CHAPTER THREE

The sun hung midway between the zenith and the western horizon as the "Excelsior" drew near the harbour of Syracuse. As they approached, the travellers looked through the telescope at the reality about which they had been dreaming all along. But although the prince jested and Wilhelm gave rein to his fancy, the one dryly sceptical, the other naïve and ingenuous, although the whole company was eager and expectant at the proximity of this memorial of ancient Greece, yet their customary cheerfulness seemed a little damped this afternoon. Diana had passed the day in far-ranging talk with Wilhelm and Franklin; the others had been more silent than usual. It was obvious that the conversation was stimulated by Diana's presence, and though not actually antagonistic, nevertheless occasionally bordered on recrimination.

Scherer, as host and owner of the yacht, had become accustomed to the shade of arrogance with which the intellectuals of the party regarded him, the mere business man. He was tolerant and indulgent towards this unconscious assumption of superiority. But the way in which the Russian opposed Scherer's practical outlook on life with his own ideological conceptions, seemed to the financier on a different plane from the oppositions he encountered among his other guests. It made him pensive and a little uneasy on his own and on Sergievitch's account. For he felt that from the point of view of problems to be faced, he and the Russian had much in common, whereas, from the outlook of political principles, everything tended to keep them apart. He himself could never be more than a dabbler in socialism. He was instinctively aware that in the young foreigner's heart there was something else besides the anarchist autocrat. This premonition moved him profoundly, as when a man unintentionally touching a woman or seeing her in a new gown, is conscious of a sensual thrill at the contact or the sight, and suddenly realizes she is quitting the circle in which she has hitherto existed for him, and is escaping into the distance.

The party's spirits rose as the yacht put into the harbour. Scherer estimated the width of the entry which the Syracusans had once closed with chains and boats against the onslaughts of Nicias. There was talk of mines and submarines, and of how only the means had changed, not the theories. Once ashore, they found themselves accompanied by a growing crowd of self-constituted guides as they strolled about the streets of the ancient city. They chaffed one another about their recently acquired knowledge of the place--mostly crammed up for the occasion from guide books. The gloom which had clung to the company all day gradually dispelled, and even the two poets joined in the general hilarity. A little cluster of shrubs which formed a circle round the well in the ancient market-place attracted Wilhelm's attention.

"The first courier from Africa," said Scherer sententiously. "And to think that out of these amazingly bristly stalks the Egyptians of old made their amazingly bristly paper."

Wilhelm looked up, inquiringly, for he was puzzled.

"Scherer means papyrus," said Franklin softly. "You could write sonnets on the stuff."

Wilhelm passed his fingers over the stalks. Nowhere could he find a smooth surface.

"But how could one ever write on such a thing?" he asked suspiciously.

Scherer explained the process whereby the fibres were converted into paper, while the whole company lolled against the shaft of the well, and a dozen or more children and beggars took up their stand around the visitors. Wilhelm followed Scherer's little lecture with the keen curiosity of a boy.

"In a word," concluded the prince, who had recaptured his customary mood of raillery, "all the misfortunes which beset this world have their origin in this plant, which may be looked upon as the instrument whereby light has been brought out of the East!"

"It serves also to disseminate speeches from the throne, Your Highness," retorted Kyril provocatively.

"Sonnets, demonstrations, newspapers," said Scherer, still stroking the plant with his fingers, "the stuff's as dangerous as dynamite! Don't you think so too?"

Diana, to whom the question had been addressed in order to draw her out of her silence, answered laughingly:

"Does not one of you hear the voice of the well which is encircled by the plant? Arethusa herself, and at this very spot the hunted nymph must have been metamorphosed. The water in the well is salt to the tongue, so bitterly did the maiden weep. Diana was responsible for the metamorphosis..."

She muttered the last words to herself and gazed into the well's depths. There was a silence, while five men's eyes were fixed upon the young woman who stood leaning over the parapet, and who bore the name of a goddess.

The prince clicked his tongue. He hated to have to live through such moments of tension while in the company of others.

"Diana has in very truth metamorphosed all of us," he said at length. "How about following this gentleman who for the last ten minutes has been trying to entice us into his osteria?"

"Al teatro, Signori! Al teatro!" yelled a voice from the throng, while twenty hands pointed in the same direction, and twenty voices echoed the cry. It was agreed that they would go, and as they went towards the building the crowd pushed them and pulled them and gesticulated wildly. They passed over the bridge which separated Ortygia from the mainland, and soon came to the hill, Eduard leading the way amid a mob of citizens, and Kyril walking on the flank, not quite so hemmed in as the prince. Scherer, who was following with Franklin, noticed this and observed:

"How could a stranger decide which was the prince and which the man of the people?"

"But are they so different? Are they really so different?" asked Franklin. "Are they not, rather, brothers? Idealists both?"

"It often happens that those who belong to the same intellectual category possess the fewest points of resemblance."

"But would you suffer yourself to be kept apart from a person you liked simply because of differences in social status, position, rank, or what not?"

Scherer thought: "He'd love to write a sonnet on a papyrus after all!" A smile lighted up his face at the notion, and he said aloud: "Yes, such things can keep kindred spirits apart. Birth, above all, is a hindrance. The papyrus, born in Egypt, and transplanted to Syracuse, cannot be acclimatized in Stockholm. But what I mainly had in mind was the varying quantity of freedom these two men might enjoy and turn to advantage."

"Is the Russian then so fettered and unfree merely because the tsar has exiled him from the possible arena of his activity?"

"The Russian? I would rather say the prince; it is he who is shackled because his father is a reigning monarch! Can't you see the counterpart?"

Franklin was silent. His mind, ever ready to absorb as much of the world of reality as he could house in the realm of his fancy, was open to the influence of this man of the world. He was ever willing, despite his grey hairs, to acquire new knowledge, and, since the beginning of the cruise, he had kept aloof from Diana and Wilhelm whose playful ways put him out of humour.

These two young people brought up the rear. Wilhelm had held his peace for some time; then he said:

"Arethusa! I can fancy christening a serious little girl by such a name, a little maid one would sit upon one's knee. Arethusa..."

He weighed the name, dandling it, as if it were in actual fact a child one were playing with. Then he asked abruptly:

"Diana?"

"Yes, Wilhelm?"

"Are you really a nymph?"

"You are a fool," chanted Diana, running away from his side and rejoining the others.

It was not until they had entered the Greek theatre that they were able to shake off the crowd which had accompanied them. The custodian, a man as solemn as a Saracen and as beautiful as an Arab, uniting in his person the attributes of the two races out of which the Sicilians have sprung, was content to murmur a few names, and after a while he ceased talking altogether. The travellers sat motionless upon the topmost step, looking down on the great tiers which had been hewn out of the rock, and which still gave the impression of an amphitheatre. But an earthquake had destroyed the stage and other structures, thus freeing the view westward over the harbour, the town, and the sea.

The flight of steps was overgrown with moss and ivy, and the stone had been weathered by two thousand years of wind and brine. Laurels and cherry-laurels shaded the parapets and walls, while fresh green leaves were sprouting from the gnarled and twisted branches of ancient fig trees. Gloomy olive groves were burnished by the evening sun, and, clinging to the broken pillars of what had been the stage, the wistaria drooped under the weight of its heavy clusters of purple blossoms. The eye travelled over the silhouettes of towers and gables in the town, to the sea, circumscribed by jagged cliffs and mountains capped with a bank of cloud. The foreground of this picture was inexpressibly sweet, wellnigh idyllic, with its scents and delicate melancholy; but the distant view verged on the tragical and forced the onlooker to recall how in far-off days the great choruses of the poets had filled the air and delighted the ears of the thousands who occupied the serried rows of the amphitheatre.

Each member of the little company from the yacht had sat down where chance had offered a convenient resting place. No one spoke. All were busied with their private meditations. Franklin, carried away by the mighty rhythm of the view, peopled the scene with figures from his own dramas. Kyril, nearby, envisaged vast assemblies of workers, gathered together in this spot before they marched upon the town, not to be hewn mercilessly down a second time as they had been at the Winter Palace! Scherer, who had happened to take a lower step for his resting place, thought how splendid a thing it would be to have such an open-air theatre up north, where, of a Sunday, popular plays on the large scale might be played; later on one might perform Schiller; and then, in the end, have a try at producing Goethe's _Iphigenia_. But not the dramas of classical antiquity, they might not be understood. Wilhelm was congratulating himself that he had not brought his lute. "I could not have refrained from playing it, and that might not have suited the others' moods. I wonder if we are going back to the yacht for dinner? Those wisteria clusters look like grapes. It must be exquisite here in autumn..."

Eduard and Diana were sitting higher than the rest, but they were separated by the whole width of the round tower. The prince looked at her and thought: "Are we foredoomed to be separated? Still, we are sitting on the same step!"

Diana leaned her arm on a broken shaft, her head was bent back, her legs were crossed, and her eyes were fixed upon the sea as it struggled with the forces of light and shade. She had completely forgotten the friends around her.