By the Waters of Sparta

== BY THE WATERS OF SPARTA :A Grecian Love Story ==
=== by E.F. Benson ===
From Temple Bar 1903 
Your letter has just come. Anastasi brought it to me as I was having breakfast, and he looked at it as one looks at some native product from a far-off conjectured country. I gave him the stamps, and they filled him with a tremulous joy. But as you do not know who Anastasi is, if I am to answer your letter, I must begin from the beginning. 
You ask me why I linger in “this bankrupt country among an abandoned populace, who drink resinated wine." You tell me that the golden days are upon London ; that the little green chairs in the park are full, that Sarah Bernhardt 's voice is a more mellow miracle than ever, that you went to Rigoletto last night, and are going to Faust to-morrow, that Piccadilly is gray and shady, and sweet with the smell of flowerstalls and asphalt, and that a blue mist hangs in Pall Mall, like the bloom on a plum. Yet I sit here, and I am not, like Ruth, sick for home. I will tell you why. 
The stylograph pen with which I write to you is my only link with what you insolently call civilization. My English clothes are all outworn, and I wear a barbarous garb; my hands and face are dyed tawny brown with those inimitable cosmetics, sun and air. I am sitting on the edge of the riverbed of the Eurotas at the comer of a grove of cypresses, tall and solemn like serge-clad Romish priests, and encrusted with rough fruit. This has once been the garden round some Turkish house, for in the middle stands a pile of ruins weathered and worn. Remembering Browning's “Home thoughts from abroad," I went and tapped, not with a hoe, but with the end of my stick, on the moldering plaster of a cornice, and sure enough, with divine fitness, there dropped out a scorpion with “wide angry nippers." 
But the garden has long been allowed to run wild, and what is lovelier than a garden nm wild ? Several ohve trees have grown up among the cypresses, and wild vines, already <jovered with little hard green globes, loop and twine themselves among their branches. Here, again, there is a pomegranate — have you any idea of a pomegranate except as a wrinkled, knobby lump bought on the quay at Marseilles? — ^with thick red flowers looking as if they were made of wax. On it, too, the fruit is forming, and little green burnished pitchers are beginning to take the place of the flowers. 
I sit at the comer of this wild garden, which Nature has again taken to herself. Above me there is a sky of incredible blue, in front the stream bed of the Eurotas, a boisterous blue stream with deep holes to swim in, and across that the olivecovered plain, rising gently to the hills beyond, covered with vegetation on their lower slopes, but bare above, showing the good red earth, and cast in fantastic forms. They remind me exactly of a scene in a Bible picture book which I used to be shown on Sunday afternoon; in the foreground the good Samaritan, with a headgear resembling an 'over-ripe pumpkin, was ministering to the man who fell among thieves, and in the background was a row of hills exactly like these. 
Just in front of my feet there races by a mill-stream which joins the river a hundred yards belowat the farm of Anastasi's father. To my right there rises abed of tall reeds ten feet high, which talk together with dry pattering tongues, and in the reeds the cicalas are winding their watches. I lean against the trunk of a white poplar, and a nightingale sings in the poplar. Let us move ten yards farther up. Here the mill-stream comes hurrying out of a cool green tunnel of wild fig trees, the lair of a tawny spider who has woven his web across the opening, and hangs malignant and busy on a silk suspension bridge across the middle of the stream. The web oscillates a little backwards and forwards; for out of the darkness a cool draught draws down. Looking up into the moist, green cave, you can see far up a white, uncertain glimmer of foam, where a rock breaks the stream, and lower down little luminous specks of gold from the sunlight which filters through the roof, and at the opening the xmdersides of the strong, five-fingered figleaves are bright from the reflection of the sxm oflEthe water. 
Now and then a tortoise goes paddling down at the bottom of the stream, and grave, priest-like frogs sit on the edge in readiness to plunge in at your approach. 
All down its course delicate clumps of black-stemmed maiden-hair line the banks ; the tips of their leaves drag and dabble in the stream, and tremble as the water touches them. Fresh, juicy elders, with white parasol-like flowers, grow thick on the banks, and here and there the more sober green of myrtle leaves pushes up among them. Over the water float blue-winged dragon flies, and just now a swallow-tail butterfly settled for a moment on a great yellow thistle close to me. A couple of goats, one white, cfne black, strayed, no doubt, from the farm below, crop quickly and anxiously at some young shoots of hawthorn, like people taking a hurried meal before going to catch their train. 
A hundred yards below stand the gray roofs of the farm. It has once been a mill, and a wall of masonry still conducts the mill-stream down a wooden cylinder to the mill-house. There it empties itself and spreads at will over the broad river-bed, never, I think, joining the river, but flushing an acre of ground with a more vivid vegetation. First it waters all those clumps of pink oleanders which grow, not as they grow in your well-beloved green tubs in front of French caf^s, with desolate stalks and a few starved leaves and flowers at the extreme tips, but in bushes which are one mass of pink blossom. Then, turning to the left, it gives drink to that row of poplars and eucalyptus trees, and further on to more oleanders and a meadow of wild spiraea, which is just beginning to foam into flower. Finally it attends to those great yellow thistles mixed with spurge, and there I think it comes to an end, for beyond lies a band of dry shingle, unflushed and barren. I found among the spurge yesterday the caterpillar of a spurge hawk-moth, already full-grown, and meditating its chrysalis change. Homed, red-legged, and spotted with yellow, it disdained concealment as it sat on the dull red stalks of the plant. “Soon," it thought, “I shall be safe enough." 
The ford across the Eurotas lies just in front of me, and an hour ago a delightful little drama was acted there. A very small boy on a very large donkey wished to cross, and drive over another donkey. The means by which he hoped to effect this were recondite oaths and a large piece of wood like a cricket bat, and reaching forward on his donkey he would smile the other one with it. All went well till the three reached mid-stream, but there the other donkey wandered off the ford into the water, about three feet deep, where it stood contentedly, for the day was hot, The boy did not wish to follow it there, but in an ill-considered moment he thought he could still smite it from the shallow water of the ford. But he misjudged his distance, the blow fell innocuous, and the cricket bat flew out of his hand and floated down-stream, and he had to drive the donkey with strange oaths alone. When it had cooled itself they proved effectual. 
Yesterday I spent at Mistra, a deserted Turkish town lying on one of the lower ridges of Taygetus, and commanding the plain. The little street runs steeply up between empty houses till it reaches the church, where a few ntms live in the precincts. One was spinning, another feeding her goat with a branch of acacia, a third drew me water from the well in a bucket of olive wood. The church itself has a terrace looking out over the plain, and there, framed between Byzantine columns, I sat and looked at the fairest view I had ever seen. 
A light north wind was blowing, and the olive trees were now green and now gray, and through them, here and there, marched grave lines of cypresses. Sparta, clustering on a little hill some four miles away, glearned white against the plain beyond, and far off on the other side of the valley rose my Bible-picture hills. To the right, and a little behind, Taygetus climbed and met the sky in snow. Pomegranates grew in the courtyard below, and somewhere up on the hills a shepherd was singing, perhaps not very sweetly, but very pleasantly. Then when the sun sank, and the shadows marched across the plain, a nun came up to the church door and beat with a stone upon an iron hoop. That was the church bell, and one nun left her spinning, and another tied up the goat, and they went in and said their vespers together. 
After dinner last night we had a great excitement. An itinerant company of players had appeared while I was at Mistra, and with the consent of the Mayor had erected a rough, wooden stage outside the caf^, and were to give a performance. The place was in a ferment, and the excitement rose to fever heat when the curtain drew up and disclosed a ferocious brigand sitting in his cave with several prisoners by him. To these he made a long speech, and the prisoners begged for mercy in moving terms. But the brigand was firm, and having taken all their valuables away, he proceeded to bare a brawny right arm and draw his sword in order to execute them. At this painful crisis in their lives a young lady in pink tights and wearing a helmet and sword, whom I confidently believe to have represented a colonel in the Greek army, rushed on the stage^ and after a terrific conflict with the brigand, in which she overturned no less than one real table and two real chairs, slew him, planted her foot on his chest, and unfurled the Greek flag. The enthusiasm has scarcely subsided even this morning, and we are going to have the play again to-night. 
In these things alone there seems to one as quietly-minded as myself sufficient reason for lingering on, though I miss so many nights of the golden Sarah, and so many days of gray Piccadilly. But I leave to-morrow for Athens, since the real reason for my stopping here has ceased to exist. And the real reason has been a devouring curiosity about Anastasi's love affairs. 
Anastasi and I are old friends: twice he and his mule, a mouse-colored confidential quadruped, have taken me round the Peloponnesus, and my interest in his affairs is of long standing. For has he not stood by me as I ate my lunch on the Langarda pass, and wept salt tears over the obdurate refusals of the young lady's father? I shared his sorrow and I am sharing his joy. 
The case was this. Anastasi's father is a wretched, drunken old man who lives from hand to mouth, and when Anastasi fell in love with the mayor's daughter, and was audacious enough to Prof.se to her, contrary to all the laws of Greek etiquette, Sparta generally sided with the mayor when he turned Anastasi out of the house and forbade him to speak to his daughter again . ' ' If he had five thousand francs , ' ' said the infuriated dignitary, “I should nof let her marry him." 
This was of course pure rhetoric, and everybody quite rightly interpreted it to mean that if Anastasi had five thousand francs that mayor wotild be delighted. 
In the beginning it was the mayor's fault. Anastasi's father rented some land from him, and when Anastasi came to pay the rent, the mayor would ask him to have a glass of wine and roll him a cigarette, for Anastasi's deft fingers rolled cigarettes in a way that was regarded as little short of miraculous in Sparta, and they were considered equal to the best made-up cigarettes straight from Athens. Anastasi's cigarettes were full and dry, whereas the cigarettes which the mayor makes himself — I know it to my cost, for he made me one only this morning — are wet and empty. 
So Anastasi sat with the mayor and Theodora, and after the second glass of wine the mayor usually went to sleep, and Anastasi made love to Theodora. He is a handsome, straightfeattu'ed boy, and Theodora and he enjoyed themselves very much . But the deluge came when he Prof.sed , and the mayor went back to his wet and empty cigarettes. 
I had written to Anastasi before I came here this year, telling him I should want his mule again for a few trips in the neighborhood, and expressing a hope that his suit was prospering. He met me at the bridge over the Eurotas when I arrived, and asked me if he might come and see me that evening. His face was solemn and mysterious, and I waited for developments. I was sitting at the café after dinner that night when I heard a whistle from somewhere in the darkness, which was twice repeated before I looked roimd. Anastasi, from under the shadow of a pepper tree, was beckoning to me to come, and I obediently paid for my coffee, and went. He walked on ahead of me until we were out of the main street, and then stopped. 
“Will you come to my house?" he said, "the old devil" — he alluded to his father — '4s out, and I want to show you something." 
He would give no further explanations, and we walked on in silence to the mill. He lit a candle, and asked me to sit down while he went to the farther comer of the room, and after some effort took up one of the big flat stones with which it is paved, dived his hand in, and brought out an old shirt, which evidently contained something heavy. He put this on a chair between us, undid it, and disclosed a big brown handkerchief. This again was untied, and showed a Greek black-ware vase, the mouth of which was stuffed with newspaper. He took out the newspaper stopper, and poured onto the brown handkerchief between five hundred and six hundred coins, some silver, some gold. 
There were ten gold coins of Philip, and thirty-four of Alexander. There were at least two hundred silver Athenian coins, of the fourth and third centuries, and about a hundred more struck under the Arcadian league of Epaminondas. 
There was a gold coin of Tenos, which I think is unique, and a gold coin of Epidaurus, which I am sure is. 
Anastasia watched me as I turned them over. 
"What shall I do?" he said. 
“Marry Theodora." 
He laughed, showing his white teeth. 
“A fortnight ago," he said, “I was digging a ditch into the vineyard in order to water it from the mill stream. The water had run for ten minutes, and I went back to close it again. As I went, I saw, near the comer where those Americans dug last year and spoiled two vine trees, a little, black, shiny thing sticking out of the earth. So I dammed up the water, and went back to look. And I found this vase. The old devil was drunk that night, so I hid it in the comer of the room and waited for you to come. Shall I get five thousand francs?" 
I was not, and I am not, acquainted with the Greek law about treasure-trove, so in my ignorance I advised Anastasi to the best of my ability. I put aside the Tenos coin and the coin from Epidaurus, and certain others which I had not seen before, and from the rest made a selection which were worth about four thousand francs market value. Now there is in Athens an excellent and honorable antiquity dealer who buys slightly under market value, and sells for slightly over, and with him I have had many transactions. 
So I gave Anastasi a note to him, and packed him off to Athens next day. He returned yesterday with a receipt from the Ionian Bank for 3,700 francs. The rest of the coins remained in their cache. 
This morning we paid a visit to the mayor, and the upshot is that Anastasi is betrothed to Theodora. 
So my interest is satisfied, and I leave Sparta to-morrow. 
I wish you would go to the British Museum for me and inquire about a gold coin of Tenos. It has on the reverse a quadriga driven by Niké, and on the obverse a helmeted head. If they have it, I should like to know how much they paid for it; if not, you may tell C that I shall bring them one for sale on behalf of a friend in a fortnight's time, and hope to drive a hard bargain ; also a unique coin of Epidaurus, both in excellent condition. There will be others as well. 
This is why I have stayed at Sparta, and this is partly why I am coming home at once.
Category:Temple Bar
Category:Benson