The Castaway (Rives)/Chapter I
CHAPTER I. THE FEAST OF RAMAZAN
[edit]A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl fagade of sky, bowed the tall, coral-lipped oleanders lining the rivulets, and crisped the soft wash of the gulf-tide. It lifted the strong bronze curls on the brow of a sleeping man who lay on the sea-beach covered with a goatskin.
George Gordon woke and looked about him: at the pallid, ripple-ridged dunes, the murmuring clusters of reeds; at the dead fire on which a kid had roasted the night before ; at the forms stretched in slumber around it Suliotes in woolen kirtles and with shawl girdles stuck with silver-handled pistols, an uncouth and savage body-guard; at his only English companion, John Hobhouse, who had travelled with him through Albania and to-morrow was to start back to London, asleep now with a saddle for a pillow. While he gazed, day broke effulgent, like light at the first hour, and the sun rose, pouring its crimson wine into the goblet of the sea's blue crystal.
For a full year Gordon had roughed it in the wilderness, sleeping one night in a pasha's palace, the next in a cow-shed a strange choice, it seemed, for a peer of twenty-two, who had taken his seat in the House of Lords and published a book that had become the talk of London. Yet now, as he rose to his feet and threw back his square-set shoulders, his colorless face and deep gray-blue eyes whetted with keen zest.
"This is better than England," he muttered. "How the deuce could anybody make such a world as that, I wonder ? For what purpose were there ordained dandies and kings and fellows of colleges and women of a certain age and peers and myself, most of all ?" His thought held an instant's thin edge of bitterness as his look fell : his right boot had a thicker sole than the left, and he wore an inner shoe that laced tightly under the shrunken foot.
Stepping gingerly lest he waken his comrade he threaded the prostrate forms to the shambling rockpath that led, through white rushes and clumps of cochineal cactus, to the town. A little way along, it crossed a ledge jutting from the heel of the hill. Under this shelf the water had washed a deep pool of limpid emerald. He threw off his clothing and plunged into the tingling surf. He swam far out into the sea, under the sky's lightening amethyst, every vein beating with delight.
Before he came from the water, the sunrise had gilded the tops of the mountains; while he dressed on the rock it was kindling golden half-moons on the minarets of Missolonghi, a mile away.
As his eyes wandered over the scene the strange stern crags, the nearer fields hroidered with currantbushes, the girdling coast steeped in the wild poignant beauty of an Ionian October they turned with a darker meaning to the town, quiet enough now, though at sunset it had blazed with Mussulman festivity, while its Greek citizens huddled in shops and houses behind barred doors. It was the feast of Ramazan a time for the Turks of daily abstinence and nightly carousal, a long fast for lovers, whose infractions were punished rigorously with bastinado and with the fatal sack. Till the midnight tolled from the mosques the shouts and muskets of the faithful had blasted the solitude. And this land was the genius-mother of .the world, in the grip of her Turkish conqueror, who defiled her cities with his Moslem feasts and her waters with the bodies of his drowned victims !
Would it always be so? Gordon thought of a roll of manuscript in his saddle-bag verses written on the slopes of those mountains and in the fiery shade of these shores. Into the pages he had woven all that old love for this shackled nation which had been one of .the pure enthusiasms of his youth and had grown and deepened with his present sojourn. Would the old spirit of Marathon ever rearise ?
He went back to the sandy beach, sat down, and drawing paper from his pocket, began to write, using his knee for a desk. The spell of the place and hour was upon him. Lines flowed from his pencil:
"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave."
His gaze fell on the figures ahout the dead fire, wrapped in rough capotes rugged descendants of a once free race, hardier than their great forefathers, but with ancient courage overlaid, cringing now from the wands of Turkish pashas. A somber look came to his face as he wrote :
"'Tis something, in the death of fame,
Though linked among a fettered race,
To feel at least a patriot's shame,
Even as I sing, suffuse my face;
For what is left the poet here?
For Greeks a blush for Greece a tear.
Must we but weep o'er days more blessed?
Must we but blush? Our fathers bled.
Earth! Render back from out thy breast
A remnant of the Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three
To make a new Thermopylffi!"
He looked up. The crescents on the spires of the town were dazzling points of light in the gold-blue air, the morning full-blown, clean and fragrant with scents of sun and sea. In the midst of its warmth and beauty he shivered. An odd prescient sensation had come to him like a gelid breath from the upper ether. He started at a voice behind him :
"More poetry, I'll lay a guinea"
Gordon did not smile. The chill was still creeping in his veins. He thrust the paper into his pocket as Hobhouse threw himself down by his side.
The latter noticed his expression. "What is it?" he asked.
"Only one of my moods, I fancy. But just before you spoke I had a curious feeling; it was as though this spot that town yonder were tangled in my destiny."
The barbaric servants had roused now and a fire was crackling.
"There's a simple remedy for that," the other said. "Come back to London with me. I swear I hate to start to-morrow without you."
Gordon shook his head. He replied more lightly, for the eerie depression had vanished as swiftly as it had come:
"Not I ! You'll find it the same hedge-and-ditch old harridan of a city wine, women, wax-works and weather-cocks the coaches in Hyde Park, and man milliners promenading of a Sunday. I prefer a clear sky with windy mare's-tails, and a fine savage race of two-legged leopards like this," he pointed to the fire with its picturesque figures. "I'll have another year of it, Hobhouse, before I go back."
"You'll have spawned your whole quarto by then, no doubt!"
"Perhaps. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring I go growling back to my jungle. I must take the fit as it offers. Composition comes over me in a kind of frenzy, and if I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. Poetry is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. Much the little en- vious knot of parson-poets who rule the reviews know about it!" he continued half satirically.
Hobhouse smiled quizzically. The man beside him had had a short and sharp acquaintance with England's self-constituted authorities in poetic criticism. Two years before, fresh from college, he had published a slender volume of verses. In quality these had been indifferent enough, but the fact that their author was a peer offered an attractive text for the gibes of the reviewers. Their ridicule pierced him. His answer had been immediate and stunning a poetical Satire, keen as a rapier, polished as a mirror, pitiless as the Inquisition, which flayed his detractors one by one for the laughter of London. The book had been the talk of the year, but while at the very acme of popularity, the youthful author had withdrawn it, and, still smarting from the sneers which had been its inspiration, had sailed for the Levant. A thought of this sensitiveness was in Hobhouse's mind as Gordon continued:
"When I get home I'll decide whether to put it into the fire or to publish. If it doesn't make fuel for me it will for the critics."
"You gave them cause enough. You'll admit that."
"They should have let me alone." Gordon's voice under its lightness hid a note of unaffected feeling, and his eyes gathered spots of fire and brown. "It wasn't much that first poor little college book of mine ! But no! I was a noble upstart a young fool of a peer that needed taking down ! So they loosed their literary mountebanks to snap at me! Is it any wonder I hit back? Who wouldn't?"
"At least," averred Hobhouse, "very few would have done it so well. There was no quill-whittler left in the British Isles when you finished that Satire of yours. None of the precious penny-a-liners will ever forgive you/'
The other laughed. "I was mad, I tell you mad !" he said with humorous ferocity. "I wrote in a passion and a sirocco, with three bottles of claret in my head and tears in my eyes. Besides, I was two years younger then. Before I sailed I suppressed it. I bought up the plates and every loose volume in London. Ah well," he added, "one's youthful indiscretions will pass. When I come back, I'll give the rascals something better."
He paused, his eyes on the stony bridle-path that led from the town. "What do you make of that?" he queried.
Hobhouse looked. Along the rugged way was approaching a strange procession. In advance walked an officer in a purple coat, carrying the long wand of his rank. Following came a file of Turkish soldiers. Then a group of servants, wearing the uniform of the Waywode the town's chief magistrate and leading an ass, across whose withers was strapped a bulky brown sack. After flocked a rabble of all degrees, Turks and Greeks.
"Queer!" speculated Hobhouse. "It's neither a funeral nor a wedding. What other of their hanged cere- monials can it be?"
The procession halted on the rock-shelf over the deep pool. The soldiers began to unstrap the ass's brown burden. A quick flash of horrified incredulity had darted into Gordon's eyes. The ass balked, and one of the men pounded it with his sword-scabbard. While it flinched and scrambled, a miserable muffled wail came from somewhere seemingly from the air.
Gordon stiffened. His hand flew to the pistol in his belt. He leaped to his feet and dashed up the scraggy path toward the rock, shouting in a voice of strained, infuriate energy:
"By God, Hobhouse, there's a woman in that sack!"