Under Greek Skies. Ioulia D. Dragoume
the smaller of her mistress’s two boys who was nearly a year older, always cried to be carried when she took them out, and Mattina found that to carry a fat, squirming, cross boy of three, and have another of five hanging heavily on her arm or skirts, was far worse than the heaviest load of sticks she had ever borne.
May melted into June, and June into July, and the days grew hotter and hotter, and longer and longer, and the longer they grew the more time there was for work, and the less for sleep. Mattina’s mattress was in a little dark room half way up the stairs, and as soon as it was light in the mornings, her mistress would pound on the floor above, with a walking stick which she kept beside her bed, for the little maid to get up, sweep the rooms, brush the master’s clothes, and prepare his coffee for him before he went to his shop; and in June and July it is light very early indeed.
Later on in the morning, Mattina used to bring out a big table cover to shake outside the front door, and her gesture as she shook it, had anyone cared to watch her, was strong, decided and thorough. One could see that she would grow into a strong capable woman; that she would know how to lift things, how to handle them, how to fold them; that whatever she touched would be the better for her touching. And as she shook the dust out, while the hot sun beat down upon her head, she would close her eyes and try to fancy that the whistle of the distant Kiphissia15 train was the whistle of the morning steamer coming into the bay of Poros and that she need only open her eyes to see the glittering blue water before her, and the fishing boats with the white and red sails gliding across it; but when she opened them she only saw potato peels and pieces of old lettuce floating forlornly on the dirty stream of water beside the sidewalk. This stream was here because there was a public tap round the corner of the street, and the slatternly women who went there for water, the heels of their loose down-trodden slippers tap-tapping on the pavement as they walked, generally neglected to close it.
One evening, when the food for supper was not enough, Mattina’s mistress sent her out to the grocer’s in the Piræus Road to buy some sardines; and while she was waiting to be served, she noticed four men sitting outside the shop around a little table. One of the men was strumming a guitar, and suddenly very softly they began to sing all together. They sang the “tsopanoulo,” that song of the “shepherd boy” which Mattina had so often heard the young officers singing as they rowed themselves about the bay on moonlit nights “at home.”
She leaned against the door of the shop and closed her eyes very tight.
“I will not look,” she thought, “I will only listen, and it will be for a little as if I were back in my island.”
And because there is nothing like music to remind one of places, unless it be scent, a picture arose behind her closed eyelids, of the quiet dark water, of the broad golden path of the moon, and of the little boat that glided through the gold; and as she watched the picture, two tears trickled from the eyes that were shut, and ran down her cheeks.
“Now, my girl,” said a voice beside her suddenly, “here are your sardines!” and a greasy paper was thrust into her hand.
Oh, how it hurt, to have to open her eyes, to take what was given to her, to pay her lepta, and to stumble out half dazed into the street.
Once there, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming, for on the side walk, talking to a man in a straw hat, was an old sea captain in the cross-over vest and the baggy blue breeches such as she had seen hundreds of times on the quay at home.
“The wind has turned a little chilly,” the man in the straw hat was saying, “and there are many clouds in the sky. It will rain I think before night.”
Mattina instinctively raised her eyes to the west, and half unconsciously repeated what she had so often heard her father say:—
“If but the Western sky be clear,
Though East be black, you need not fear.”
then pointing with her finger where the sky was still of a dusky pink, she said, “There are no clouds there.”
The captain turned suddenly, and looked at the odd little figure in her white festooned apron that hung far below her frock, with her short black plaits tied round her head.
“That is what we say in my country.” Then stooping a little. “From where are you? Are you from Poros, perhaps?”
Mattina gulped down a lump in her throat.
“Yes, I am from Poros.”
“Whose are you?”
“Aristoteli Dorri’s, the sponge diver’s.”
“Ah, yes! The poor one! I heard that he had died. And did your mother send you here?”
“My mother wept much after my father died, and then she coughed more than she did before, and then she got worse, and then she died.” And Mattina turned her back on the men, and twisted and untwisted the end of the paper in which the sardines were wrapped.
“Now, lately?” asked the captain.
“It was on the Thursday of the Great Week.”
“Well! Well! Life to you! It is a dirty world! With whom do you live now?”
“I serve at a house.”
“You have no one in Athens?”
“I have my uncle Anastasi the baker, and my Aunt Demetroula, but they live far from here near the Kolonaki.”16
“Ah, Anastasi Mazelli, your mother’s brother; I know him. A good man! When you see him give him my salutations. Say they are from Capetan Thanassi Nika of Poros, and he will know.”
“I will say it to him,” answered Mattina.
“Well, the good hour be with you, little compatriot!”
Mattina walked back to the house very slowly, with her eyes fixed on the pavement. The talk about her people, the sound of a Poros voice, had brought back so much to her! She thought of the good times when her “babba,” as she called her father, came home from a long absence with the sponge-divers—filling the room with his laugh, the little bare clean room with the big pot of sweet basil on the window seat—telling all that had happened: how this one had not been able to stay so long under water, and that one, the lazy dog, had pretended to be ill, and how the captain had called on him again and again—“Come then, you, Aristoteli! I would rather work with you alone than with ten others; you are always ready to get your head into the helmet.” And Mattina, seated on his knees, would clap her hands with pride, crying, “My Babba is always ready!” and her mother cooking a hot dinner in honor of the return, would shake her head and mutter, “Too ready; too ready,” but would smile at them the next moment, as she emptied the stew from the pan to the dish and told them to get their plates ready. After her father had died, the house was never so bright again; there was no laughing in it. Still, she had had her mother then, and it was she whom Mattina missed most, for she had never been away from her.
IV
All the next day Mattina thought of the old captain, and in the afternoon she told Antigone how she had met a compatriot, and what he had said to her. This was when they sat side by side on the steps of their “houses” to take the cool of the evening, after their mistresses had gone out.
Antigone was the serving maid of the next house, which was kept by a widow who let the rooms out to different lodgers. This maid was much older than Mattina and puffed out her hair at the sides, besides wearing a hat with pink flowers on it when she went out on Sundays.
“Your heart seems to hold very much to that island of yours!” she was saying. “What is there different in it to other places?”
Mattina tried to tell her; but talking about Poros was like relating a dream which has seemed so long and which one still feels so full and varied,