These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by--this unseizable force.
"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round the drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people. "Where are the guns?"
Mrs. Durrant looked too.
Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out again.
They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by this unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran straight into the Williamses.
"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan added, "What luck!"
The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square of the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.
It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought in yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way and that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that, answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.
The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they said.
"Before you are up," said Sandra.
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered something--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.
"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a little too.
"At half-past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in broken half-sentences:
"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are you too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not that she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time," he said. "You couldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You will fall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or was it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or come with us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
"You must go to Delphi, of course," she said. "But," she asked herself, "what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have missed...."
"You will get there about six in the evening," she said. "You will see the eagles."
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him--this disillusionment from women in middle life.
"The hotel is awful," she said. "The last visitors had left their basins full of dirty water. There is always that," she laughed.
"The people one meets ARE beastly," Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
"Write and tell me about it," she said. "And tell me what you feel and what you think. Tell me everything."
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
"I should like to, awfully," he said.
"When we get back to London, we shall meet..."
"Yes."
"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked.
"We could climb them!" she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened; the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few lights.
"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may," Jacob murmured.
"And then when your mother comes to London--," said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them--the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra's veils were swirled about her.
"I will give you my copy," said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns--Paris-- Constantinople--London--were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders's bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer--oh, a little longer!--the oppression of eternity.