Cleopatra, as imagined by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).
Cleopatra, by English artist John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). Ned Leithen compared Koré to Cleopatra, one of those women who exert a potent fascination over men by being “all the brothers as well as all the daughters of their father’s house”. The Dancing Floor was published in 1926, just a year after Leithen’s last outing in the Scottish comedy John McNab, and is an altogether more serious adventure, reminiscent of Prester John (1910) in the prominence given to superstition.
Part 1 of 2
I ONCE read in some book about Cleopatra that that astonishing lady owed her charm to the fact that she was the last of an ancient and disreputable race.* The writer cited other cases — Mary of Scots,* I think, was one. It seemed, he said, that the quality of high-coloured ancestors flowered in the ultimate child of the race into something like witchcraft. Whether they were good or evil, they laid a spell on men’s hearts. Their position, fragile and forlorn, without the wardenship of male kinsfolk, set them on a romantic pinnacle. They were more feminine and capricious than other women, but they seemed, like Viola,* to be all the brothers as well as all the daughters of their father’s house, for their soft grace covered steel and fire. They were the true sorceresses of history, said my author, and sober men, not knowing why, followed blindly in their service.
Perhaps Koré* Arabin was of this sisterhood. At any rate one sober man was beginning to admit her compelling power. I could not get the girl from my thoughts.
* Cleopatra VII Philopator (70 or 69 BC – 30 BC) was Queen of Egypt from 51 BC to 30 BC. As a direct descendant of Ptolemy I of Egypt, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, she was hardly the last of a ‘disreputable race’: Ptolemy was a high-born Macedonian Greek from Pella. She was courted by both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. See also Mark Antony Catches a Kipper.
* The daughter of James V of Scotland, and mother of James VI. Mary’s short and turbulent reign ended when her cousin Elizabeth I of England, to whom Mary had fled for protection despite resolutely intriguing against her, found it necessary to have her beheaded in 1587. Mary had been married to Francis II of France; following her return in 1561 she married her cousin Henry Stewart, Earl of Darnley, but carried on an affair with Italian musician David Rizzio that was abruptly cut off when Darnley murdered him. Darnley was subsequently murdered by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell was acquitted in a farcical trial that disgusted all Europe, and married Mary in 1567, probably after raping her. See also Mary Queen of Scots.
* A reference to a character in William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, who has adopted the guise of a young man named Cesario in order to run errands between Orsino, Duke of Illyria, and the Duke’s lover Olivia; in saying that she is ‘all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers too’ she is trying to prompt Orsino to look a little closer. See Viola Draws a Blank.
* Koré corresponds to the Greek word κόρη, a maiden, pronounced much as Ned Leithen first heard it from Mollie Nantley, ‘Corrie’. It is applied specifically to a style of ancient Greek sculpture showing a young woman standing stiffly upright, and draped in a loose garment. Koré Arabin was, as Leithen expressed it, “Pure English, but lives abroad”; her flamboyant and frankly disreputable father, the late Shelley Arabin, had owned the (fictional) Greek island of Plakos, where she was brought up.
Précis
Ned Leithen, narrator of John Buchan’s The Dancing Floor, recalled reading that certain women, the last of a long and colourful line, had exercised a strange fascination over men through their peculiar blend of vulnerability and strength. Examples included Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots; and Koré Arabin, he admitted, was beginning to cast just such a spell over him. (60 / 60 words)
Part Two
Gyaros, an uninhabited island in the northern Cyclades.
Gyuaros is an uninhabited island in the northern Cyclades, an archipelago of the Aegean Sea which includes such popular holiday destinations as Mykonos, Naxos and Paros. John Buchan’s Plakos in The Dancing Floor is of course fictional, but from the hints he drops he clearly imagined it lying in the Cyclades. Unlike Gyaros, it was not absolutely uninhabited, though as “a remote and not over-civilized island where the writ of the Greek Government scarcely runs” it was little better. The island’s unhappy condition was down largely to Englishman Shelley Arabin, Koré’s father, who had purchased it from the Greek government and encouraged the simple-minded locals to devise wild pagan orgies for his amusement.
For one thing I had awakened to a comprehension of her beauty. Her face was rarely out of my mind, with its arrogant innocence, its sudden brilliancies and its as sudden languors. Her movements delighted me, her darting grace, the insolent assurance of her carriage, and then, without warning, the relapse into the child or the hoyden.* Even her bad manners soon ceased to annoy me, for in my eyes they had lost all vulgarity. They were the harshnesses of a creature staving off tragedy. Indeed it was her very extravagances that allured, for they made me see her as a solitary little figure set in a patch of light on a great stage among shadows, defying of her own choice the terrors of the unknown.
What made my capture complete was the way she treated me. She seemed to have chosen me as her friend, and to find comfort and security in being with me. To others she might be rude and petulant, but never to me. Whenever she saw me she would make straight for me, like a docile child waiting for orders. She would dance or sit out with me till her retinue of youth was goaded to fury.
She seemed to guess at the points in her behaviour which I did not like and to strive to amend them. We had become the closest friends, and friendship with Koré Arabin was a dangerous pastime.
* Jane Austen gave us a perfect cameo of the little hoyden in Catherine Morland at the age of ten, who “was fond of all boys’ play” and was “noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”. See An Unlikely Heroine. The word ‘hoyden’, which probably comes from Middle Dutch and is related to the word ‘heathen’, is considered dated now. If anyone dared apply such a label today, he might call Koré a tomboy; but a tomboy may be anxiously cultivating an ironic style, whereas a hoyden just doesn’t care — a defining element of Koré’s magnetism.
Précis
Leithen’s first impressions of Koré had been negative, but now that he understood more of her past, her awkwardness had taken on even a heroic character. The fact that she had appealed to him for help so trustingly only drew him the more. Her appeal was growing, and he realised how easily he might fall in love with her. (59 / 60 words)
