It must have appeared to him that they were afraid. A curious mixed expression, somewhat smug, somewhat sentimental, passed over his hard face; and to relieve their embarrassment he rose and brusquely announced that he had another hour’s work to do at his headquarters, and left them.
Then it dawned on them that he was a different man, a changed character. It was not only poor health, loss of weight, loss of appetite. Some part of the change evidently was between him and them, a merely human matter, an attitude of mind, a change of heart. For the first time in a year he had spoken civilly to them. It was a small matter but a miracle.
In the night they blamed themselves for not being pleasanter about it, more responsive, more forthcoming, upon this great occasion. They were afraid he might have resented their bad manners, tied tongues, startled glances. It could not be helped, he had surprised them too much. They were half in dread of their next encounter with him, next day, lest the civil inquiry turn out to have been a mere slip of his tongue, or their own ears deluding them. They tried to recall the exact German wording, syntax and inflection, and argued it back and forth until they could agree about it.
Next morning Mrs. Helianos, finding some pretext, insisted on accompanying Helianos with the breakfast tray; and then promptly enough, the anxious or uncertain look still in the major’s eyes, the respectful way he said good morning, and his subsequent remarks, reassured them. It was not a delusion, it had happened.
Tranquilly he inquired what brought Mrs. Helianos to his bedroom so early in the morning; and once more they were tongue-tied. But as it seemed, he seriously intended to be friendly with them, he would not be put off.
“Welcome, welcome, in any case,” he said, “for after all, you are the housewife, aren’t you? Worrying about something, somewhere in the house, from morning to night!”
Mrs. Helianos stood blushing as if it were over-whelming praise.
After that there was some slight amazement for them every day; and day and night a continuous gossip and analysis of things he said and did. Whatever it meant, whatever had changed him, it had begun the very day he returned from Germany, when they had noticed nothing but his thinness, weariness, biliousness, without understanding. So now they went back over every slight evidence and minute incident; but still they did not understand, nor did they entirely agree.
Helianos wanted to accept everything as it appeared on the surface; at least to interpret everything as favorably as he could, as mere kindliness, a wonderful improvement and a great blessing. Mrs. Helianos, poor bereaved creature, was never sure. Instinctively she stood on guard against the mystery of the German. It was her nature to be mistrustful.
He was a naturally pacific, sociable man; he liked to think well of his fellow men, even an occupying German officer. It was his life-long habit to make the best of everything from day to day. Now she did not trust his judgment. She lived in dread of their making some mistake or falling into some trap. Every now and then, in the closeness of their hearts, he felt twinges of her emotion. She kept him in uncertainty about everything.
The day of Major Kalter’s return, for example, that Monday evening: he sank on the edge of his bed, sighing, gritting his teeth with weariness, although he had worked only half the day. Helianos knelt as usual to remove his boots; he would not allow it. “It is a ridiculous thing for one man to have to do for another,” he said, in his altered tone of voice, “a humiliating thing!”
After that there was no more boot-removing, and very little valeting or intimate waiting-on of any kind. Helianos would begin something of that sort, something he had always done; Kalter would interrupt him, saying, “No, it’s not necessary, let it go, I don’t want it done.”
Perhaps, Mrs. Helianos suggested, it was because Helianos was not good at this work. It was her way now, pointing out every obscurity and dubiety.
No, it was to make things easier for him, or to show him due respect; Major Kalter made that clear. “After all, you’re a man of the world, aren’t you?” he said, “a man of some distinction, as things went in your little backwater of Athens. . .”
Pausing and fixing Helianos with a look of some cordiality he added, “It must be hard to be reduced to domestic service.”
He seemed to have no sense of how all this contradicted his attitude and his remarks of the previous fourteen months, fifteen months. Apparently he had forgotten the martinet, the humiliator, that he had been. Somehow he had grown indifferent to the little domestic comforts, servitudes of man to man. Something had disabused him of that pride and thrill of petty overlordship which had meant more to him than comfort.
One morning, when Helianos brought in his breakfast, out of practice, he overturned the coffee-pot, and a few drops fell on the major’s parade-uniform, on the sleeve just below the new insignia. That same afternoon, certain of his papers having fallen on the floor, Mrs. Helianos thoughtlessly gathered them up and put them in the waste-basket. But, dread histrionic fellow that he was—that is to say, had been—he did not clench his fists or stride up and down. Nothing happened: a mere grunt about the coffee-stains, a sigh for the crumpled papers.
Somehow his bad temper, petty tyranny, bitter fuss about everything, had shifted away like a season of the year, like a scene in a cloud. When he wanted anything at all out of the ordinary he would explain it to them, patiently and clearly. In case he did not get it he complained, to be sure, but very softly, as if they were friends, or in the sympathetic patronizing way, as if they were children. Whatever happened—a noise when he was napping, or something inedible included by mischance in his evening meal, or a bad smell exhaling from the kitchen all the way down the corridor to his room, or a button torn off a badly laundered shirt—still he was correct, calm, sometimes almost sympathetic.
That night of his going to bed early he came to the kitchen-door and asked politely for his kettle of warm water. An hour or two later Helianos forgot and walked with a heavy tread in the corridor, which woke him; and the next morning, complaining of his insomnia, he mildly mentioned it and requested Helianos to be more careful in the future. And on subsequent nights, tiptoeing extremely carefully past his door, they heard how restlessly he slept; but he never rang for them to wait on him. Finished, that little indecent chore and midnight humiliation. . .
He smiled less than ever, but they did not mind that. His smile was a disquieting thing anyway, with more tooth than lip about it; too suddenly and sharply drawn in. They had never especially enjoyed being smiled at. On the whole he seemed more amiable-looking and in a way handsomer with his present long face, the slight squint and frown softening his gimlet eyes; the dead calm and the rigid strength gone from his mouth.
His voice was still rough, rapid and peremptory, even when the sense of his remarks was benign. Still upon occasion a sharp focus of his Prussian eyes, small and blue, would discourage one from presuming upon his friendship or fellow-humanity beyond a certain point. But who cared, when of his own accord every day he deigned to be a little more friendly?
Now he never bothered to inspect their cupboardful of provisions and the day’s shopping. No more quartermastery in the kitchen! Although it made things easier, and also enabled them to eat a little more freely, Mrs. Helianos—accustomed to the old strict regime, broken to last year’s harness,—did not really like it.
In the morning when it came time for him to depart to his headquarters, time for them to run and open the front door for him, and to stand and take his orders as usual, evidently he could not think what to say to them. There were no orders; nothing was as usual. Mrs. Helianos complained of it. Without his usual criticism, she said, she had no way of knowing whether he was satisfied with what she had done the day before, or whether what she would undertake that day upon her own initiative was the thing he wanted undertaken.
But with or without orders, criticism or no criticism, Helianos impatiently inquired, had she ever known what Kalter expected of her, or what to expect of him?
In the past, in his b
ad temper, she answered, at least she had something to go by; some basis for hoping that in the end, somehow, something she did might meet with his approval. Even disapproval was better than nothing, she felt. As he was their tyrant, let him tyrannize!—little by little, as a tyrant should, that they might know where they stood. How else could they be expected to give satisfaction?
For some reason, for the moment, but only for the moment, she said, he had lost interest in her house-keeping. It was not natural for him not to get his own way, it was not natural for him to control his temper, it would end badly. Indifference, inefficiency, civility: none of this was in the German nature; it would not last. Before long she expected him back at her heels with a vengeance.
Helianos supposed that she was so tired of house-keeping that she could not be reasonable about it. By her account all their work went less and less well. She served unappetizing meals; they kept the household accounts badly; their usurpation of odds and ends of food just because they happened to crave them was scandalous; and the children, that is, Alex, kept taking various liberties, now that Kalter pretended not to mind. . .She had a sense of guilt about all this, and she blamed the new Kalter for it. For it was his new carelessness about what they did, his indulgence whatever they did, which allowed them to grow guilty. She could not keep herself up to the mark, to say nothing of keeping Helianos and the children up to their mark. There would come a day of reckoning.
Helianos grew extremely impatient with her when she talked like this. But patiently he kept pointing out that they were better off than they had been all year. If only she would not excite herself now with vain foreboding. . .She never denied anything he said but, the instant he ceased to argue with her, fell back into the same flutter of anxiety and stubborn mistrust.
The major had also lost interest in his military studies after dinner. Instead he bought some ordinary cheap novels and various German and Swiss periodicals, and sat with this frivolous literature evening after evening, reading or pretending to read. If Helianos had not seen it with his own eyes he would not have believed it.
Mrs. Helianos found dust gathering on the volumes of strategy and diet, the unknown lexicon, the faraway atlas; but remembering his reproof of a year ago, she let it gather. Then one evening he complained of the clutter on his desk, and asked her to make room for his books with Helianos' Greek and French volumes in the closed bookcase.
This puzzled Helianos as much as anything. “Now that he is a major,” he said, with half a smile, “he no longer needs to study, you see. He has no further ambition. . .”
Helianos could always think of something to say, but now his humor turned to odds and ends, ambiguous and pointless. It was not really to amuse anyone but as it were for his own sake, hoping that his own thought might be led somewhere by it. His wife took less and less pleasure in his jokes.
7.
THERE WAS AN ODD UNHAPPY TIME FOR HELIANOS IN the middle of May, a kind of crisis. He tried to keep his thoughts to himself but his wife knew all about it. All the while he was reproving her for her anxious imagination, his own imagination was running away with him in a different sense, in intense curiosity about the cause or causes of the change in the major; and often it was a miserable and ridiculous thing.
He could jest about it but he could not help it or throw it off. All his life he had taken pride in his perspicacity, his understanding of the way other men’s minds worked, even foreigners' minds; obviously in vain. A change of the German heart, and presto! his non-German intelligence dumbfounded and incapacitated by it. He felt stupider than ever in his life. Somehow the terrible spirit of the occupier lay now like a great snake scotched, depressed, paralyzed—or was it charmed? reformed? metamorphosed?—and still he, the Greek rabbit, could not move, could not make up his mind, could not think of anything else, gripped by daydream.
What was it? What ailed Kalter? Why was he so sad? Why was he kinder to them than ever before? Was it some policy or scheme or trap? Would he, one fine day, having made friends with them little by little, suddenly make some terrible demand upon them? What purpose of his could they possibly serve, except by their usual submissive domestic service? Why had he lost interest in everything, even their submission? What was this strange combination of kindness and sadness; did they normally go together in the German psyche? Was he to be trusted? How long would it last? What then? What next?
He pondered it by the hour, as the days passed, and grew tired of it and tried to forget it—for the evil of their life was still sufficient unto the day, every day—but then another little innovation, reduction of their servitude or added kindliness of Kalter’s, would start his speculation, his futility of mind, all over again.
Mrs. Helianos had taken his mockery to heart, as to her first theory of the difference in their German. Now she thought of another explanation, and got up her courage one night to confide it to him.
“Helianos,” she whispered, “Helianos, listen! You know, my feeling has always been that my brother is not dead. Now I think it must be thanks to him that we are having an easier time, with the major.
“O poor little brother! At last he has grown influential, wherever he is, with the Germans in high position who determine the policy in Greece; and he still remembers us. He is ashamed and wants to make amends. So now somehow, I think, the word has come to the major to treat us better.”
Helianos hated to hear this. In the time of oppression, especially the last year when they had been oppressed personally, his mere scorn and disapproval of his brother-in-law had turned to detestation. He felt the need that almost everyone in a defeated country must feel,—the need of someone to blame personally, in some sort of intimacy, convenient to his mind; some personification of whatever weakness and perfidy in the country itself may have helped to bring about its defeat. In this sense for months Helianos, without a word to his wife about it, had been concentrating on his brother-in-law. That questionable, departed, perhaps deceased young man had become his scapegoat. There is a certain satisfaction in having a scapegoat. The least sense of indebtedness to him, for the improvement of their relations with the German, would have spoiled everything for Helianos.
So when in the dark on the kitchen-cot Mrs. Helianos whispered it, he lost his temper a little, snapped at her, and with that arm on which her head lay all night, shook her, and told her what an intolerable idea it was, what a fool she was!
With womanly mixed emotion she let it pass with no further argument. Once more for a day or so the shadow of the ambiguous youth came between them; and once more great matrimony, side by side all day, close in each other’s arms all night, naturally over-came it.
Perhaps, too, the year of oppression had given her a new insight into human nature, and remembering various things that were wrong with her brother, considering how they might have developed into real evil by now, it seemed to her preferable to think of him as dead. Thus she avoided dishonoring him in her thought, and also avoided feeling dishonored by him. She ceased to speak of him as alive, she mourned him as dead, then ceased mourning, then more or less forgot about him. And she continued in this forgetfulness, little fratricide of mind, even at a later time when she had desperate need of him, need of someone, anyone. . .
Helianos, however, could not influence her so much, as to her attitude toward Major Kalter. In it her nervousness reigned supreme; about it her talk ran on and on, foolish, bitter, and contradictory, until it tired them both out. Even in that fateful spring-time, ill and fantastic as she had become, he still had the last word about most things; not about the major.
However she contradicted herself, it was intuition, instinct; now like some sprout in a dark cellar growing deformed for the light’s sake; now like some primitive worm brought to light, and wriggling away from the light into a safe clod, safe darkness. It was too delicate for his male mind, and too strong for his gentle spirit.
But he kept arguing with her, pleading with her, to try to meet the major halfway; to give him the benefit
of the doubt; and by appreciation of what kindness he showed, to inspire in him more kindness, for her own sake, for all their sakes. But, no, she could not, or as it seemed to Helianos, she would not.
Sometimes as it appeared to him it was a kind of patriotism. She felt ashamed to take a more cheerful view of the minor matter of their life when behind it and around it lay the Greek tragedy as a whole; for which indeed it became every Greek to mourn day and night.
He himself apparently was not the type of man who can persist in tragic mood simply because it is the historic and appropriate mood, when circumstances happen to smile around him, when the season for him privately changes. . .Sometimes with her uncompromising unhappiness she made him ashamed of himself.
In the course of one of their arguments she said that their dead son Cimon appeared to her in dreams and warned her. He did not know whether this was a figure of speech or a reference to particular nightmares, nor did he quite understand what the warning could be. But he did not ask her because she was not to be encouraged to dwell on her bereavement.
How she had changed in that month of May! Helianos thought. All the previous year, so shrinking and conciliatory, passive and panic-stricken, a little oldish woman—now she was like a wild romantic inexperienced girl! How she had talked against his underground cousins; now never a word; and in fact she was as rebellious as they. How she had feared Alex’s spirit of revenge, and endeavored to repress it; now she was the irrepressible one! From morning to night she indulged in her sense of injustice: she who used to say that they were lucky to be alive! Oh, sighed Helianos, in his manly confusion and exasperation, who can begin to know a woman’s heart?
It occurred to him then that he had not heard any news of his cousins for many weeks. In their implacability and extreme energy they were so unlike him as he was now, that he could never imagine what they might be doing; he wondered. Alex, after all, was not likely to grow up to be one of them, a rebel, a fighter, he thought; and he was not sorry. He realized then how his vicarious romanticism about all this had passed in the course of those spring months. His own peculiar life with only his wife and the children and Kalter in the small apartment had preoccupied him so; not knowing how it would turn out in the end. . .
Apartment in Athens Page 6