The Vintage/Part 1/Chapter 6

by Edward Frederic Benson

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 sunbaked corner of the vineyard had been pnt, 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, thongh 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 ont 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 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 from under the forefoot, and the his of the motion was quenched. He got up for an oar, so as to puller 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:

"Dig we deep around the vines,
Give the sweet spring showers a home,
Else the fairest sun that shines
Sends no sparkle to our wines,
Lights no lustre in the foam."

He could not see the singer; all he saw was the circle of black night, the faint lines of his boat a shade blacker against it, and just ahead the white glimmer of tho wall. The voice, low and sweet, came out of the darkness like a bird flying through a desert—a living thing amid death. Mitsos stood perfectly still, strangely and bewilderingly excited. Then he took up his oar and turned the boat's head round, rowed a few strokes out, and waited again. But the voice had ceased.

He felt somehow unaccountably shy, as if he had intruded into another's privacy; but having intruded, he was determined to make his presence known. So just as the sail caught the wind again he stood up in the stern, and in his boyish voice answered the unseen singer with the second verse:

"Dig we deep, the summer's here;
Saw we not among the eaves
Summer's messenger appear,
Swallows flitting here and there,
Through the budding almond leaves?"

The boat bent over to the wind, the white line streaked the water, and he hissed off into the night again.

He sat down, let go of the tiller, and let the boat run on by itself. He had never known that that common country song was beautiful till he had heard a voice out of the darkness siug it—a voice low, sweet, soft, which might have been the darkness itself made audible. Who was this woman? How did she, a Greek, come to be in the house of a Turk? Then with a flash of awakened memory he brought to mind the evening when he and Nicholas had sailed home after fishing; how a man came up and struck a woman who was leaning on the sea-wall; how she had cried out and said, in Greek, "What was that for?"

The flapping of the sail in the last breath of the wind roused him and he looked up; the breeze had died out, and he was floating in the middle of a shell of blackness. He had no idea where he was until be saw the lights of Nauplia, where he least expected them, on the left of the boat instead of behind him, dim, and far away. For his craft, left to itself, had of course run straight before the land-breeze out into the mouth of the gulf, and now the breeze had died ont and he was miles from the land. That did not trouble him much; fishing was a minor consideration, and spending the night in the boat was paid for by a shrug of the shoulders. He wanted one thing only—to get back to the white glimmering wall, to the voice from the darkness.

A puff of hot air wandered by the boat, the sails shivered for a moment and were still again. A veiled flash of lightning gleamed through the clouds over the Tripoli hills and was reflected sombrely acrosg the sky, and a peal of thunder droned a tardy answer. A faint rim of light, like the raising of tired eyelids, opened over the sea, and he saw the ropes of his boat stand out sharp against it. Then, suddenly, there came from the hills a sound he knew, and knew to be dangerous—the shrill seream of a mountain squall from the highlands to the west of the gulf. He sprang to the ropes and had the sail down just before it struck him, but in less than a minute the bows were driven round, and the white tops of little waves began to fleck the bay. He felt the salt spray on his face and hands, and Jaughed exultantly. This was what he wanted.

With a joy in the danger of the thing he hoisted the sail, struggling and pulling to be free, and in a moment he was tearing back straight to the head of the gulf, with the rudder pushed hard a-port.

At the pace he was going the boat was quite steady, cutting through the waves instead of rising to them, and now and then one was flung over the bows like a white rag. The wind screamed, the white snakes of foam flew by, and, bareheaded, Mitsos clung with both hands to his rudder, controlling the course of the beat like the rider of a restive horse, laughing to himself for some secret glee, and every now and then shouting out a verse of the vine-diggers' song. Before long the wall appeared again, and he took in his sail; the water was already rough, and was dashing up against it; but he let the boat drift on till he was within thirty yards of it. The rim of light over the sea had widened, and he could see the edge of the top of the wall quite distinctly, and, behind, the tall sombre cypresses in rows. But there was no one there.

Just then the rain began hissing into the sea like shot, and for a few minutes turning the whole surface milky white, Mitsos, frowning and peering awhile into the darkness, put up his collar, and with some difficulty proceeded to put about. The wind was blowing hard ashore, and he had to take down the sail altogether and row. Even then he seemed hardly to be making way against the maddened air, and it was a quarter of an hour's hard work to get far enough from the shore to sail again. Then he fetched a long tack towards Nauplia, and from there managed to handle the boat back opposite the shore where his honse stood. The surf was breaking nastily on the rock-ridden beach, and he had to get through a narrow channel, both sides of which were shoal water, not sufficiently deep to allow the boat to pass. But he had the light from his own house and that from the café opposite to steer by, and he knew that he could run in when they were in a line. As he neared the shore he conld see it was impossible to bring the boat round sharply enough, and while there was yet time he beat out again for a quarter of a mile and approached it more directly. This time he was successful, and the boat skimmed past the tumbled water on each side—and as he passed he saw sharp-toothed rocks foaming and gnashing at him—safe into the smoother water of his anchorage. Constantine was waiting up for him, and when his tall figure appeared in the doorway, he looked up with relief.

"Mitsos, you shouldn't sail on nights like these," he said; "the best seamen in the world might not be able to handle a boat in such a squall. How did you get in?"

"It's easy enough when you get the lights from the house and the café in a line," said Mitsos; "besides, I was six miles out in the bay when the squall came down."

"Six miles out? You haye not been long getting back," said his father, marvelling at the lad's knowledge.

Mitsos walked to the door to close it, turning his back on Constantine.

"No, there was a fine wind to sail on," he said, and whistled the vinc-diggers' song beneath his breath.

Constantine did not ask any more questions, and Mitsos went to make himself some hot coffee and get out of his wet clothes, for he was drenched from head to foot.

Two days after this the ordinary wine had cleared completely, and it was racked into fresh casks, for if it stood too long on the lees in contact with the skins and stalks it would become bitter. The crust itself Constantine removed from all the barrels and put into the still for the making of spirits. This only required one man to look after, and on the day Mitsos went to Epidaurus to got the resin he employed himself with it.

The apparatus was of the simplest. He placed all the crusts from the barrels in a big iron pot, under which he lit a slow charcoal fire; into a hole in the lid of this, which screwed on to the body, he inserted a bent iron pipe, on to which he screwed another pipe made in spirals. A big wooden tub filled with water, through the bottom of which passed a third pipe fitting at one end into the spirals which lay in the water, and communicating at the other with the glazed jar into which the spirit was to be stored, completed the apparatus. The fire drove off the alcohol from the fermented crust in a vapor, which distilled itself into spirit as it passed through the tube that lay in the cold water, and dripped out at the farther end into the jar.

He finished the day's work by soon after five, and, having business in Nauplia, set off there at once; so that Mitsos, returning a little later from Epidaurus with the resin, fonnd him out, and, without waiting to get any food, he set off again at once dowh to the bay.

It was drawing near that moment when all the beanty of the day in sea, land, and sky is gathered into the ten minutes of sunset. The sun, declining to its setting, was dropping slowly above a low pass in the hills, shining with an excecding clearness, and it was still half an hour above the horizon when Mitsos got into the boat. The land-breeze was blowing temperate and firm, and his boat dipped to it gently, and glided steadily on the outward tack. Between him and the Argive hills hung a palpable haze of thinnest blue; but the whole plain slept in a garment of gold, woven by the level rays. The surface of the water, unruffled under the shadow of the land, was green and burnished like a plate of patinated bronze, and the ripple from the bows broke creamily and flowed ont behind the boat in long, feather-like lines. As the sun neared its setting, the golden mist grew more intense in color, and the higher slopes of the mountains turned pink behind their veil of blue. The sky was cloudless from rim to rim, except where, low in the west, there floated a few thin skeins of vapor, visible against the incredible blue only because they were touched with red. Just as Mitsos neared the wall on his second tack the sun's edge was cut by the ragged outline of the mountain, and in ten minutes more it would have set.

She, the nameless, ineffable she—and Mitsos never questioned that this was the sweet singer—was leaning on the edge of the wall looking seawards. She saw Mitsos sitting in the stern of his boat, and guessed at once—for few boats passed so close—that it was he who had sung the second verse of the vineyard song two nights ago, and that it was his boat which passed close under the wall last night, when the other women of the harem were there with her. She had not known till she saw him that she wished te see the owner of that half-formed boyish voice, which had come so pleasantly out of the darkness; and now, when she did not see him, she looked long. He, too, was looking, and her eyes made a bridge over the golden air that lay between them and brought them close together.

The boat drew nearer, and she dropped her eyes and began playing with a spray of roses that trailed along the top of the wall. She picked a couple of buds,

"HALF CARELESSLY SHE THREW INTO THE BOAT THE ROSES SHE HAD PICKED"

smelled them, and then very softly she began the first verse of the vine-diggers' song.

The boat had got under shelter of the wall, and drifted windlessly near. Mitsos was still looking at her; her eyes were still cast down. She sang the first verse through, and the first two lines of the second verse, and then apparently she recollected no more, for she stopped, and from the boat Mitsos sang very softly the two lines that followed. Still, without looking up, she sang them after him; he finished the verse, and she sang the whole through.

From the bay the sun had set, but the mountains on tho cast glowed rosier and rosier every moment. All that Mitsos saw was a girl's slender figure wrapped in a loose white cloak, with a gold band round the waist—a hand that held two rosebuds, a face veiled up to the eyes, eyes down-dropped, and eyelashes that swept the cheek.

"There is a third verse," he said.

Then she looked up, and her eyes smiled at him, and they were as black as shadows beneath the moon.

"I will learn that another night," she said, softly, "if it be you will teach me; and this is for your teaching. Go, now; others are coming."

Half carelessly she threw into the boat the roses she had picked, and turned away.

Mitsos waited a moment longer, and then, hearing voices in the garden behind the wall, rowed quickly away. His thoughts were a song; his mind, one sweet secret frenzy, that made the heart quick and the eye bright. All the common details of life were seen and taken in by him but dimly, as sounds come dimly to a sleeper, and are but the material out of which he weaves a golden vision; for the first splendor of love, hackneyed as a theme, but as an experience from generation to generation ever new, was dawning on him.

Maria was married next morning, and Mitsos went without emotion to the wedding. The bride and bridegroom appeared to him to be admirably suited to each other.

About four o'clock that afternoon the lad was just about to set off down to the shore when his father appeared.

"We'll finish with the wine this evening," he said, "Come and begin at once, Mitsos."

Mitsos pansed a moment.

"I was just going sailing," he said. "Cannot it wait till to-morrow?"

"No; it had better be finished now. Besides, you can sail afterwards. Come, it won't take a couple of hours."

"Uncle Nicholas told me to sail every day," he began.

"And to obey me, Mitsos."

Mitsos stood for a moment irresolute, but soon his habit of obedience reasserted itself.

"Yes, father," he said; "I am sorry. I will come."

The casks in which the first fermentation had taken place had been thoroughly scoured with boiling water, which had quite got rid of the sour-smelling fermented stuff, and they were to rack the cleared resinated wine back into them. They filled each cask again three quarters full, and into the remaining space they poured a portion of the fine wine, dividing it equally among all. To Mitsos the process seemed insufferably long and tedious. The sun had set before the casks were filled, and it was dark before the work was over. Never before, it seemed to him, had the taps dribbled so dispiritingly. His father now and then addressed some remark to him, which he barely answered, and after a time they both lapsed into silence. Mitsos knew that he was behaving badly, and he thought he could not help it. Perhaps she was there; perhaps—bewildering thought—she was even wondering why he did not come. How could he simulate the slightest interest in the wine of grapes when the wine of love was fermenting within him, driving him mad with those sweet, intoxicating fumes for which there is no amethyst?

At last it was over. No, he would not eat now; he would eat when he came in, and ten minutes later he was on his way. Soon the wall began to glimmer in front of him. Something, it looked only like a white shadow, was leaning on it, and as he drew nearer he heard again the voice singing low in the darkness, singing the common country soug which had become so beautiful.