The Corn King and the Spring Queen (54 page)

Themisteas took the whole lot of squirming puppies on to his own knees, and handled them, fingering round their blind, sucking muzzles, their broad paws, laughing delightedly when the needle-pointed claws pricked him through his tunic as the puppies padded over him. Berris and Erif leant over and admired and shoved them back when they tried to tumble off. The bitch sat on her haunches with her head on her master's thigh and stayed so, unmoving, gazing dumbly and darkly at her babies. Themisteas scratched her gently behind the ears and crooned to her, and wondered aloud whether he would ever see these hounds running. His leg was the devil to heal, he could still only hobble about.

Now the mistress of the house clapped her hands and a boy brought in a jug of new wine, with apples and walnuts and thin wheaten cakes. They all nibbled and drank from the pretty, eared cups of black pottery. Themisteas still kept the puppies on his knees and fed the bitch with cake.

Philylla sat down again, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and hands clasped in front on them. She would have enjoyed being alone with the puppies, or even with them and her father, or perhaps Ianthemis. But now every one was talking and laughing and interrupting the soft babiness of them and stopping her from listening to their funny, tiny squealings and growlings. Berris and Erif weren't going to be much good to her after all. They'd gone over. She had hoped that Erif, anyhow, would remember. Berris, anyhow. Erif. Berris. She had hoped that much of friendship! She stopped listening to what they were saying; it was not interesting at all.

They put the puppies down on the floor, Ianthemis reluctant to let go of the lovely silky rolls of fat on their backs. She squatted among them, tickling and playing with them, shoving them towards their mother's teats or pulling them off. Oh, how nice, father was offering one to Berris Der! He would have his pick. Oh, was he going to choose the right one? She held them out to him, trying without words to get him to take that one, but he didn't seem to understand; he wasn't as interested as he ought to have been. He chose quite a good puppy, but not her special one. It would be ready for him by the middle of winter.

Now it was time to go. Eupolia got up from her chair to say good-bye very cordially. Philylla was watching. There! the thread had caught. All in a moment the embroidered bird was twisted and tortured into shapelessness. Her ears were so keen to it that she caught the sound of the wool thread snapping. Her mother frowned a little and glanced down and appeared not to notice. A slave was sent running to fetch the guests ‘mules to the door. They went.' I like that boy,' Themisteas said. ‘It will be pleasant to see something of them this winter. He cheers me up. You must ask them again, my dear.' ‘Certainly I will,' said Eupolia.

The two mule-riders went back to Sparta. They both had stiff felt cloaks with sleeves, thick enough to keep out all but the heaviest rain. When they were half-way a shower gathered and began to fall, and the land responded immediately with a cloud of damp-stirred plant and earth smells. Berris turned up his face to catch the rain; he had not spoken much. Erif's mind was still back with Philylla. She said firmly: ‘We've got to get her out of that. She'll fret herself to death.' But Berris did not answer, and suddenly his sister rather regretted what she had said.

Winter went on; the two were often at the house of Themisteas. It had been difficult for Erif to see Philylla alone—Philylla herself had not seemed anxious to make opportunities—but gradually she had pieced the situation together. As she did so she began to waver and be uncertain of what she ought to do. For it seemed to her by no means sure that Philylla's ultimate happiness lay in following Panteus. Then, when at last she had persuaded Philylla, not suddenly but little by little over a long series of looks and words—snatched question and answer—and infinitely friendly kisses and touches, that she really might be trusted, she was shown the letter, and that did not help her to decide. It was Philylla at last who asked the decisive thing: would Erif lend her money, on no security beyond her word, to take her over to Alexandria, and, if so, would she help her to escape out of the house?

They were sitting close together on Philylla's bed; there was a pretence of trying on sandals. Erif said: ‘My brother has the purse. I must ask him.'

‘But would he? I couldn't bear—to be betrayed again.' Philylla, suddenly almost snivelling!

‘I don't know,' said Erif frankly.

Philylla stopped and began to lace and unlace the new sandal. There was a charcoal fire in the room and she was naked but for a thin shift that rucked up over her thighs. Erif could see her breasts heave and harden under the tightening of shoulder and chest muscles. The unsaid thing about Berris stood like a crystal between the two women. Philylla raised herself and looked down critically at her sandalled foot. ‘If he thinks he can get me for himself this way, he's wrong,' she said.

‘Yes,' said Erif, ‘yes. Shall I tell him that too?'

But Themisteas and Eupolia were beginning to speak to one another guardedly of possibilities. If Ianthemis were married off to Chaerondas and if Philylla—not at once, oh no, but after due formalities and presumption of death in exile—were married to this charming and certainly rich young man, who so obviously adored her and who could certainly be persuaded to take a Greek name and settle down, well—In the meantime they allowed Philylla to walk with Berris in the walled orchard, among the bare trees, half in sight, but not in hearing of the house. They did not know what Philylla was talking to him about so earnestly. She was re-telling him the stories Agiatis had told her as a young girl, at the same time soothing herself by speaking to someone of what was in her heart, saying often the name of the woman she had loved, and keeping alive in herself the flame of the revolution.

When she had told him the story of King Agis, Berris remembered the first evening when they had heard it from Sphaeros, and for a time his mind went back to Marob, and his sister, much younger, and Tarrik drinking from a skull-cup, and the paleness of Eurydice's hands, and himself seeing it, but still in those days not able quite to put it down. Then he began to make other pictures in his mind, rather deliberately childish and unplanned: the young and innocent King, the golden hair edged with sunshine against the red door of a house in shadow. The man, at the end, coming up to Agis in pretence of friendship and betraying him to the ephors with a kiss. A good scene. The dark betrayer. Done with sharp angles and zigzags and that violetish colour you see in a sallow skin, against Agis lighted up into squares and rounds, kind simple shapes, the shapes a child thinks of, looking
at a rose. And he should have a blue tunic—probably did!—with the folds quite obvious, movingly common. Or it might be done as a crowd, dozens of tiny people seen from far off, and a rather steep perspective, so that the mere crowding and repetition of them should make up the weight and pathos of the picture. Not a pattern picture, a story picture. Not for himself, but for Philylla and her people of the revolution.

During the next week he was hard at it, first with one after another squared-up sketch, small and crowded and exciting, then with the big thing, on canvas. When it was done he rolled it and disguised it with some care as a bolt of linen, and he and Erif showed it to Philylla. When she saw what it was she looked from it to him and blushed and clasped her hands in rather a delightful and childish way, and threw down barriers and said in her old voice: ‘Oh, Berris!'

She took his hand and he kissed hers. He kissed it softly up on to the wrist. At last she drew it away. He took the picture back to Sparta, and after that he made three more of the life and death of Agis, and under each, in careful lettering, he put the legend of which incident it was, exactly in Philylla's words. One of them was Agis in the mountains, suddenly knowing what was laid on him to do, a boy in the dawn, and lambs on the hillside behind him. Another was his speech to the people of Sparta, the gentle and earnest head among all those grim, specious, bearded, crafty heads: a picture of heads—the bodies were only flat patterns of colour. In the third Agis was dead: the hanged King cut down and lain naked across his mother's knees in the moment of her agony, before her neck too was in the noose. Berris told Philylla he was doing them, and that he would show them to her some time. In the meanwhile they were rolled up and put away in the room where he worked. As technique they did not interest him particularly, but whenever he remembered them, he was pleased.

Erif had hesitated for some time before approaching him about the money; when she did he smiled and said he would think about it, and then he said nothing more until he had finished painting the Agis pictures. Then one day he said to his sister: ‘Do you still think I should give Philylla that money?'

Erif was planing down a wood panel for him. ‘Why not?' she said.

‘If you really want to be told, my dear, because I've got a chance of her myself.'

‘I doubt it,' said Erif.

‘What about Agis?' said Berris, jerking his thumb back at the rolled pictures. ‘They're for her. She'll take them.'

‘You surely don't think you've a chance of getting her for keeps? You know Sparta as well as I do.'

‘Sparta now's not Sparta then. They'll have me.'

‘But she won't, and what's the good of thinking you'll ever want to take her by force? You'd be bad at rape, Berris.'

‘She can't go on staying in love with a shadow. She's always been half turned towards me; if he'd got killed decently instead of slinking off to Egypt, she'd want me now. She's holding out for her idea still, but it'll all crash suddenly.'

Erif saw, by his calmness, that he was really serious, and stopped planing. ‘Darling Berris,' she said, ‘I do want you always to get what you want, but she still is in love with Panteus. That is perhaps very silly of her, but I don't see what can be done about it yet. I'm certain she loves both you and me in a way, and you might work up a kind of glow in her with gratitude and friendliness which might do as pretence love before it was found out. I think once in a lonely winter night she might let you have her, thinking about the Agis pictures, and I don't see that she would be hurt by that because it wouldn't touch her marriage. But that would be all you would get and it might hurt you.'

Berris took up the planed board and rubbed his hands softly over the surface. ‘You think I'm more easily hurt than I am,' he said, ‘in these complicated woman-ways of yours. I'm just plain hurt at not having her at all. I'd sooner buy her than nothing. With the Agis pictures. I've bought women before!' He glared violently across at his sister.

Erif sighed; he was tiring to live with in these moods. But perhaps it was a possible way of helping him and Philylla at the same time. ‘Well, go on,' she said, ‘but try the pictures alone first. Keep the money out, if you can, till afterwards. But if she lets you be her lover you must help her to go to Alexandria afterwards. It's all very fine, Berris, looking like that, but after all, it's my money too, and if I like to sell one of my jewels—yes, and the ones you've made
would fetch most!—I can get her away just the same as you.'

‘Why don't you do it then, you devil, instead of sitting there looking at me!'

‘Because we've been friends, Berris, all our lives, haven't we? And if we were out of Greece I would be able to magic you. How could I not give you the chance of having her once? You see, Berris, it might turn out to be all you needed. Then she could go to Egypt, and we could go to Athens or somewhere. Till the end of the four years. Why can't Hyperides write! I don't see that Panteus would really hate you, either. Yes, I know you don't care whether he does or not, but she'd hate you if he did. Oh, Berris, am I quite, quite wrong?'

Berris was calm again. He had begun to draw on the wood, a great tangly growth of elks and dragons—northern. He said: ‘I think you may be wrong. She may have stopped being in love with that man after the letter came, only she hasn't found out yet, and she won't unless something shows her. Wouldn't it be odd, Erif, if she went out to Alexandria not knowing that, and only found out when she saw him! Or when she went to bed with him. She'd never be able to admit it to anyone but herself, and there it would be inside her all her life. Isn't that a funny thing to think of!'

Erif said in horror: ‘I wonder if you can possibly be right.' And then she began to cry, but quietly, so as not to interrupt Berris.

He said: It's very easy to deceive oneself, and other people. It would be quite easy to deceive you, Erif, over this kind of thing. Yet it's a thin, flimsy bit of pretence, quite easy to break with the right kind of blow: a sharp tap would do it, Erif, a word if it were the right word. A very little force would do it—even I could use that amount of force! Even on her. And if it was broken there would be nothing left standing between her and me.'

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn't,' sobbed Erif. ‘You may be right!'

‘Why shouldn't it be me who's right for once? And what a place we'll make for you, what a home for the four years! And I am sure, I've known this in my heart ever since I first saw her.'

‘Oh, I do hate you all!' Erif cried at him, and threw the
plane on to the floor, skidding, crash, into the wall. ‘I had it all plain in my head and now it's tangled, it's a bad magic! Oh, Berris, I've got this curse on me still, I can feel it, the seasons have turned on me, and all the proper things that go with the seasons, love and marriage and friendship! Oh, I make everything I touch unlucky, I spoil people's lives, I make straight things crooked! Oh, go away from me; I'm unlucky, I've lost Tarrik and Marob and my baby! Oh, take Philylla away if you like, I shall only hurt her! Oh, it's all my fault. Oh, Berris, let me go. Oh, don't hold me, oh, how shall I ever get free!'