The Leithen Stories (45 page)

‘What did he do?' I asked. ‘I should have thought the opportunities for wrong-doing in a remote island were limited.'

‘He was a student of evil. He had excellent brains and much learning and he devoted it all to researches in devilry. He had his friends – people of his own tastes who acknowledged him as their master. Some of the gatherings at Plakos would have made Nero vomit. Men and women both … The place stank of corruption. I have only heard the orgies hinted at – heathenish remnants from the backstairs of the Middle Ages. And on the fringes of that hell the poor child grew up.'

‘Unsmirched?'

‘Unsmirched! I will stake my soul on that. A Muse, a Grace, a nymph among satyrs. Her innocence kept her from understanding. And then as she grew older and began to have an inkling of horrors she was in flaming revolt … I managed to get her sent away, first to school, then to my wife's charge. Otherwise I think there would have been a tragedy.'

‘But surely with her father's death the danger is gone.'

He shook his head. ‘Plakos is a strange place, for the tides of civilisation and progress seem to have left it high and dry. It is a relic of old days, full of wild beliefs and pagan habits. That was why Shelley could work his will with it. He did not confine his evil-doing to his friends and the four walls of his house. He laid
a spell of terror on the island. There are horrid tales – I won't trouble you with them – about his dealings with the peasants, for he revelled in corrupting youth. And terror grew soon into hate, till in his last days the man's nerve broke. He lived his last months in gibbering fear. There is something to be said after all for medieval methods. Shelley was the kind of scoundrel whom an outraged people should have treated with boiling oil.'

‘Does the hatred pursue his daughter?' I asked.

‘Most certainly. It took years for Plakos to recognise Shelley's enormities, and now the realisation has become cumulative, growing with every month. I have had inquiries made – it is easy for me since I have agents everywhere in the Aegean – and I can tell you the thing has become a mania. The war brought the island pretty near starvation, for the fishing was crippled and a succession of bad seasons spoiled the wretched crops. Also there was a deadly epidemic of influenza. Well, the unsettlement of men's minds, which is found all over the world today, has become in Plakos sheer madness. Remember, the people are primitive, and have savagery in their blood and odd faiths in their hearts. I do not know much about these things, but scholars have told me that in the islands the old gods are not altogether dead. The people have suffered and they blame their sufferings on the Arabins, till they have made a monstrous legend of it. Shelley is in hell and beyond their reach, but Shelley's daughter is there. She is the witch who has wronged them, and they are the kind of folk who are capable of witch-burning.'

‘Good God!' I cried. ‘Then the girl ought never to be allowed to return.'

‘So I thought, and hence my little conspiracy which failed. I may tell you in confidence that it was I who prompted the action of the Greek Government and was prepared to find the compensation. But I was met by a stone wall. She insists on holding on to the place. Worse, she insists on going back. She went there last spring, and the spring is a perilous time, for the people have had the winter to brood over their hatred. I do not know whether she is fully conscious of the risk, for sometimes I think she is still only a child. But last year she was in very real danger, and she must have felt it. Behind all her bravado I could see that she was afraid.'

It was an odd tale to hear in a commonplace drawing-room,
and it was odder to hear it from such a narrator. There was nothing romantic about Ertzberger. I dare say he had the imaginative quickness of his race, but the dominant impression was of solid good sense. He looked at the thing from a business man's point of view, and the cold facts made him shudder.

‘What on earth is her reason?' I asked. ‘Has she any affection for Plakos?'

‘She hates it. But there is some stubborn point of honour which forbids her to let it go. She has her grandfather's fierce obstinacy. Fate has dared her to defend her own, and she has accepted the challenge … It is not merely the sense of property. I think she feels that she has a duty – that she cannot run away from the consequences of her father's devilry. Her presence there at the mercy of the people is a kind of atonement.'

‘Has she any friends in the island?'

‘An old steward is the only man in the house. She may have her well-wishers outside, but they cannot be many, for she has not lived continuously there for years. Last spring I tried to have her guarded, but she saw through my plan and forbade it. All I could do was to have the place watched on my own account. This winter my information is that things are worse. There is famine in the hills, and the hillmen are looking with jealous eyes towards the house by the sea. The stories grow wilder, too.'

‘What kind?'

‘Oh, witchcraft. That the Arabins are sorcerers and that she herself is a witch. Every misfortune in the island is laid to her account. God knows what may happen this spring, if she persists in going back! My hope was that she might find some lover who would make her forget the obsession, but on the contrary the obsession has made her blind to lovers. Perhaps you have noticed it … She seems to flirt outrageously, but she keeps every man at a distance … Now, do you understand Miss Arabin a little better?'

I was beginning to. A picture was growing up in my mind of something infinitely pathetic, and terribly alone. A child terrified by a nightmare life which she did not understand – carried off to a new environment from which she extracted what was more feverish and vulgar, for she had no canons, yet keeping through it all a pitiful innocence – returning to a
half-comprehension which revolted her soul – resolute to face the consequences of the past with an illogical gallantry. I did not know when I had heard a tale that so moved me.

‘You will not refuse her if she asks your help?' Ertzberger pleaded.

‘But what can I do?' I said. ‘I'm a lawyer and she doesn't want legal advice, even if I were free to give it her.'

‘She has got the notion that you can help her. Don't ask me why or how. Call it a girl's fancy and make the best of it. I cannot influence her. Derwent couldn't, but you may, because for some reason or other she believes that you are wise … I think … I think that she thinks that you can tell her what precisely she has to fear in Plakos. There is a mass of papers, you know.'

‘What to fear!' I exclaimed. ‘Surely you have just made that plain. A famished and half-civilised peasantry with a long record of ill treatment. Isn't that enough?'

‘There may be something more,' Ertzberger said slowly. ‘She has an idea that there is something more … and she is terrified of that something. If you can get rid of her terrors you will be doing a humane act, Sir Edward. The trouble, as I have told you, is that she will take so few into her confidence.'

‘Look here, Mr Ertzberger,' I said. ‘I will be quite frank with you. Miss Arabin did not attract me – indeed I have not often been more repelled by a young woman. But what you have said puts a new complexion on her behaviour. Tell her I am willing to do my best for her, to advise her, to help her in any way I can. But if she wouldn't listen to you, you may be certain she won't listen to me.'

‘That's very good of you,' he said, rising. ‘She proposes to go to Plakos in March. Pray God we can put some sanity into her in the next three months.'

TWO DAYS LATER I had to go north by an early train from Euston, and opposite my platform a special was waiting, to take a hunting party down to somewhere in the Shires. Around the doors of the carriages stood a number of expensive-looking young people, among whom I recognised Miss Arabin. She wore a long fur coat and sniffed at a bunch of violets, while in her high clear voice she exchanged badinage with two young men. As she stood with one foot on the carriage step, her small head tilted backward, her red lips parted in laughter, it was hard to connect her with the stricken lady of Ertzberger's story. Just as the special was leaving I saw Vernon hurry up, also in hunting-kit. He cast one glance at Miss Arabin, and found a seat in another carriage. I hoped the Pytchley would have a fast day, for I did not see these two fraternising during waits at covert-side.

Curiously enough I saw the girl again the same week, also in a railway train. I was returning from Liverpool, and our trains halted beside each other at Rugby. She was alone in her carriage, the winter dusk was falling but the lights were not yet lit, and I saw her only faintly, silhouetted against the farther window. She was not asleep, but her head was sunk as if in a dream. In the few seconds during which I watched I had a strong impression of loneliness, almost of dejection. She was alone with her thoughts, and they were heavy.

That evening on my return to my flat I found a big parcel of papers. Characteristically there was no covering letter or identification of any sort, but a glance showed me what they were. My time after dinner that night was at my own disposal, and I devoted it to reading them. I believe I would have put aside work of whatever urgency for that purpose, for Plakos had begun to dominate my thoughts.

The papers were a curious jumble – no legal documents, but a mass of family archives and notes on the island. I observed
that there was nothing concerned with Shelley. Most of the things had to do with old Tom Arabin – correspondence, original and copied, which had passed between him and his friends or enemies. There were letters from Byron and Shelley and Trelawny, one from no less a person than Sir Walter Scott, many from John Cam Hobhouse, official dispatches from the British Foreign Office, a formal note or two from Castlereagh, and several long and interesting epistles from Canning, who seemed to have had some friendship for the old fellow. There was a quantity, too, of correspondence with Continental statesmen, and I observed several famous names. All this I put on one side, for it did not concern my purpose.

Then there was old Tom Arabin's diary, which I skimmed. It was a very human and explosive document, but there was little about Plakos in it. Tom was more interested in the high politics of Europe than in the little domain he had acquired. Next I turned up a manuscript history of the island in French, written apparently about 1860 by a Greek of the name of Karapanos. This was a dull work, being merely a summary of the island's record under Venetian and Turkish rule, and the doings of its people in the War of Liberation. Then came a bundle of early nineteenth-century maps and charts, and some notes on olive culture. There was a batch, too, of verses in Greek and English, probably Tom's work and not very good. There was a pedigree of the Arabin family in the old Irtling days, and a great deal more junk which had not even an antiquarian interest. I shoved away the papers with a sense of failure. There was nothing here to throw light on Plakos; if such material existed it must have been in Shelley's papers, of which his daughter had doubtless made a bonfire.

Then I noticed something among the notes on olive culture, and drew out a thick old-fashioned envelope heavily sealed with green wax, which bore the Arabin device of a Turk's head. I opened it and extracted a sheet of yellowish parchment, covered closely with Greek characters. I was taught Greek at school, though I have forgotten most of it, but I never professed to be able to read even the printed Greek of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This document seemed to be of that date, and its insane ligatures and contractions completely defeated me. But there might be something in these hieroglyphics, so I bundled up the rest of the papers and locked the envelope in a dispatch box.

Next day I paid a visit to a Chancery barrister of my acquaintance whose hobby was medieval Greek and who had written a monograph on Aldus Manutius. He examined the thing with delight, pronounced the calligraphy fifteenth century and promised to write out the contents for me in decent Greek script.

It was not till early in the New Year that I got the manuscript back from him. The task, he said, had been very difficult, and though he was pretty certain that he had got the transliteration correct, he did not profess to be able to construe it. ‘I'm a typographer,' he wrote, ‘not a scholar. The thing, too, is obviously corrupt, and I should call it the work of an uneducated man who copied what he did not understand. But it is very curious. It seems to be an account of a place called Kynaetho. Better show it to—' and he mentioned several names.

I did not happen to know any of the people he cited, and it occurred to me that I might consult Vernon. He was, I knew, a fine scholar, and he had kept up his interest in Greek literature. So I sent the original and the modern version to him, saying that the document had come into my hands professionally and I should like to know if he could make anything of it.

Next day I had Vernon on the telephone and he seemed to be excited. ‘Where on earth did you pick up that thing?' he asked. ‘I suppose it isn't a fake?'

‘Genuine enough,' I replied, ‘but I can't tell you its story yet. Can you make sense of it?'

‘I wouldn't say exactly “sense”, but I can translate it after a fashion. I worked at it last night till the small hours. If I knew the
provenance
of the manuscript, I might be able to understand it better. Come and dine tonight, and we'll talk about it.'

Vernon had taken a flat in Cleveland Row, and it was a proof of our gradual estrangement that till that evening I had never been inside its doors. Indeed we had not met since that Sunday at Wirlesdon.

‘I saw you at Euston one morning before Christmas,' I said. ‘Miss Arabin was going to hunt in the same train.'

‘Miss Arabin?' he puzzled. ‘I don't think I know—'

‘The queer girl who was at Wirlesdon.'

‘Is that her name? I didn't know it. She rides well, but her manners are atrocious. Lord, how I dislike these
déracinés!
Let's get dinner over, for I've a lot to say to you about your jigsaw puzzle. It's extremely interesting, you know.'

Later in the evening he put before me several sheets of foolscap on which he had written the translation in his small beautiful hand.

‘The thing is headed
Ta Exotika
,' he said. ‘That puzzled me at first, till I remembered the phrase in Basil of Cæsarea. It was the word used by the early Christians to describe the old divinities. Whoever wrote this – I don't mean the fifteenth-century scribe, but the original author – was no doubt a Christian, and he is describing a belief and a rite which existed in his time at a place called Kynaetho.'

‘Where is that?'

‘I'm hanged if I know. It's a fairly common place name in Greece. There's one in Arcadia.'

I read his translation and could not make much of it. It reminded me of a schoolboy's version of a bit of Herodotus. ‘In Kynaetho,' said the writer. ‘there is a custom at the Spring Festival of welcoming the Queen (
Despoina
was the word) with the rites of the tympanon and the kestos, such as they use in the Mysteries. There is a certain sacred place, a well beside a white cypress, from which all save the purified are excluded. In Kynaetho the Queen is known as Fairborn (Kalligenia). In winter the Queen is asleep but she wakes in Spring, wherefore the Spring month is called by her name …' After this came a fuller description of the rites and a lot of talk about ‘mantic birds'.

‘There's nothing much in the first part,' said Vernon. ‘It's the ordinary ceremony of the rebirth of Demeter. But notice that she is called “Lady of the Wild Things”. There was a mighty unpleasant side to Demeter as well as an idyllic one, and it didn't do to take liberties with the Queen of the Shades. But read on.'

The writer went on to say that in time of great distress at Kynaetho there was a different ceremony. It then became necessary to invite not only the Mistress but the Master. For this purpose a virgin and a youth must be chosen and set apart in a hallowed place, and fed upon sacred food. The choosing was done by the victor in a race, who was given the name of King. Then on the appointed day, after the purification, when the dithyramb had been sung, Bromios would be born from Semele in the fire, and with him would come the
Mistress. After that the place would be loved by the Gods and corn and oil and wine would be multiplied.

That was the gist of the story. The manuscript must have been imperfect, for there were gaps and some obvious nonsense, and there were fragments of verse quoted which I took to be part of the dithyramb. One ran like this:

I laid the paper down. Vernon was watching me with bright eyes.

‘Do you see what it is? Some of those lines I recognise. They come from the Hymn of the Kouretes, which was discovered the other day in Crete, and from the Pæan to Dionysos found at Delphi, and there is a fragment of Pindar in them too. We know Koré, the Maiden, and we know the Kouros, who might be any male god – Dionysos or Zeus or Apollo – but this is the only case I ever heard of where both Koré and Kouros are found in the same ceremony. Kynaetho, wherever it was, must have fairly gone on the bust … It's amazingly interesting and that's why I want to know the story of the manuscript. I tell you it's a find of the first importance to scholarship. Look at the other things too – the sacred race and the winner called the King, just like the Basileus at the Olympic games.

‘And there's more,' he went on. ‘Look at the passage about the hallowing of the maiden and the youth. How does it go?' He picked up the paper and read: ‘“Then the Consecrator shall set aside a youth and a virgin, who shall remain consecrate in a sanctity which for all others shall be a place unapproachable. For seven days they shall be fed with pure food, eggs and cheese and barley-cakes and dried figs and water from the well by the white cypress.” Do you see what that means? It was a human sacrifice. The fellow who wrote this skates lightly over the facts – I don't believe he was a Christian after all, or he wouldn't have taken it so calmly. The boy and the girl had to die before the Gods could be re-born.
You see, it was a last resource – not an annual rite, but one reserved for a desperate need. All the words are ritual words –
horkos
, the sanctuary, and
abatos
, the tabu place, and
hosioter
, the consecrator. If we knew exactly what
hosiotheis
meant we should know a good deal about Greek religion. There were ugly patches in it. People try to gloss over the human sacrifice side, and of course civilised Greeks like the Athenians soon got rid of it; but I haven't a doubt the thing went on all through classical times in Thessaly and Epirus and Arcadia and some of the islands. Indeed in the islands it survived till almost the other day. There was a case not so long ago in Santorini.'

He pressed me to tell him the origin of the paper, but I felt reluctant to mention Miss Arabin. He was so deeply prejudiced against the girl, that it seemed unfair to reveal to him even the most trivial of her private affairs. I put him off by saying it was the property of a client, and that I would find out its history and tell him later.

‘I have made a copy of the Greek text,' he said. ‘May I keep it?'

I told him, certainly. And that was all that happened during the evening. Formerly we would have sat up talking and smoking till all hours, but now I felt that the curtain was too heavy between us to allow of ordinary conversation. We would get at once into difficult topics. Besides I did not want to talk. The fact was that I was acquiring an obsession of my own – a tragic defiant girl moving between mirthless gaiety and menaced solitude. She might be innocent of the witchcraft in which Plakos believed, but she had cast some outlandish spell over me.

Before the end of the week Miss Arabin rang me up.

‘You're Sir Edward Leithen? I sent you some papers. Have you looked at them?'

I told her I had.

‘Then you had better come and talk to me. Come on Saturday and I'll give you luncheon. Half-past one.'

There was no word of thanks for my trouble, but I obeyed the summons as if it had been a royal command. She had taken a flat in a block off Berkeley Square, and I wondered what sort of environment she had made for herself. I think I expected a slovenly place full of cushions and French novels and hot-house flowers. Instead I found a large room wholly without frippery – a big bare writing-table, leather arm-chairs like a
man's smoking-room, and on the walls one or two hunting prints and some water-colour sketches of English landscape. There were few books, and those I looked at were county history. It was a mild frosty day and the windows were wide open. The only decorations were some dogwood branches and hedgerow berries – the spoil which townsfolk bring back in winter from country week-ends.

She was in tweeds, for she was off to Wirlesdon that afternoon, and – perhaps in my honour – she had forborne to powder her face. Once again I was struck by the free vigour of her movements, and the quick vitality of her eyes. The cabaret atmosphere was clearly no part of the real woman; rather, as I now saw her, she seemed to carry with her a breath of the fields and hills.