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The Vintage: A Romance of the Greek War of Independence
The Vintage: A Romance of the Greek War of Independence

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The Vintage: A Romance of the Greek War of Independence

Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2017
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"Very good," said the officer. "I have heard of you. But stop the riot first, if you can. I desire bloodshed no more than you."

The group had now collected round them, still waiting irresolutely, in the way a crowd does on any one who seems to have authority. Father Andréa turned to them.

"You foolish children," he cried, "what are you doing? The Sultan has added a tax, it is true, but will it profit you to be killed like dogs? You have knives, and you can cut a finger nail with knives, and these others have guns. This poor dead thing learned that, and he has paid for his lesson. Is it better for him that he has wounded another man now that he has gone to appear before God? And those of you who are not shot will be taken and hanged. I am here unarmed, as it befits a priest to be. I am a hostage for you. If there is further riot you yourselves will be shot down like dogs, or as you shoot the little foxes among the grapes and leave them for the crows to eat; I shall be hanged, for I go hostage for you; and the tax will be no less than before. So now to your homes."

The crowd listened silently – for in those days to behave with aught but respect to a priest was sacrilege – and one or two of the nearest put back their knives into their belts, yet stood there still irresolute.

"Come, every man to his home," said Andréa again. "Let those who have wine-shops close them, for there has been blood spilled to-night."

But they still stood there, and the murmur rose and died, and rose again like a sound carried on a gusty wind, until Andréa, pushing forward, laid his hand on the shoulder of one of the ringleaders.

"Christos," he said, "there is your home, and your wife waits for you. Go home, man, lest you are carried in feet first."

The man, directly and individually addressed by a stronger, turned and went, and the others began to melt away till there were only left in the square the Turkish soldiers and Andréa. Then he spoke to the officer again:

"I am at your disposal," he said, "until you are satisfied that things are quiet again."

The officer stood for a moment without replying. Then, "I wish to treat you with all courtesy," he said, "and you have saved me a great deal of trouble to-night. But perhaps it will be better if you stop in my quarters for an hour or two, though I think we shall have no more of this. With your permission I will give you in custody."

And with the fine manners of his race, which the Greeks for the most part could not understand and so distrusted, he beckoned to two soldiers, who led him off to the officer's quarters.

The Turkish captain remained in the square an hour longer, but the disturbance seemed to be quite over, and he followed Father Andréa.

"You will smoke or drink?" he said, laying his sword on the table.

"I neither smoke nor drink," answered Andréa.

The officer sat down, looking at him from his dark, lustreless eyes.

"It is natural you should hate us," he said, "and but for you there would have been a serious disturbance, and not Greek blood alone would have been shed. I am anxious to know why you stopped the riot."

Father Andréa smiled.

"For the reason I gave to the rioters. Is not that sufficient?"

"Quite sufficient; it only occurred to me there might be a further reason, a further-reaching reason, so to speak. I will not detain you any longer. I am sure no further disturbance will take place."

Andréa rose, and for a moment the two men faced each other. They were both good types of their race: the Greek, fearless and hot-blooded; the Turk, fearless and phlegmatic.

"I will wish you good-night," said the captain; "perhaps we shall meet again. My name is Mehemet Salik. You owe nothing to me nor I to you. You stopped the riot and saved me some trouble, but it was for reasons of your own. I have detained you till I am satisfied there will be no more disturbance; so if we meet again no quarter on either side, for we shall be enemies."

"I shall neither give quarter nor ask it," said Andréa.

The vintage began the next week, and for the time Mitsos had to abandon his boat and gun for the wine-making, since he alone knew the particularities of manufacture which Constantine practised – the amount of fermentation before finally casking the wine, the measure of resin to be put in, and the right quality of it, all which were as incommunicable as the unwritten law of tea-making for an individual taste. The small vineyard close to the house, which was all that was left to them after the seizure of the bigger vineyard by the Turk, contained the best vines, which, being nearer to hand, had inevitably received the better cultivation. These again were divided into two classes, most of them being the ordinary country stock; but the other was a nobler grape from Nemea, which yielded the finest wine. They were always gathered last, and fermented in a barrel by themselves.

The evening before the grape-picking began, several girls from neighboring farms came to find labor in the gathering for a couple of days, as the harvest would not be ripe in other vineyards for a day or two yet. Constantine engaged four of them, who came early next morning, just as he and Mitsos were getting out the big two-handled panniers in which the grapes were carried to the press from the vineyard, which lay dewy and glistening under the clear dawn. Spero, the boy who had been employed for the last week in scaring birds, was also engaged for the picking, and in all they were seven. For the larger half of an hour they all picked together, until two of the big baskets were full and the treading could begin. The press, an old stone-built construction, moss-ridden and creviced outside, and coated inside with fine stucco, stood close to the house. The bottom of it sloped down towards a small wooden sluice which opened from its lower end, and which could be raised from the inside when there was sufficient must trodden to fill one of the big shallow casks in which it was fermented. Mitsos had spent the previous day in washing and scouring it with avuncular thoroughness, scrubbing the sides with powdered resin, and when Spero had wanted to assist in treading the grape instead of gathering, he looked scornful, and only said:

"We do not make wine for you to wash in. Get you back to the picking."

They poured the first two big panniers of grapes into the press just as the sun rose, stalks and all, and after turning his trousers up to the knees, and scrubbing his feet and legs in hot water, Mitsos stepped in and began the treading. The purple fruit was ripe and tight-skinned, and the red stuff soon began to splash and spurt up, staining his legs. Another basket came before he had got the first two well under, and by degrees the pickers gained on him. The day promised a scorching, and the press, which had at first stood in the shade, had been swung round into the full blaze of the sun before a couple of hours were over. About nine o'clock Constantine, who had just carried up another basket with Spero, and stayed for a moment looking at Mitsos dancing fantastically in the sun, saw that there was already stuff enough to fill a cask.

"There is food for a cask there," he said to Mitsos, "but it is not trodden enough yet. You will not keep pace without some one to help you."

Mitsos paused a moment and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"I am broiled meat," he said. "Yes, send one of the girls. Make her wash first."

Constantine smiled.

"There speaks Nicholas," he remarked, "who is always right."

So Maria was sent to help Mitsos. She was a pretty girl, about seventeen years old, fawn eyed and olive skinned. As she stood on the edge of the press before stepping in, with her shoes off and her skirt tucked up, Mitsos found himself noticing the gentle curve of her calf muscle from the ankle to behind the knee, and how prettily one foot, pink from the hot water, broadened as she rested her weight on it for a moment. He gave her his hand to help her down into the press, and their eyes met.

"We shall do nicely now," he said.

Constantine meantime had fetched one of the casks, open at the top, and with a tap at the bottom, about six inches above the other end, from which the fermented liquid would be drawn off when it was clear, and placing it under the sluice, looked over to see if the must was sufficiently trodden. No baskets had come in for a quarter of an hour, and Mitsos and Maria between them had reduced the whole must to one consistency.

"It is ready now," he said to Mitsos; "raise the sluice."

The must had risen above the ring by which the sluice was raised at the lower end of the press, and Mitsos and Maria groped about for half a minute or so before they found it. Once they tightly grasped each other's fingers, and both exclaimed triumphantly, "I've got it."

Maria found it first; but the wood had swollen with the scouring of the day before and it was stiff, so Mitsos had to raise it himself. Then with a gurgle and a gulp the purple mass of pulp, juice, stalks, and skins poured riotously out, splashing Constantine, and foaming into the cask with a lusty noise. When it was three-quarters full Mitsos closed the sluice again, for in the process of fermentation the must would swell to the top, and Constantine and Spero took the barrel, clucking as it was moved, off into the veranda out of the sun, and covered it with a cloth.

They all rested for an hour at mid-day, and ate their dinner in the shade of the poplar by the spring. The others had brought their food with them, with the exception of Maria, who said she was not hungry and did not care to eat. But Mitsos, pausing for a moment in his own meal, saw her sitting close to him looking rather tired and fagged from the morning's work, and fetched her some bread and some fresh cheese, cool and sweet from the cellar, and Maria's want of appetite vanished before these things. After dinner they all lay down and dozed for that hour of fiercest heat, when, as the poet of the South says, "even the cicala is still," some in the veranda, some in the shade of the poplars. Mitsos was the first to wake, and he, under a stern sense of duty, aroused himself and the others. Maria had disposed herself under a farther tree, where she lay with her hands clasped behind her head, and her mouth half open and set with the rim of her white teeth. She had drawn up one leg, and her short skirt showed it bare to above the knee. Mitsos stood looking at her a moment, thinking how pretty were her long eyelashes and slightly parted mouth, and wondering why it had never occurred to him before that she was pretty, when she woke and saw him standing in front of her. She sat up quickly and drew her skirt down over her leg, and a faint tinge of red showed under her skin.

"Is it time to go on?" she said; "and I am nothing but a bag of sleep."

"I will help you up," said Mitsos, putting out his hand.

But she stretched herself, smiling, and got up without his assistance.

Then the work went on till nearly sunset; a second cask and a third were filled, which were taken away to the veranda, where they were put on trestles and covered like the first; and, as there would not be time to fill a fourth before sunset, they stopped work for the day.

Mitsos and Constantine ate their supper together, but afterwards Mitsos said he would not go to the café to-night, he was sleepy, and to-morrow would be as to-day. The two sat there in silence for the most part, the father smoking and playing with his beads, and Mitsos lying full length on the floor of the veranda intermittently eating a cherry from the remains of their supper.

About nine he got up and stretched himself.

"I am for bed," he said. "How pretty Maria is. I wonder why I never noticed before that girls were pretty."

Constantine smiled.

"We all notice it sooner or later," he said. "I noticed it when I was about as old as you."

"Did you? What did you do then?"

"God granted me to marry the one I thought the prettiest."

"My mother? It is little I remember of her. But I am not going to marry Maria. Yet she is even very pretty."

The second day was devoted to picking the remainder of the ordinary grapes, which Mitsos and Maria trod, as on the day before, and Mitsos feeling a desire – to which he had hitherto been a stranger – to look well in a girl's eyes, told her stories about the shooting, and his own prowess therein – for all the world like a young cock-bird in spring and the mating-time strutting before his lady. The girls were not required for the third day's picking, and in the evening Constantine paid them their two days' wage. Mitsos walked back with Maria through the garden, and together they washed their feet of the must at the spring. A little further on they came to the cherry-tree, and here he told her to hold out her apron while he picked a little supper for her, again taking pride to swing himself with an unnecessary display of gymnastics from one bough to another, while Maria looked on from below with up-turned eyes bidding him be careful, and saying, as was indeed true, that there were plenty of cherries on the lower boughs, and his exertions were needless. Something in his conduct seemed to amuse her, for as they said good-night at the gate she broke out into a laugh, and, with the air of a great, fine lady to a pretty boy, "Good-night, little Mitsos," she said; "and will you come to my wedding?"

Mitsos, in spite of his determination of the night before, felt a perceptible shock.

"Your wedding? Whom are you going to marry?"

"Yanko. At least, so I think. He has asked me, and I have not said no."

"Yanko Vlachos? That ugly brute?"

Maria laughed again.

"I don't find him ugly – at least, not to matter."

Mitsos recollected his manners.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I like Yanko very much. He knocked a Turkish soldier down last week – such a bang on the back of his head!"

"Oh, he's a very good man," said Maria, walking off with a great, important air.

Mitsos went slowly back to the house, his strutting over.

The third day was devoted to the gathering of the finer grapes, which were fermented by themselves in a separate cask. These the two boys and Constantine picked together, until all the trees but one were stripped, but instead of throwing them in stalk and all, they picked each grape separately off the bunches and shed them into the cask, until there was a layer some fifteen inches deep. Mitsos trod these as before, while his father and Spero went on picking, and when they were sufficiently pulped he poured on to them about a quart of brandy. More grapes were then put in, trodden, and more brandy added. When the cask was three-quarters full they moved it away with the others, but covered it more closely with two layers of thick woollen blanket. The remainder of the fine grapes were sufficient to fill another half-cask.

Then there came the final act of the grape-gathering, a page of pagan ritual surviving from the time when the rout of Dionysus laughed and rioted through the vineyard. Mitsos fetched a big bowl from the house, and Constantine cut all the grapes from the remaining vine. These he placed in the bowl and left in the middle of the vineyard for the birds to eat.

For the next two days the must required no attention, though the fermentation, owing to the heat of the weather, was going on very rapidly, and by the end of the second day the thin acrid smell mingled strongly with the garden scents. Once or twice Constantine raised the cloths which covered the casks to see what progress it made, or drew a little from the tap at the bottom. But the stuff was still thick, and had not cleared sufficiently to be disturbed yet.

On the second day Mitsos went off to get fresh resin for the wine. The ordinary pine resin was generally used by Greeks for this, but Constantine always preferred the resin from the dwarf pine, which was less bitter and finer in quality. The sides of Mount Elias were plentiful with the common pine, but the dwarf pine only grew on the hills round Epidaurus, a five hours' journey. Mitsos took his gun with him on the chance of sighting and slaying game, and started off on his pony before dawn, for the way wound over low, unsheltered hills, a day-long target for the sun; but before he reached the shoulder of mountain in which was cut the old grass-grown theatre, about which the dwarf pines grew, the sun, already high, had drawn up the heavy dews of the night before, and the air was quivering with heat like a man in an ague fit. The growth of these pines was that of bushes rather than trees, some of them covering a space of ten yards square, gnarl-trunked, and sprawling along the ground. On some dozen of them he selected a place near the root and cut off a piece of bark a few inches square in order that the resin might ooze from the lips of the wounded trunk, placing below each a flat stone to catch the dripping. In a few days' time there would be sufficient resin collected for the year's wine. On several trees he found the incisions he had made in previous years, in some of which, where the flow of resin had continued after he had removed it for the wine, it had gone on dripping until a little pillar, like the slag-wax from a candle, stood up between the stone and the tree. He cut off one of these to see whether it was still good, but the damp had soaked into it, and the outside surface was covered with a gray fungus growth which rendered it useless.

He ate his dinner under shelter of the more shady trees which grew higher up the slope, and waited till the sun had lost its noonday heat, listening lazily to the bell on the neck of his pony, which was grazing on the hill-side above, dozing and wondering what the next year would bring for him. He had no idea what Nicholas would call on him to do, but he was willing to wait. The love of adventure and excitement was fermenting in him, though he was contented to go on living his usual life from day to day. Nicholas, he knew, would not fail; some day, he knew not when, the summons would come, and he would obey blindly. Then he thought of the horrible scene which Nicholas and he had looked on three months ago, when they saw that dead, misshapen thing dangling from a tree, and his blood began to boil and the desire to avenge the wrongs done to his race stirred in him.

"Spare not man, woman, or child," Nicholas had said.

He lay back on the short turf and began to think about Maria. Supposing Maria had been a Turkish woman, and Nicholas had put a knife into his hand while he was looking at her mid-day sleep beneath the poplars, and told him to kill her, would he have been able? Could he have struck anything so soft and pretty? Fancy that heavy lout, Yanko, marrying Maria; he was all fat, and sat drinking all day at the wine-shop, yet he was never drunk, like a proper man, and he was seldom sober. Then Mitsos for the first time in his life became analytical, though his vocabulary boasted no such word. Why was it that since the day he stood in front of Maria as she lay asleep he had regarded women somehow with different eyes? What was it to him whether Yanko or another had her? Hitherto he had thought of women in the obvious, work-a-day light in which they are presented to a Greek boy, as beasts of burden, hewers of wood and drawers of water, inferior beings who waited on the men, and when alone chattered shrilly and volubly to each other like jays, or a bushful of silly, jabbering sparrows – creatures altogether unfit for the companionship of men. But since that moment he or they had changed; there was something wonderful about them which men did not share, something demanding protection, even tenderness, affording food for vague, disquieting thought. He had not understood at all, not having known his mother, why Nicholas had spoken as he had of his wife, except in so far that she was a possession of which the Turks had robbed him. But Mitsos could think of nothing the loss of which would make him devote his life to the extermination of the race that had robbed him of it. Even if the Turks took away his gun he realized that he would not wish to destroy the whole race for that. The brutal hanging of a man was a different matter; a man was a man, and a woman – Well, that woman was Nicholas's wife. Suppose the Turks killed Maria, would that be worse than if they killed, say, Nicholas? Well, not worse, not nearly so bad in fact, but, somehow, different.

Thus knocked Mitsos at the door of the habitation called love, and waited for its sesame.

CHAPTER VI

THE SONG FROM THE DARKNESS

When Constantine looked at one of the casks of fermenting wine on the fourth day, he saw that the crust of skins, stalks, and stones had risen to within six inches of the top, like coffee on the boil, and was thickly covered with a pink, sour-smelling froth. The fermentation was at its height, and it was time to mix up the crust with the fluid again to excite it even further. In one cask, into which the ripest fruit from the more sun-baked corner of the vineyard had been put, this crust had risen even higher, and threatened to overflow. The ordinary custom in Greece at this time was for a naked man to get into the cask and stir it up again, a remnant, no doubt, of some now insignificant superstition; but Constantine, though he still put the grapes of one vine in a bowl for the birds to eat, did not think it necessary to make this further concession, but only stirred up the frothing mass with an instrument like a wooden pavier. The crust was already growing thick and compacted, and it was ten minutes' work to get it thoroughly mixed up again with the fluid in each case, and from the seething, bubbling surface there rose thickly the sour fumes of the decomposing matter, heavily laden with carbonic-acid gas. One cask leaked slightly round the tap at the bottom and was dripping on the floor. A little red stream had trickled down to the edge of the veranda, and he noticed that it was full of small bubbles, like water that had stood in the sun, showing that the fermentation was not yet over. He caulked this up with a lump of resin, and then moved all the casks out of the shade for an hour or two, so that the heat might hasten the second fermentation, which naturally was slower and less violent than the first. The cask and a half of fine wine, however, he did not touch; there it was better that the fermentation should go on slowly and naturally.

That evening Mitsos went out fishing, as the work of wine-making was over for the present. In four or five days he would have to go over to Epidaurus to get the resin from the pine-trees, but just now there was nothing more to be done. Later on the vines would have to be cut back, but Constantine preferred delaying this till the leaves fell and the sap had sunk back again into the roots and main stem.

Though the day was one of early autumn, and in most years the serenity of summer would continue into the middle or end of October, the top of the hills above the farther side of the gulf had been shrouded all day in thick storm-boding clouds, and as sunset drew near these spread eastward, making a sullen sky. The sun, as it dropped behind them, illumined their edges, turning them to a dark translucent amber, and the afterglow, which spread slowly across the heavens, cast a strange lurid light through the half opaque floor of cloud. The night would soon fall dark, perhaps with storm. It was very hot, and the land breeze was but a languid air, and blew as if weary with its travel over the broiling plain, but there was quite enough of it, with Mitsos' economical methods, to send the boat along at a good pace. He sailed almost before it out seaward for two miles or so, meaning to fish from the island, but then changed his mind, and went back on tedious tacks to the head of the bay, the water seeming to him a thick thing, and the boat going but heavily. Dark fell, dense and premature, and when an hour later he put the boat about on the last tack he had to keep two eyes open as he neared the land; but as there were no other boats abroad, he did not think it necessary to light his lantern at the bows. Against the dark sky and the dark water it would hardly have been possible to see the brown-sailed craft from more than forty yards distant, and even then, if the thin white line of broken water at the forefoot had not caught the eye, or the stealthy, subdued hiss as it cut through the sea fallen on the ear, it might have passed close and unnoticed. Then, with a curious suddenness, he saw faintly the white glimmer of the sea-wall of Abdul Achmet's house straight in front of him, and knew that in the dead darkness he had taken too starboard a course. However, by running up as close as possible to this, one tack more would certainly take him across to the fishing bay where he was bound, and sitting rudder in hand, he waited till the last possible moment before putting about. He had, however, forgotten that the wall would take the wind from him, and when he was about fifty yards off, the sail flapped once and fell dead against the mast, and the boom swung straight, the line of white water faded from under the forefoot, and the hiss of the motion was quenched. He got up for an oar, so as to pull her round again, when quite suddenly he heard the sound of a woman's voice from the terrace singing. For a moment or so he stood still, and then his ear focussed itself to the sounds. She was singing a song Mitsos knew well, a song which the vine-tenders sing as they are digging the vines in the spring of the year, and she sang in Greek:

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