Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian | Page 9

DEMETRIOS BIKELAS
From "Tales from the AEgean." Translated by L.E. Opdycke. Published
by A.C. McClurg & Co.

Copyright, 1894, by A.C. McClurg & Co.

I.
Mr. Plateas, professor of Greek in the Gymnasium of Syra, was
returning from his regular afternoon walk.
He used to take this walk along the Vaporia, but since they had begun
to build a carriage road to Chroussa--at the other end of the island--he
bent his steps in that direction, instead of pacing four times up and
down the only promenade in Syra. He followed the road-building with
great interest, and went farther and farther from week to week. His
learned colleagues said he would finally get to Chroussa,--when the
road was finished; but at this time--that is, in 1850--the Conservative
party in the town regarded the expense as useless and too heavy for the
resources of the commune, and so the work had been stopped for some
months.
The road was completed as far as the stony valley of Mana, and here
the professor's daily walk ended. To look at him nobody would have
suspected that he had to care for his health; but his growing stoutness
gave him no little anxiety, and led him to take this exercise. Perhaps his
short stature made him look stouter than he really was; yet it could not
be denied that his neck emerged with difficulty from the folds of his
neck- cloth, or that his close-shaven, brick-red cheeks stood out rather
too conspicuously on each side of his thick moustache. The professor
had passed his fortieth year. True, he still preserved his elasticity, and
his short legs carried their burden easily; but it was noticed that when
he had a companion on his walks, he always contrived to have his
interlocutor do the talking going up hill, and took his own turn coming
down or on the level ground.
If he had thus far failed to lessen his rotundity, he had at least stopped
its growth,--a fact of which he made sure once a month by weighing
himself on the scales of the Custom House, where a friend of his held
the post of weigher. His physician had also recommended sea- bathing.

Most of his friends--both doctors and laymen--protested against this
advice; but the professor was immovable when once he had made up
his mind or bestowed his confidence; he stood firm against the
remonstrance and banter of those who regarded sea-bathing as a tonic,
and consequently fattening. He continued his baths for two seasons,
and would have kept on for the rest of his life, if a dreadful accident
had not given him such a fear of the sea, that he would have risked
doubling his circumference rather than expose himself again to the
danger from which he had been saved only through the strength and
courage of Mr. Liakos, a judge of the civil court. But for him, Mr.
Plateas would have been drowned, and this history unwritten.
It happened in this wise.
The professor was not an expert swimmer, but he could keep above
water, and was particularly fond of floating. One summer day as he lay
on the surface of the tepid sea quite unconcernedly, the sense of
comfort led to a slight somnolence. All at once he felt the water
heaving under him as if suddenly parted by some heavy body, and then
seething against his person. In an instant he thought of a shark, and
turned quickly to swim away from the monster; but whether from hurry,
fright, or his own weight, he lost his balance and sank heavily. While
all this happened quick as a flash, the moments seemed like centuries to
him, and his imagination, excited by the sudden rush of blood to the
head, worked so swiftly, that, as the professor said afterwards, if he
should try to set down everything that came into his mind then, it
would make a good-sized book. Scenes of his childhood, incidents of
his youth, the faces of his favorite pupils since the beginning of his
career as a teacher, the death of his mother, the breakfast he had eaten
that morning,--all passed before him in quick succession, and mingled
together without becoming confused; while as a musical
accompaniment, there kept sounding in his ears the verse of Valaoritis
in "The Bell":
"Ding-dong! The bell!"
The night before poor Mr. Plateas had been reading "The Bell" of the
poet of Leucadia,--that pathetic picture of the enamored young sailor,

who, on returning to his village, throws himself into the sea to reach
more speedily the shore, where he hears the tolling knell and sees the
funeral procession of his beloved, and as he buffets the waves is
devoured by the monster of the deep. The poetical description of this
catastrophe had so affected him