The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (10 page)

The exhilaration gave place finally to a tranquil fatigue. As he entered the shadowy temple he saw the priest sleeping before the altar he tended. The priest opened his eyes a moment and above the curve of his arm he watched the young man spread his cloak upon the marble pavement and lie down upon it and fall asleep.

Simo was awakened a little before dawn by the sounds of shrill voices and of unaccustomed movement in the outer courtyard. On approaching he discovered that a clamorous old woman had entered the gates and that a number of his slaves were trying in vain to quiet her and to drive her back into the road. He recognised Mysis. With a gesture he commanded the men to release her. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked.

‘I must see Pamphilus.’

‘He is not here.’

‘I cannot go away until I have seen him,’ she replied, her voice rising in feverish insistence. ‘A life depends upon it. I do not care what happens to me, but Pamphilus must know what they have done to us.’

Simo said quietly: ‘I shall have you whipped; I shall have you shut up in a room for three days, if you continue to make this noise. Pamphilus will be able to listen to you later in the morning.’

Mysis was silent a moment, then she raised her eyes and said sombrely: ‘Later in the morning will be too late, and all will be lost. I beg of you to let me see him now. He would wish it. He would not forgive you for turning me away now.’

‘Come, tell me what is the matter and I will help you.’

‘No, it is you who have done this harm and now he alone can save us.’

Simo sent the slaves back to their quarters. Then he turned to her again: ‘In what way have I harmed you?’

‘You do not wish to help us,’ she said. ‘The Leno’s boat has arrived at the island and my mistress Glycerium and all the household of Chrysis have been sold to him as slaves. We were awakened in the middle of the night by the herald of the village and told to gather our clothes together and to go down to the harbour. Glycerium is not well now; she must not be driven so. I myself escaped through the rows of a vineyard and have come to find Pamphilus. It was you who have done this, for it was the Fathers of the Island who ordered that we should be sold as slaves to pay our debts.’

This was true. He remembered having listened without interest to a discussion of the matter, assuming that it would be carried out with sufficient warning and delay to admit of Glycerium’s being separated from the rest of the destitute company. The Leno’s boat visited Brynos so seldom that it seemed to the Fathers of the Island that it they might yet be under the necessity of providing for the household through many months while awaiting the arrival of this purchaser.

Suddenly a light dawned upon Mysis: ‘He is at the temple! How could I have forgotten that he was under the vow of silence and that he must be there!’ And turning she started to enter the road.

‘You must not go to him at the temple,’ said Simo sharply. ‘I shall come down to the harbour with you now and buy your mistress from the Leno.’

He returned to the house for his cloak, then walked into the town with Mysis hurrying at his heels. Dawn was breaking as he descended the winding stairs to the square. Against the streaked sky he saw the mast of the Leno’s boat. The Leno was not only a dealer in slaves; he was a wandering bazaar and sold foreign foods and trinkets and cloths. If an island were large enough he came ashore and conducted a fair and a circus. And now in the first cold light of morning Simo could see on the raised portion of the deck a brightly coloured booth, a chained bear, an ape, two parrots, and other samples of the Leno’s stock in trade, including the household of Chrysis. Philocles had remained on shore and for two hours had been standing at the parapet uttering short broken cries towards his companions. Being a Greek citizen he could not be sold into slavery and was to be transported later to Andros.

Simo descended the steps of the landing with Mysis and was rowed out to the boat. While he concluded his transaction with the black and smiling Leno Mysis sank upon her knees before Glycerium, telling her of this good fortune. But Glycerium derived no joy from the news. She sat between Apraxine and the Ethiopian girl, amid the bundles of their clothes, and for weariness she could scarcely raise her eyes or move her lips. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall stay here with you. I do not wish to go anywhere.’

Simo approached them. ‘My child,’ he said to Glycerium, ‘you are to come with me now.’

‘Yes, my beloved,’ Mysis repeated into her ear, ‘you must go with him. All will be well. He is taking you ashore to Pamphilus.’

Still Glycerium remained with bent head. ‘I do not wish to move. I do not wish to go anywhere,’ she said.

‘I am the father of Pamphilus. You must come with me and good care will be taken of you.’

At last and with great difficulty she arose. Mysis supported her to the side of the boat and there taking her farewell she whispered to her: ‘Goodbye, my dear love. Now may the gods bring you happiness. I shall never see you again, but I pray you to remember me, for I have loved you well. And wherever we are, let us remember our dear Chrysis.’

The two women embraced one another in silence, Glycerium with closed eyes. At last she said: ‘I would that I were dead, Mysis. I would that I were long dead with Chrysis, my dear sister.’

‘You are to come with us too,’ said Simo to Mysis, who having known even greater surprises obediently followed him. The little group was rowed in silence to the shore. The Leno’s oarsmen struck the water, his bright coloured sails were raised, and his merchandise left the harbour for other fortunes.

The sun had already risen when Pamphilus returned with swift and happy steps to his home. There he discovered Glycerium sleeping peacefully under his mother’s care. There was not a sound to be heard on the farm, for his mother, already invested with the dignity of her new duties as guardian and nurse to the outcast girl, had ordered a perfect quiet. Argo was sitting before the gate, her eyes wide with wonder and pleasure at the arrival of this new friend. Simo had gone to the warehouse and when he returned, for all his happiness, he moved about with lowered eyes, driven by the constraint in his nature to act as though nothing had happened.

In the two days that followed, all their thoughts were centred about the room where the girl lay and all their hearts were renewed under the fragile claims that Glycerium’s beauty and shyness made upon them. Simo seemed, after Pamphilus, to have best understood her reticence and to have been understood by her; a friendship beyond speech had grown up between them. This flowering of goodness, however, was not to be put to the trial of routine perseverance, nor to know the alternations of self-reproach and renewed courage; for on the noon of the third day Glycerium’s pains began and by sunset both mother and child were dead.

That night after many months of drought it began to rain. Slowly at first and steadily, the rain began to fall over all Greece. Great curtains of rain hung above the plains; in the mountains it fell as snow, and on the sea it printed its countless ephemeral coins upon the water. The greater part of the inhabitants were asleep, but the relief of the long-expected rain entered into the mood of their sleeping minds. It fell upon the urns standing side by side in the shadow, and the wakeful and the sick and the dying heard the first great drops fall upon the roofs above their heads. Pamphilus lay awake, face downward, his chin upon the back of his hand. He heard the first great drops fall upon the roof over his head and he knew that his father and mother, not far from him, heard them too. He had been repeating to himself Chrysis’s lesson and adding to it his Glycerium’s last faltering words: ‘Do not be sorry; do not be afraid,’ and he had been remembering how with the faintest movement of her eyes to one side, she had indicated her child and said: ‘Wherever we are, we are yours.’ He had been asking himself in astonishment wherein had lain his joy and his triumph of the few nights before: how could he have once been so sure of the beauty of existence? And some words of Chrysis returned to him. He recalled how she had touched the hand of a young guest who had returned from an absence, having lost his sister, and how she had said to him in a low voice, so as not to embarrass those others present who had never known a loss: ‘You were happy with her once; do not doubt that the conviction at the heart of your happiness was as real as the conviction at the heart of your sorrow.’ Pamphilus knew that out of these fragments he must assemble during the succeeding nights sufficient strength, not only for himself, but for these others, – these others who so bewilderingly now turned to him and whose glances tried to read from his face what news there was from the last resources of courage and hope, to live on, to live by. But in confusion and with flagging courage he repeated: ‘I praise all living, the bright and the dark.’

On the sea the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high pastures the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him. In the hills the long-dried stream-beds began to fill again and the noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones in the way, filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds the moon soared radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking mountains. And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing its precious burden.

A
FTERWORD

We don’t at the moment know the date of publication, but a new book by Wilder is a genuine literary event.

– ‘The Phoenix Nest,’
Bookman,
September 7, 1929

Mr. Wilder has said somewhere that all his books have been studies of how men and women meet their fates.

– Henry Seidel Canby,
Saturday Review of Literature,

March 1, 1930

T
hornton Wilder conceived the idea for
The Woman of Andros
at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in the spring of 1928 in the midst of a literary explosion titled
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
The fallout from this event would determine how and where
Andros
would be written, designed, and marketed by its publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., and would help to shape its reception by critics and the public. It would also give Wilder leverage for publishing drama, his other literary passion.

Before
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
transformed his life, Wilder had taught and served as a dormitory master at Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1925, before departing on a two year leave of absence to complete
The Cabala
and take a graduate degree at Princeton University. Because he did not earn enough royalties from his first novel to stake himself for at least another year of writing or to persuade his publisher to underwrite such a program, he returned to teach at the school in the fall of 1927, three months before
The Bridge
was published. By the end of 1928, sales of
The Bridge
had reached more than 300,000 copies in the United States and England. After one of the most celebrated debuts in twentieth-century American literature, Wilder found himself the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the toast of the English-speaking world, and a wealthy man.

The stunned author also found his stunned publisher at his side reminding him of a significant new fact in his life: now that Wilder was an author with an enormous following, it was his obligation to write the next novel as quickly as possible. The man who had written
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
appeared to see his duty. In February 1928, amid the madness of trying to teach; run a dormitory; and handle the phone calls, correspondence, and visits generated by his newfound fame, Wilder informed Boni that the next novel would be entitled
The Woman of Andros.
He apparently described it with no more detail than he gave his mother in a brief and harried note: ‘The Woman of Andros – after play by Terence – Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.’

Andros
would be Wilder’s next work of fiction, but not his next book. In October 1928, the recently established New York publisher Coward-McCann published a modest trade edition of 2,000 copies of
The Angel That Troubled the Waters,
Wilder’s first book of drama. It contained sixteen three-minute playlets, the dramatic form Wilder had practiced passionately since high school. All but four of these short short plays were written or published before 1926.

This detour into publishing drama was no surprise to his publishers, and they were not happy about it. Soon after
The Cabala
appeared in 1926, Wilder had approached Boni about publishing his playlets. Prospecting for the gold to be found in fiction, Boni had no interest in throwing away a contractual claim to one of the author’s next two books on a mere book of drama, goldplate at best. In April 1927, therefore, they gave Wilder permission to publish his playlets elsewhere ‘in some kind of limited edition.’ Wilder was not blind to the marketplace risks involved. As early as April 1926 he had put the matter this way to Boni’s secretary-treasurer Lewis Baer:

My thought was that they [the playlets] were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years it would probably be bad for ‘my booksellers’ and even, perhaps for most of ‘my readers.’ And yet I should love to get those little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.

Thanks to the leverage provided by
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
there was nothing quiet or unprofitable about
The Angel
in print. The dust jacket language nails to the mast the relationship between the two books: ‘[These playlets] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent that has astonished the critical world.’ The volume was widely and thoughtfully reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although a number of critics were puzzled by its purpose and wondered whether it was really necessary to read Wilder’s juvenilia.
The Angel
also earned some gold, returning royalties to the author of more than $5,000 over two years, a modest sum compared to that moneymaker,
The Bridge,
which garnered more than $100,000 for Wilder in its first two years of shelf life.