Apartment in Athens (26 page)

“But sometimes it seems to me, having been childish myself all my life, that all the good-hearted men and women on earth are children, and only the evil ones have mature minds; and then I despair.”

Now she had only two distinct sets of little pages left, and she began the one that seemed less minutely written, because it was late at night and her eyes were tired.
“As to Greece in particular, our present calamity and the prospect in the near future,”
it began,
“I do not altogether despair as I hear others despairing. I suppose the loss of life, and the abuse of children, and the ravages of famine and disease, have been worse here than anywhere else. But a nation can recover from all this in time, I think, if it is given time. It is the factor of time and the world-prospect that especially worry me. None of the nations will be able to withstand the cumulative effect of one of these German wars every twenty years, every ten years. They will be able to speed up their rate of attack, as the nations exhaust themselves in so-called victories over them, letting them have the peace each time just as they want it, their breathing-spell; and of course in future wars more and more nations will suffer as we have suffered. . .

“Our good old Dr. Vlakos takes a desperate view, of the case of Greece in particular. I did not repeat what he told me at the time because I so wanted you not to worry. Now I am not afraid of your worrying. It is better to consider all the possibilities and accustom ourselves to all the truth. It is not safe to shut our eyes, for then suddenly they are forced open and it drives us mad. I confess to you, dearest, that when I first came here there was a time when I was afraid of madness
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“What Vlakos told me was that the birth rate in Greece has fallen to almost nothing. Greek men have become impotent, Greek women have ceased to conceive. But I suppose that there is a great deal of mystery and miracle about a thing like the birth rate. You would expect a doctor to understand that, but they are so much concerned with matters of fact; and sometimes they discourage themselves unduly, for lack of imagination
.

“I do not believe that the children of Greece are irremediably, incurably sick; not all of them. They are like Leda. I have been thinking and thinking of the poor little one here in prison. She is not really psychopathic, I have decided. She is only horror-stricken and paralyzed by fright, and no wonder. I believe that if the war does not go on too long, she will recover from it. She will be cured by a miracle, and perhaps the very declaration of peace will suffice. She will breathe the wonder of it in the air. She will sense the difference in all of us, and wake up. Remember my telling you this, my wife, when you despair about her
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“So it will be for a fortunate portion of the race of Greeks in general. I do not believe that the virility and the motherhood of our people can have fallen into a real decline. They have all been too tired and disheartened to feel their natural passion, and whether it is their conscious thought or not, unwilling to bring children into the world as it is just at present. But all that will change when peace comes. A part of what has happened to us has been only torment and mutilation and destruction; which is a different thing from a decline or a sickness, the effect in the long run is different. Whatever is strong enough to rise from torment, whatever is left over from mutilation, whatever happens not to be destroyed, will be healthy enough. I told our good doctor so and we had an argument about it
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“Dear, do you remember my old Macedonian grandmother, what great flocks of sheep and goats she had? I think I have not often spoken of all that because she was rude to you when we first married. Did I ever tell you about the autumn I spent up there in her high valley when I was a little boy? I made friends with one of her shepherds. One night—it was a lovely cold night, the pastures were beginning to frost, the moon rose brilliantly, and all the wild hills were softened down like a cloud—I helped him divide the flocks and drive them where he wanted them; and then he put the rams in with the ewes. He explained that his sheep would not breed until those frosty nights came; then their excitement and potency began as if they were bewitched. His best rams, he said, would beget as many as a dozen lambs in a single night. All my life I have recalled it as a similitude of all that strange great rule of nature; in my thought, almost a religious thing
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“
So it will be with all of Greece when peace comes. When I told Vlakos this it irritated him beyond endurance. He said it was indecent and incongruous to liken men and women to animals, in this solemn time of the death-agony of the nation. No wonder the birth rate is falling, I answered, when even doctors grow too solemn for such things. He said that I reminded him of some irresponsible silly modern poet that I used to publish
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“I swear that it is not silly. There will be a great passion in Greece when the Germans depart, there will be wondrous children: children, O my darling, like the Cimon of our youth, faultless and promising! There will be a little new generation begotten in a night, the progeny of bravery and pain and hunger
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“But this is the sad part of it—tell Petros!—it will be in vain, unless the nations develop a greater intelligence and precaution than they have shown so far, especially the great nations. For every few years the Germans mean to come back, to bludgeon our new generation into a psychopathic stupor, to set up their slaughter-houses all anew, to batten on us. Dr. Vlakos cannot help that; Greeks dying in battle to the last man cannot stop it; it will take the nations all together to prevent it; tell Petros. They will let us come up again for a season; then when the time is ripe for them, mow all our lives down again in a disgusting, useless harvest like this.”

Oh, these written words, Mrs. Helianos thought, were worse than anything he had ever said in the nights on the kitchen-cot when she had put her fingers in her ear to keep from hearing. She was not so sensitive and shrinking now, but even now she could not bear this. She rose, and left the bits and pieces on the floor, and went to bed.

It was a bad night, sleepless half the time, and worse when she fell asleep, with the nightmare of still reading, and still failing to grasp or to reconcile herself to what she read. Then her dream changed from reading to listening: his beloved voice so long-winded disturbing her sleep: terrible talk of Leda reborn and of Cimon re-killed, in a second battle of Mount Olympos all over again; incomprehensible talk of rams and slaughter-houses. Then she dreamed that her curiosity woke her, to find out whether he was talking to her or talking in his sleep; then she actually woke and found out only his absence and no more dream-voice. Miserably she flung her arms around the mere space, pressed her face into the vacant pillow.

This fondness turned to bitterness. For then, wide awake, she stopped to think of the desperate imprudence of his writing her pages and pages denouncing the Germans there inside a German prison, of his entrusting them to foolish old Demos. It was as if he did not care whether he ever got out of prison or not. Oh, was there a more foolish mortal on earth than this Helianos to whom she had given all her love; was there a more useless, helpless intellect than this great one to which she had entrusted her life? It had brought about his downfall in the first place. For one weary hour she had deserted her post in the clothes closet; whereupon out he had come with his fatal opinion of the Fuehrer! Arrest and imprisonment: it was his own fault, it served him right, but it did not serve her right! It was a kind of infidelity, his not taking better care of himself, his letting his tongue slip, his putting his foot in the German trap. He was a child. Indeed their children, even wild Alex and witless Leda, had more sense of self-preservation than he. Then the wife of Helianos felt a kind of maternal exasperation with him; an impulse to catch him and shake and slap him.

Once in their youth when she really had been bad-tempered, in the middle of the night she had scratched him like a cat and struck his face and beat his chest with her fists, bursting into tears finally; and gently making fun of her, he had dried her tears upon one corner of the bed-linen, and drawn her body close to him, soft and helpless with her temper spent, and holding her arms and then her legs in his hard young hands as he wanted them, peacefully made love to her. So now in a dream incongruous enough at her age, she relaxed and fell asleep again.

Next morning she sent the children out to play early, in order to finish her task of reading the letter. There were five pieces left on the worst paper of all, with the faintest smallest writing.
“Now this is what I want Petros to do:—I want him to think about all these things; then I want him to go to America and talk to the people there. He is the only one of us who is a good talker, simple, with no embarrassed style; convincing, with his virile personal charm
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“I want you to persuade him of it. Do not say anything about his own safety; that will only provoke him. Although indeed he has grown somewhat too famous in our small warfare under the Germans' noses; his exploits are too much discussed! One day in the market-place I heard a cluster of gossips; he had been in Athens that day, and they knew all about it. Presently he will endanger the lives and curtail the activities of the men under him; so he may go without a bad conscience
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“It is an odd thing: I really know nothing about Americans except that spiteful stuff Kalter told me. Only I feel sure that they will be most important again when the war is over. Probably the Russians are ruthless, but the British have too much sense of honor and sentiment for the job that is to be done; and the Americans can influence the British
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“
It is important for them to be told what we have learned from the German rule and misrule. I want Petros to tell them. For if we all continue to take our cue in world-politics from the Germans as we have done—in reckless appreciation of them when they are on their good behavior, only fighting when they choose to fight, and pitying them whenever they ask for pity—sooner or later they will get what they want: a world at their mercy
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“Tell Petros that this is my prophecy, even if it seems to you intolerable or foolish. He is a younger man, and a man of action; let him judge of the folly of it. I am afraid that men of his type, the best we have, are all so absorbed in their heroism of the moment that they are not giving enough consideration to the future wars that the Germans are planning, and how clever their plans are. It is not a question of the far distant future. Petros and even old Giorges will have another fight forced on them in their lifetime. Even you and I may live to suffer it all over again, though I should prefer to die, and to have you die
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“Tell Petros to warn them beyond the sea that it may happen to them too, before the century is over. Nothing is too difficult for these great mystical, scientific, hard-working, self-denying Germans, possessed of the devil as they are, and despising everyone else
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“I do not suppose that the Americans are indifferent to their fate and danger. I think that their worst mistake must lie in their hope of getting peace established for all time, as if it were a natural law needing no enforcement, so that they can relax and be frivolous and forget it. When they see that this is not possible then they lose hope altogether. They give it all up as a bad job and yield to their cynicism and fatalism, It is what happened after the other war. I want Petros to speak very strongly of this, because it is a terrible folly
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“What on earth do they mean when they speak of peace forever? Naturally it can only be a little at a time, with good luck, and with an effort and great vigilance and good management, day by day, year after year. Life is like that; everything on earth is like that; have the Americans and the British forgotten? Tell Petros, whenever he hears foolish political men babbling about permanent peace, to ask them: what about permanent life? Do they believe in that too? What about permanent love, permanent health, permanent talent?

“When we are sick and we go to see a doctor, do we expect him to promise us immortality? When he prescribes some medicine, do we have to be persuaded that it is a panacea, an elixir, before we take any of it? Dear wife, you have never liked my little witticisms much, I know. But this is a good one, useful and suggestive. Please don't be scornful of it, Petros will see the point of it.
”

That was the end of the letter; not a real ending. Perhaps just then, if it was the midnight hour, sleep had overcome him; or if it was the daytime, Demos had walked into the prison-cell, or the Germans had summoned him for some ignominious task or some juridical formality.

The letter as a whole, although it convinced Mrs. Helianos more than ever that her husband was a great man, disappointed her; and when she finished reading she wept once more. She did not begrudge him his little note of over-assurance and vainglory here and there; for in affliction it is good for a man to assert himself. She did not disbelieve his prophecies. Only she felt a certain bitter jealousy of the great anxious shadow of the world upon every page of it, the nations, the nation, humanity, the cousins; with no message to herself alone, no advice about the children, no comfort in her momentary vicissitudes. It was bad enough, his not knowing what they were; as it seemed in the letter he was not even trying to think what they might be. His imagination had flown away to greater causes, worse tragedies.

There was another bitterness, not at all selfish; and it increased the more she thought of it: this was only the beginning of what he had wanted to write. He would have written something greater and simpler and more helpful to the poor world, if they had not interrupted him with their bother and nonsense, whatever it was.

Next day, with her disappointment still bitter, and a sudden dread of having so damning a piece of evidence of anti-German feeling in the apartment, and some other unknown emotion, she decided to destroy it. She tried to sort out all the political parts, and began tearing them up in smaller and smaller bits until no one, no one except herself, perhaps not even she, could ever have reconstituted them. But after a few minutes of this sad silly work she felt ashamed, as if it were an indecency or a misdemeanor. She found a little painted box which had been a present from Evridiki years ago, a handkerchief-box, and packed the mutilated epistle into that, and hid it on the high shelf of the closet in the children's room.