knossos—if you are Elsa Storme. What more did she say?”
The wily old fox! As curious as… a Greek!
“Ah, Doctor,” I said at my most dissembling, “nothing it would not be premature to interpret. She is disappointingly proper in her proposals.”
He thought about that for a moment. “In other words, the next move is up to you?”
I nodded and let his interpretation stand.
It was mid-afternoon when finally alone in the hotel room I was able to read Elsa’s letter at leisure:
Dear John Eakins:
A writer, idle, is the most mischievous of creatures. Even Shepherd has suggested that I commence my next book here rather than wait until we return to England. Perhaps I shall. But if so, I propose to take time out to attend the festival at Dodoni, with or without Shepherd who is very if-ish about it. I have a premonition that something extraordinary may happen there this year. You know of course that Dodoni is the oldest of the oracles and Zeus’s own.
It is but an hour’s flight and drive from Corfu, and I learn from my new friend, Elena Kondylis, that it is likely to be the thing for summer Corfiotes to do this season, attend the theater festival.
Which brings me to the other clipping. Isn’t it odd, the seeming coincidences which accumulate as at an appointed time recalling an affair that until that time seemed quite forgotten?
I should suppose it was Signor Braschi whom I met with Mrs. Webb at the consul’s dinner last spring. I’d not have said at the time that he was an Italian. I am sufficiently curious—and idle—to have written home to a friend at the British Museum. I should like to know the gentleman’s genealogy.
Perhaps you will have lost your interest in the widow Webb now that she has dropped anchor. How gauche of me to put it that way. If you read a certain pettiness in it, you are right! I am feeling spiteful and isolated, and painfully aware that the original labyrinth is a stone’s throw from my door. I must get into my book at once. I trust you have gotten into yours.
Sincerely,
Elsa (Storme)
I thought about Elsa’s letter on the bus to Sunium. I had signed on with the French-speaking tour, wanting nothing of tourist talk, but at the same time having had enough of driving for one day. My privacy was observed in true Gallic fashion.
“…the seeming coincidences which accumulate as at an appointed time….” It could not be called coincidence that I was in Greece at the time Stephanou was released from prison.
But it ought to be asked, I told myself, why Margaret Webb’s marriage at this particular time after seventeen years of widowhood? In fact, why sanctify a relationship which had endured some time without benefit of clergy? I wondered how often Margaret’s name had appeared in the newspaper social columns through these years. With some regularity no doubt. It was the actress who had mentioned her as a friend of the Princess Royal. It would not have surprised me to learn of royal strains in her own lineage. Nor would it have impressed me any more than it would have impressed Webb. Margaret I would have called a convert to republicanism during her marriage to Webb. Democracy she would have found as offensive as Byron found it. It would seem she had reverted to old loyalties after Webb’s death.
The questions I was asking were interesting, I decided, but they were the wrong ones. I had always asked the wrong questions where Margaret Webb was concerned. Deliberately.
I had seen her a number of times before we ever actually spoke, and although I did not so flatter myself at the time as to think so, she was more than a little aware of me. Indeed she would sometimes send my blood coursing by frankly meeting my eyes across, say, the barroom of the Grande-Bretagne. She must have asked someone who I was, for it was she who spoke first. Byron had nothing to do with it, but I was in the little park in the Plaka where an inscription memorializes his having lived nearby when she came up to me and offered her hand.
“Your name is Jabez Emory, am I right?”
“Yes, Mrs. Webb.”
“And are you truly a newspaper reporter? Forgive me if that seems insulting.”
“If you can call the Rock County Citizen a newspaper, I am.”
“There seem to be so many reporters, and there is so little to report,” she said.
We had sat in the park smoking. She asked me a great many questions about myself on that and subsequent days when we walked out together, the next time, I clearly remembered, at her suggestion. I had now to look for the design behind this platonic wooing. With Stephanou’s having followed us, the issue with Margaret could no longer be considered random. Only a fool would fail to see in this light that early on in my relationship with Margaret I was being measured to a pattern to which I was admirably adaptable.
What did we talk about, Margaret and I? Webb once had asked me that. And there was no use conjecturing what his attitude had been. For years I had tried to weigh it. Impossible with the scales so out of balance.
What did we talk about?
The legacy of Middletown, America, prairie sunsets, Indian summer, and box suppers after prayer meetings, bittersweet bursting red and yellow in the frost, soup kept warm for after-school, and my mother’s reading Byron by the kitchen stove in winter, the shaking down of the furnace grate at five on winter mornings which was my only memory of my father, but one that ha
lloed at me down the years like the rattle of his bones. He was a railroad man, killed in an accident when I was four. I have another memory of him: the black box with the brass handles and the squeaking of one of his pallbearers’ new shoes. This I told, and more, to Margaret Webb, even as I had told it to a Red Cross worker in England, a nurse in Belgium, and had tried to tell it to a USO canteen worker near Paris except that she couldn’t listen to me because by then I was an officer and she was assigned to the enlisted men.
But Margaret listened to it all. And once she had said, “Alexander comes from Ohio. That’s not far from Illinois. Perhaps we shall visit!” And she had laughed, looking up to see the expression on my face. “Am I really that much of a foreigner, Jabez?”
She made me feel that she was truly interested not so much on my account as that such lore as mine was also Alexander Webb’s and, knowing it, she would know him the better. God save us from the feeling of truth! I felt it then, I felt it in the moment I saw Webb with the Andartes’ whore, I felt it at the trial—and told it there, or tried to. I felt it on the bus to Sounion.
I remembered then her asking me how I came to be named Jabez. It was after a favorite uncle of my mother’s, a New England man, and it was a biblical name, of course.
“Yes, I supposed that,” she said. On this occasion we were resting under a plane tree not far beneath the Acropolis. We watched some workmen repairing a wall which had been damaged by mortar fire during the British campaign against the Communists. “What does it mean? All biblical names have meanings.”
“‘He will cause pain,’” I said. I had looked it up in many places as a child, hoping somewhere to find a different meaning to it.
Margaret’s eyes told the wish that she had not asked. She reached out and briefly laid her hand on mine. “I doubt that very much… but I have fears that he will suffer greatly.”
What, in the name of God, had she known, saying that?
12
“IT’S THE BONE-WHITE COLUMNS of the temple that most impress one, and the blue mists that come up and veil the sun, and of course the sea all round the promontory.”
“I have seen it,” Stephanou said. “It is as you say. And did you find Lord Byron’s name?”
“Among the many.”
“It must have taken him a day or would he have carried a hammer and chisel?”
“He wouldn’t have had a guide calling the fifteen-minute turns on him,” I said. “I do not like to be guided by someone who knows less than I do.”
Paul lifted his head, tilting it a little to the side; it was his way when thinking. He sat at one end of the table, erect as the straight-backed chair. The table had been so angled that he sat directly between the back window overlooking the hills and the door fronting on the street. “It is a fatal journey when the guide is ignorant,” he said. “The blind cannot lead the blind.”
I said nothing, hoping he would elaborate. But he got up and walked to the high window. Without his cane, I noted. The afternoon sun was full in his face and he turned his head this way and that as though he enjoyed it.
“You are becoming ambulatory,” I said.
“And I am becoming restless. What else did you do at Sunium?”
“I sat on the rocks and listened to the wind and waves and thought of Byron’s verse.”
“Which?”
“‘Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!’”
Stephanou spread his arms against the window frames as though he would push them out. “I thirst,” he said, swinging round. “Oh, God, how I thirst for such as Samian wine! Then what did you do?”
“I swam while the tour went in to a dinner they complained about all the way back to Athens.”
“Do you like to swim, Professor?”
“Yes.”
“So did Byron if I am not mistaken.”
“He did. He swam the Hellispont and boasted unmercifully about it.”
“Will you do that also?”
“I doubt it. But if I did, I would also boast unmercifully—and with much less charm.”
He returned to the chair and sat down with almost the surety of the sighted. “I was afraid you might not come back.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and played his hand along the table until it touched the mandolin I had brought him. He dribbled his fingers over the strings, producing a remarkably discordant sound. He shook his hand as though to rid it of the echo. “Would the gods had made me musical.”
“It is not a perfect instrument,” I said solemnly.
“Nor am I, my friend, nor am I. I am sorry I was rude to you the last time you were in this house.”
“If I had taken offense I should not have returned.” It was a lie of course, but the trivial lie mere politeness might have prompted.
“You will go away soon,” he brooded.
“Not until I have accomplished something,” I said, knowing even as I said it how hard that sentence might be to explain.
But he was suddenly exuberant. “I too have accomplished something. Every day I do the exercises we used to do in the prison. And every night I go out and walk all around the cottage, maybe three or four times. My uncle is in mortal fear: every time I get closer to the precipice.”
I realized then what Modenis had been working at behind the cottage. He was building a hedge of dead olive branches. “He would fence in an eagle,” I said.
Stephanou smiled, the smile that was so beguiling in the tragic face. I was again torn between the old hatred and whatever it was I now felt for him. “Come here beside me,” he said.
I got up from where I was sitting at the other end of the table and went, touching him lightly on the shoulder as I was about to sit on the bench nearer to him. He reached out and caught my hand and held it in a hard grip in both of his. “Thank you, Professor, for more than I can tell you.”
I eased my hand out of his grip, murmuring… I don’t know what. Some inanity.
“I embarrass you. It is a natural love. Prison did not do that to me.”
“I understand.”
“It is not only your books and your brandy… nor this poor dead thing I cannot bring to life….” He brought his hand down on the mandolin. “It is that this poor dead thing—me—has something in him yet to give. I have felt that. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“You see!” he cried. “You have made me feel it. Not the priest, not my uncle… not Vasso.” He paused, thinking. “To Vasso I am an empty cup she would pour herself into to overflowing. It is not the way.”
“You are wrong, Paul. It is she who is the empty cup, as you put it—waiting, yearning to be fulfilled.”
He put his head to the side. “She is still beautiful?”
“She is a strikingly handsome woman.”
A little smile played at the corners of his mouth. “You like handsome women, Professor. I am not sure of the words as you used them, but to strike is strong, to take, to challenge… you know?”
“I know.” Fleetingly I numbered the women I had known and gone to. It was so. “But strong women are often the most gentle. So it would be with Vasso.”
“And how would it be with me, Professor? Can you tell me that?”
“No, and I must go,” I said. “I want to walk before it’s dark.”
“You are ashamed for me, Professor?”
“It is my nature—the Puritan inbred in me.”
I cannot describe it in any other way than to say a shadow passed across his face, a complete change of expression. I remembered that he had used the word to describe Jabez Emory to the jury at Ioannina.
“Is it so with all Americans?” he asked presently.
“It is a characteristic which dies out slowly, having many roots. Nor am I sur
e it is altogether a bad thing.”
“I do not understand it,” Paul said. “Ah, but I do—up here.” He pointed to his head. “Not here.” His heart. “And what I do not understand here I think is a bad thing. Sit down, sit down. You can walk in the dark if I can.”
I sat down again. I lit a cigarette and offered him one. He shook his head. “Please be careful with the sparks. Now. A Puritan can be easily persecuted, am I right?”
“The consensus against them has always put it the other way: they are the persecutors.”
“Ah, yes, but they judge and those who judge are vulnerable.”
“I’m not sure what you’re driving at, Paul.”
“I am not sure myself. It is something I have thought about. They condemn in others that which they wish to do themselves.”
“Not necessarily. That is a theatrical concept.”
“Exaggerated?”
“And old-fashioned. But so is puritanism itself.”
“Professor, I was a Communist. I don’t know what I am today. It is enough to be blind. Does it shock you that I tell you this?”
“Not in the least.”
“I am glad. I have not known many Americans, you see.”
“And those you knew were Puritans?”
“One of them was. Yes, I think so still. It is not an easy thing for a Greek to understand. A Greek, even if something stinks, he wants to know what makes it stink. This man did not know anything because he did not want to know. It was as though he was afraid to know—as though it would contaminate him.”
I listened to this portrait I knew to be of myself and felt the commencement of a slow, sick anger. I tried to keep it out of my voice. “Is this not judgment, what you are saying, Paul?”
“But of course not! I am trying to understand. I had watched him, you see, when he did not know me, did not know I was watching. It was my duty.” He turned his head toward me. “Professor, do you know why I was in prison?”
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