The Capsina. An Historical Novel

The Capsina was already vanished on some hurricane errand by the time Mitsos had brought his ship to anchor, and Christos and he being left without orders or occupation took refuge in a café, where they sat awhile smoking and playing draughts, for outside the day was nought but a gray deluge of driven rain. To them at a critical moment in the game entered the Capsina, and words adequate for the occasion failed her. But Mitsos, seeing that her eye betokened imminent chaos, took a rapid mental note of the position of the remaining pieces on the board. Then he said, hurriedly, to Christos: "It's my move, remember, when we get straight again," and stood up. Christos shrunk into a corner.

"Mitsos Codones, I believe?" remarked the Capsina, with a terrifying stress on the last word, and a burning coldness of tone.

"And I believe so, too," said Mitsos, genially.

"Whom I engaged to play draughts in low cafés," said the Capsina, with a wild glance, "and to waste his time – Oh, it is too much," and the draughtsmen described parabolas into inaccessible places. "God in heaven! is it not too much," cried the girl, "that I have to go hunting you through the villages of Greece, up and down the Lord knows where, to find you playing draughts with that pigeon-livered boy? And the Revenge is pulling at her hawser, while Mitsos plays draughts; and the Greeks are being murdered all along the coast, and Mitsos plays draughts!"

An interminable grin spread itself over Mitsos's face. "And the Capsina, I doubt not, goes to see a strange baby, while the Greeks are murdered all along the coast. And the Revenge strains at her hawser, and the Capsina spends her time in abusing her own first officer," he said. "Oh, Capsina, and where is there a choice between us? Do not be so hasty; see, I shall have to pick up all these draughts, for finish the game I shall and will, and as you very well know we do not start till to-morrow. It was my move, Christos, and these pieces were so – eh, but there is another. Is it up your sleeve, Capsina?"

The Capsina glared at Christos a moment as if she were a careful mother who had discovered him luring a child of hers into some low haunt and directed the torrent of her grievance against him.

"Never did I see such a lad," she said; "if you were of the clan I should set you to the loom and the distaff like the women. He would sit and look at the sea by the hour, Mitsos; he would throw bread to the gulls. Gulls, indeed!"

Mitsos fairly laughed out.

"Oh, Capsina," he cried, "sit down and watch us play. There is nothing we can do, you know it well. The new men have volunteered – Kanaris had the choosing of them; you settled that yourself, and the Revenge cannot start before morning. Then how does it assist the war to stamp up and down through the villages of Greece, as you say, and call me and Christos bird-names? There, I am cornered; I knew that would happen; and the pigeon-livered wins. Move, pigeon."

Mitsos shook back his hair from his eyes and looked inquiringly at the Capsina.

"Does not that seem to you most excellent sound sense?" he said.

The Capsina stood a little longer undecided, but the corners of her mouth wavered, and Mitsos, seeing his advantage, clapped his hands.

"Coffee for the Capsina!" he cried to the shopman. "Is it not so, Capsina?" He fetched her a chair. "Now watch us finish, and then Christos will play you, and I will take your side. Thus we stand or fall together, and may it ever be so with us. Christos is the devil of a cunning fellow, for be it known to you I am pretty good myself, and see what there is left of me."

"Oh, fool of a little Mitsos!" said the girl, and she looked at him a shade longer than a friend would have done and sat down.

"There came a caique in from Corinth this afternoon," she said, "with news of the other three ships, and with news, too, from overland – from Nauplia!"

Mitsos paused with his finger on a piece.

"What is the news?" he asked.

"The three Turkish ships tried to put in there, but they could not make the harbor."

"No, I mean the news from Nauplia?"

The Capsina looked up, raising her eyebrows.

"Are they at home so dear? Yet you have been with me a month now, Mitsos, and except only that you want to say good-bye to those at home before starting, I know not if you have father or mother. And it is bad manners," said she, with her nose in the air, "to ask for what one is not given."

"But what is the news?" repeated Mitsos.

"Good news only: the town is blockaded by land and sea, so that no Turk can go out or in. The Greek women and children with the men who do not serve – but there are few such – all left the town the night before the blockade began and have encamped on the mound of Tiryns. But in the spring the Turks will send a fresh army south, in time, they hope, to raise the siege."

"Praise the Virgin!" said Mitsos; "but Nauplia will be starved out before that. I move, and my king goes as straight as a homing honey-bee into the mouth of the pigeon-livered. But there is no other way, oh, your Majesty!"

The Capsina laughed.

"Surely there has never been a lad yet so single of purpose," she said. "To him there is nothing in all the world but a little wooden king."

"Even so, if only the news from Nauplia is good!" said Mitsos, smiling half to himself, "and if the little Turks will be kind and sail northward to us."

"Yet still you do not tell me," said the girl, "and I will throw my manners away and ask. Have you a mother, Mitsos?"

"No, nor father either," and he stopped, remembering what he and Suleima had said to each other as they walked beneath the stars down to the boat.

"Then who is it who is so dear?" she asked, and with a sudden uprising of anxiety waited for the answer.

"It is Suleima!" said Mitsos, "the little wife, and he the adorable, so she calls him, the littlest one."

The Capsina stared a moment in silence.

"So," she said, at length, "and you never told me that! Little Mitsos, why have you so greatly made a stranger of me?"

She rose from where she sat, and with that the flame in her eyes was quenched, and they were appealing only as of a chidden dog.

"Indeed, Capsina," and again "Indeed," he said; but the girl turned quickly from him and went out of the place, leaving her coffee untouched, into the dark and rain-ruled night.

She walked up the quay and down again, hardly conscious of the driving rain. On the right the water below the harbor wall hissed and whispered to itself like an angry snake under the slanting deluge. The Sophia and Revenge lay side by side some two hundred yards out; from nearer in she could hear the rattle of the crane which was unloading the Turkish ships which they had captured, and a great oil flare under the awning flickered and flapped in the eddying draughts. The wind kept shifting and chopping about, and now and then the drippings from off the houses would be blown outward in a wisp of chilly water across her, and again the spray from the peevish ripples in the harbor would be cut off and thrown like a sheet over the quay. But in the storm of her soul she heeded not, and that chill and windy rain played but a minor part in the wild and bitter symphony of her thoughts. At first it seemed an incredible thing to her: ever since she had seen Mitsos come up out of the sunset from his boat, her conviction had been unchanged, that this was he, the one from the sea and the sun, who was made to fulfil her life. As if to put the seal on certainty, that very night he had joined her on the ship; they had tossed together to the anger of the Ægean, together they had played like children on a holiday, and they had been together and as one, comrade with comrade, in the work to which they had dedicated themselves. Comrade to comrade! That was exactly Mitsos's view of it, but to her the comradeship was her life. Yanni, the cousin of whom he had often spoken, Kanaris, the lad Christos – she was to Mitsos as they were, perhaps a little less than they, for she was a woman.

Oh, it was impossible! God could not be so unkind. She who spent her days, and risked her all – and oh, how willingly! – fighting against His enemies, was this her wage? Who was this Suleima? A Turkish name by the sound. Some moon-faced, pasty girl, no doubt, fat, fond of sweet things, a cat by the fire, what could she be to Mitsos? The littlest one, Mitsos's son – and at the thought impotent, incontinent jealousy and hatred possessed her soul. Mitsos was not hers but another's, pledged and sealed another's – and she walked the faster. Michael, who had accompanied her without murmur, since such was the duty of a dog, stood a moment under the protecting eaves of a house, with his head on one side, looking at her in reproachful protest, for even his shaggy coat was penetrated by the whipping rain. But she still walked on, and he shook himself disgustedly from head to tail and went after her. Opposite the café again she hung on her step, looking in through the rain-slanted window-panes. Mitsos was bent over his little wooden kings, absorbed and sheltered, while she was outside rain-drenched, with anguish for a heart. Ah, what a humiliation! Why could she not have lived like the other women of her class, have married Christos the cousin, and long ago have settled down to the clucking, purring life, nor have looked beyond the making of jam, the weaving of cloth, marriage among the domestic duties? She had thought herself the finest girl God had made, one who could treat with scorn the uses and normal functions of her sex, one who had need of no man except to serve her, one who thought of woman as a lower and most intensely foolish animal, whose only dream was to marry a not exacting man, and settle down to an ever-dwindling existence of narrowing horizons. Yet, where were all those fine thoughts now? She had sailed her own ship, it was true, and sent a certain number of the devil's brood to their account, but what did that profit her in the present palpable anguish? Her pain and humiliation were no less for that. The clucking women she despised were wiser than she; they at any rate had known what they were fit for; she alone of all had made a great and irrevocable mistake. She, the Capsina, was brought down to the dust, and Mitsos played draughts with the little wooden kings. Her flesh and blood, her more intimate self, and that childish need for love which even the most heroically moulded know, cried out within her.

Then pride, to her a dominant passion, came to her rescue. At any rate none knew, and none should ever know, for thus her humiliation would be at least secret. She would behave to Mitsos just exactly as before: not one tittle of her companionship, not an iota of her frank show of affection for him should be abated. And, after all, there was the Revenge, and – and with that, her human love, the longing of the woman for the one man came like a great flood over the little sand and pebbles of pride and jealousy and anger, and she cried out involuntarily, and as if with a sudden pang of pain, bringing Michael to her side.

They had reached the end of the quay; on one side of the road was a little workman's hut, erected for the building of the Capsina's "custom-house," and, entering, she sat down on a heap of shingle, which had been shot down there for the making of the rough-cast walls of the building. Michael, cold and dripping, but too well bred to shake himself when near his mistress, stood shivering by her, with a puzzled amazement in his eyes at the unusual behavior of the pillar of his world. The girl drew him towards her, and buried her face in his shaggy, dripping ruff.

"Oh, Michael, Michael!" she sobbed, "was not one to come from the sea – all sea and sun – and we, were we not to be his, you and I and the brig, and was not heaven to fly open for us? Indeed, it is not so: one came from the sea and the sun, but it was not he. I was wrong. I was utterly wrong, and now the world holds no other."

The rain had ceased, and from outside came only the sullen drumming of the waves breaking on the shingle beyond the harbor, followed rhythmically by the scream of the pebbly beach, dragged down by the backwash, and the slow, steady drip from the sodden eaves. Suddenly these noises became overscored with the rise and fall of voices, and the Capsina drew Michael closer to her and hushed his growling.

"So, indeed, you must not mind, Christos," said Mitsos's voice, "for there is none like her. Her eyes but grow the brighter for the excitement, when, to tell the truth, my heart has been a lump of cold lead. It is an honor to us that we are with her, that she trusts us – she even likes us – which is more than she did for any of those in Hydra. Eh, but it will be rough to-morrow. Look at the waves! I suppose she has gone back to the ship."

"I expect so," said Christos; "let us go, too, Mitsos."

"No, but wait a minute. There is nothing like the sea at night, unless it be the Capsina. It is strong, it is ready to knock you down if you come too near, yet it will take you safely and well if you only make yourself – how shall I say it? – make yourself of it. The fire-ship – did ever I tell you about the night of the fire-ship? Of course I did not, for I never told any but Uncle Nikolas, nor am I likely to, except to one only. Yes, so it is; I admire her more than I admire the rest of this world rolled into one – always, so I think, I would do her bidding. She might chide me – I would crawl back to her again; I would even bring Suleima, too, on her knees, if so it pleased the Capsina. She must know Suleima. I feel she does not know me, nor I her, until she knows Suleima. Well, come; let us get back. I think the good news from Nauplia must have made me drunk. Surely I was anxious and knew it not. Did I ever tell you how the Capsina and I … Oh, she is of finer mould than all others!" And the voices were caught and drowned in the riot of the sea.

Obedience, admiration, liking – that was all. And she would have given them all at that moment – for at that moment the devil and all his friends were lords and masters of her soul – for one flash of the human longing and desire of flesh and blood felt by him for her. No matter in what form it came, a moment's heightened color, the sudden leap of the enchanted blood, an involuntary step towards her, hands out-stretched, and eyes that longed, she would have given all for that; let him hate her afterwards, or be as indifferent as the Sphinx, to have once called out that which must call itself out, yet never tarries when its own call comes, would be sufficient for her. That he should for one second forget Suleima, remembering her, that he should be unfaithful to Suleima and before the accuser could pronounce the word turn faithful again, would be enough. And the evil thoughts suddenly shot up like the aloe loftily flowering, and she clutched Michael till the dog whimpered.

She drove not her thoughts away, but picked those bright and evil flowers, pressing them to her bosom: she tended them as a shepherd tends his sheep, and like sheep they flocked into her soul, on the instant a familiar abiding-place. If Suleima should die; better even if she should not die, but live bitterly, for, no doubt, she too loved him. He would come to her, how well she could picture in what manner, great and awkward and burning and beyond compare, saying little but letting all be seen. Not content with that picture, she went on to put specious, despicable words into his mouth. Suleima, he should say, would soon get over it; for him he was simply one of the sea, and Suleima hated the sea; she would live with Mitsos's friends – a man's friends were always kind to women who had wearied him. No, it was not her fault nor his either – she had wearied him, he had wearied of her. Besides, he loved. And even as she imagined him saying such sweet and terrible things, her heart rose against him, and her better self spat out like an evil taste the false image she had conjured up of him.

Sullen and windless rain began again outside, and fell hissing and spitting like molten lead into the harbor water, yet somehow to her it was a baptism and a washing of the soul. And she rose, and with quick step and firm went back to opposite the Revenge, and blew her whistle for the boat. And strangely sweet and bitter was it to hear Mitsos's voice shouting an order, and to see him beneath the flare bareheaded to the rain clamber quickly down the ship's side into the boat and row with all the strength of those great limbs to come and fetch her, himself and alone.

Almost before the sun was up next morning they prepared to put to sea. The rain had again fallen heavily during the night, but it ceased before daybreak, and Mitsos, stumbling sleepily on deck, was soon awakened by the chilly breeze from the mountains which should take them out of the harbor. The deck was dripping and inclement to the bare feet, and his breath trailed away in clouds like smoke in the cold air. Land and sea and sky were all shades of one neutral gray, more or less intense and strangely sombre. The tops of the hills to the west were pale and pearly, reflecting the more illuminated clouds eastward, and deepened gradually without admixture of other color into the lower spurs and ridges behind the village. The sea which had grown calm again during the night was but a mirror of the low-hanging clouds overhead, and to the south it faded so gradually and with so regular a tone into the sky that the horizon line eluded the eye. Even the ripple which broke against the wall of the quay seemed in the misty air to be woolly in texture, as if drawn from the ooze of the bottomless sea and to have lost the sparkle of foam. But early as he was the Capsina had come on deck before him, and before he had stood more than a few seconds on the bridge she joined him, nodded him a greeting in silence, and they waited side by side, Mitsos occasionally shouting an order while the ship cleared the harbor mouth.

Then Mitsos yawned, stretched himself, and rubbed his eyes.

"This is no proper hour," he said; "it is neither night nor morning, even as the jelly-fish is neither plant nor animal; and oh, Capsina, but it is extraordinarily cold."

He turned and looked at her, and something arrested his gaze. She had slept but little, but the added touch of pallor only lent a more potent brilliance to her black eyes; the courage of a resolution but newly taken was there, and the animation which effort to be herself gave her. She had twisted a brilliantly colored shawl round her head, but her hair just loosely coiled showed in two broad bands over her forehead, and it was wet and sparkling with fine drops of condensed mist. Surrounded on all sides by the endless gray of the enormous morning she seemed to him more vivid than ever, and her beauty, for he was a man with eyes and blood, rose and smote him. Then throwing back his head he laughed for very pleasure, not from the lips only, but from head to heel – the whole man laughed.

"But you are splendid," he said; "indeed, there is none like you!"

She looked up at him quickly; was this the leap of the blood, the sudden step nearer which she had told herself would be sufficient for her? And again, more quickly than the upward sweep of her eyelids, she indorsed that thought. But even before she looked her heart told her that it was not thus he spoke of Suleima, nor thus he would speak to her. The admiration in his voice, the involuntary tribute so merrily paid, all the appreciation he gave, all that he had to give, but one thing only, did not make up that little more, which is so much. For he was not, so she thought, one who would make pretty speeches, or play at love-making with one woman while he thought of another, and, indeed, she would not have accepted such a travesty of the heart's deed. But let him come to her but once, were it only with a glance, or a handshake, involuntary and inevitable – that was a different matter. And she answered him without pause, speaking from the heart, while he thought she spoke from the lips only.

"Indeed, little Mitsos," she said, "but you are very sleepy. Surely you are but half awake, and are dreaming of Suleima."

Mitsos laughed.

"Surely Suleima would not know me if I spoke to her like that," he said.

"What, then, do you say to Suleima?"

"Oh, nothing, or a hundred things, all sorts of foolishness; for some mornings she will do nothing but stare at the baby by the hour and just say at the end that it will be a tall lout like me, and for answer I say it will be like to its mother. Other mornings she will be shirt-mending and do no more than grunt at me. Yet you and I, too, talked only silly things for the first week of our voyage, Capsina, so there is excuse for Suleima and me."

The Capsina turned away a moment with a sudden gasping breath. "Look, the sun is up," she said, "and it is getting warmer. Also our coffee will be getting cold. Come down, little Mitsos. And is the lazy Christos abed yet?"

"He shall soon not be," said Mitsos, taking a flying leap down the stairs. "Ohé, Christos!" he cried.

But Christos appeared to be not yet on deck, and Mitsos went down to his cabin, and a moment after cries for mercy mingled themselves with the Mitsos's voice raised in solemn reproof.

"Is it not a shame," he said, "that the Capsina and I should have our eyes grow dim with the midnight watches and the Greeks be murdered all along the coast, as she herself said, while you lie here – no, away comes that blanket thing – and that we should burn our fingers making coffee for those fine ladies who lounge in bed? This shall not be, indeed it shall not. Christos, there are more uses for a slipper than to put on a foot; them shall you learn. Lord, what a wardrobe of clothes the lad has! it is enough for a Turk and his harem. Here is a red sash, if it please you, and a gay waistcoat; a razor, too – what in the name of the saints does the smooth-faced Christos want with a razor? Suleima will be wanting me to buy her a razor next, or perhaps the little Nikolas. Let go that rug, Christos, and be turned out of bed cool and peaceful, or sharper things will be done to you. Now be very quick, for I shall continue to drink coffee, and thus there may be none left in ten minutes, for I do not drink slowly."

Mitsos, having once spoken of "the little wife" to the Capsina, spoke of her more than once again that morning, and to his secret surprise he found the girl extraordinarily sympathetic, and as if much pleased and interested in being told of her. And this was beyond measure an astonishing thing to him, for heretofore his intercourse with her had been either of adventure past or to come, or they had, as at first, been no more than two children at play. But any matter touching the heart had been so remote from the talk on the board that Mitsos had never thought of her as a human woman, one to whom these things could or rather must be of any concern. She, to her bitter cost, had seen him merely as a great, strong, and silly boy, boyish altogether, though to her a magnet for the heart; and of the more intimate lore of man and woman, so she had planned it, they were to learn together. And the surprise to him of finding that she was clearly willing to hear him talk thus was perhaps hardly less strong than the shock to her of finding that he had known too well what she had thought they would learn together. And thus, with a strange flush of pleasure to the boy and a new bond between them, he told her of the ride from Tripoli, the finding of Suleima at home. Only of the anguish of the night of the fire-ship he spoke not at all. There was no intimacy but one only close enough for that. So to all the admiration and affection he felt for the girl, this added a tenderness to his thoughts of her, and without knowing it the knowledge of the thing itself, which had severed them irrevocably in the Capsina's mind, was the very cause of a new tie binding Mitsos to her, and the strands of it were of a fibre more durable and more akin to that which she now despaired of than any that had bound them yet.

They sailed a southeasterly course, for the ships that had put out from Corinth had gone, according to their information, north, and it was not unlikely that they were on their way to join the three which the Capsina had already accounted for at Porto Germano, and which were now being made ready, in hot haste, to take the sea again under the flag of the cross instead of the crescent. It was at any rate certain that they would keep close to the coast, unless driven out to sea by bad weather, destroying as they went, and thus the Greeks had a winning chance of falling in with them at the narrow end of the gulf. But after a breezy morning, at mid-day the wind had died down and they lay a mile or so off shore, with canvas flapping idly, and Mitsos whistled the "Vine-digger's Song" to stir the heavens, but the wind came not for all his whistling.