Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott Page B

herself go in angry rhetoric and senseless weeping. Helianos, in his constant anxiety about her health which he never admitted to her, undertook the hard part of everything. But it was up-hill work, make-believe work; nothing went well. The fear and humiliation and anger, in which they could not indulge when the captain was in residence, now welled up in them, and this, even more than their fatigue and undernourishment, alarm and anxiety, made them incompetent, invalid. Whatever they pretended to be doing, it served only to pass the time, two weeks, ten days, one week, then only a few days, thinking and thinking of the captain, waiting and waiting for the captain to get back; and the time passed quickly.
    As they thought of it afterward, it seemed that this holiday had been the worst time; soft and unstrung and maniacal. It was the time when they had no more imagination; they could not even predicate any future betterment, except that folly of expecting to find more food in the market. And apparently their memory of the past was failing little by little: Helianos' failure to find the case of imported wine, for example. . .
    Mrs. Helianos, on one of her rare excursions into the street for something—scurrying along, looking neither to the right nor the left lest her eyes light on some terrible beggar or terrible cadaver—encountered a man whom for a moment she took to be her runaway brother. It was not he. Afterward she confessed to Helianos that she had come to have only a vague idea of what her brother looked like. If he came to their very door she might not recognize him.
    Their tenderness toward each other did not fail, in spite of hard remarks; but more than once the death-wish arose in the midst of it, mingled with it. One night he confided to her that he was tempted to defy the captain, or all the occupying foreigners as a lot somehow, to make an end of his shame and enslavement, at whatever penalty or cost. She whispered back with affectation of scorn, “You know you’d never have the courage to do anything of the kind.”
    She confided to him that she was tempted to kill herself; her health was going from bad to worse anyway. He answered very roughly, “My poor dear, you have always exaggerated your illnesses. Anyway, you know, with your passive womanly nature, you’re incapable of suicide.”
    Then there were reproaches on both sides, especially for that disregard of their poor helpless children which these temptations indicated. Which brought their minds suddenly to the strange fact that neither of them felt any great love for Alex and Leda. They had tried to, but they were unable to. They blamed each other for it, but with a sense of guilt so sharp in them both that they had to stop. They saw eye to eye as to what small excuse there was for their lack of love. Peculiar little bodies of their children, morbid little minds of their children: what was there lovable about them? Even if they lived to maturity they would not be normal. Their shortcomings were irremediable and their future of no interest; and irremediability in the lives of children—being a contradiction of terms, and against nature—seems worse than what happens to their elders.
    It brought these elders, Helianos and Mrs. Helianos, to a clearer realization than ever of what they had to live for, all they had: each other. With almost no surcease of sleep all that night, clinging together, as they were obliged to do, to keep from falling out of the folding cot on to the grimy floor—even in the captain’s absence they were afraid to move into his room, lest he return unexpectedly—they both wept together, so that there was no consolation, no consoler. Even in their early married life which had been difficult at first, infatuated, jealous, disappointed, they had not fallen into any such waste emotion.
    Next day, returning to the subject of suicide, Helianos made one of his little formal discourses: