The Double Image by Helen MacInnes

Author:Helen MacInnes [MacInnes, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781164419

12

Thursday was going to be a pleasant day, early-morning sun and blue sky promising good sailing to Mykonos. It was also a pleasant end to a very pleasant week in Athens. John Craig had his last cup of coffee out on his small balcony, watching the white-skirted Evzones on guard at the Parliament sentry boxes across the square. He was packed, ready to leave. He felt healthy and rested. There had been enough exercise in the constant walking through the Plaka or over the Acropolis or up to the American School to keep him happy. His one dislike of most cities was the way they forced you to take a bus or a subway, feel heavy with food and soft with unused muscles. But here, over the low-storied houses, the sun could bathe a street and fill it with light and entice you to walk. He had developed his first tan of the season, even if he had worked each morning in the School’s library on the days he had actually spent in Athens. His own private conscience was at rest; no guilt about lazing around, or about the nights off with his friends from the School. As for his public conscience—play it loose, Partridge had said. There had been no alarms, no threats, no tensions. He had had a very pleasant week, indeed.

Time to go. If Paul and Pam Mortimer were coming to see him off—though he doubted it—they might be waiting downstairs even now. He had his last look at the streets surrounding the square—people, people, exploding everywhere. If we all keep crowding to the cities, he thought as he remembered the long stretches of lonely empty country, the village left to sleep away the twentieth century that he had seen in the Peloponnese, perhaps that will be the real time bomb we ought to be worried about. Everyone wants the bright lights and running water, hot and cold. Everyone wants the theatres and cafés and the girls in high heels, the museums and concerts, the newspapers fresh off the press. That is one thing that Athens shares with New York (and Moscow, Rome, Paris and London too); just name the big cities of the world and you see the same wenlike growth—the more and, if not the merrier, certainly the busier. It makes politicians’ eyes bulge in delight as they count heads and think of next election’s votes. It keeps a business-man beaming as he hears the music of ringing cash registers. Bigger and better... But what does a historian think of? Or, rather, what does he try not to think of? One of the main reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. People. Just people, bless their happy hearts and their congregating feet.

Indeed time to go. A balcony does funny things to a man. Either he wants to make speeches, have every face upturned, shouts from every throat to prove how right, how gloriously right, he is; or he looks down over the black dots

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