0,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Station,' Robert Byron masterfully intertwines travel narrative with a philosophical exploration of culture and society. Written in the early 20th century, the book adopts a lyrical style that vividly captures the landscapes and encounters of his journeys while reflecting on the impact of modernization on traditional ways of life. Byron's keen observational skills and humor infuse the narrative with a sense of adventure and introspection, positioning his work within the context of the burgeoning travel literature genre, which sought to engage readers' imaginations in the face of an increasingly industrialized world. Robert Byron, an English travel writer, art critic, and member of the Bloomsbury Group, was deeply influenced by his varied experiences and appreciation for classical art and architecture. His extensive travels throughout Europe and beyond prompted a desire to convey the beauty and nuances of the places and cultures he encountered. This work is indicative of Byron's broader intellectual convictions and echoes the tensions he perceived between the old and new worlds, making 'The Station' a product of its time yet enduringly relevant. Readers seeking an enriching journey through the intricacies of travel, culture, and the human experience will find 'The Station' a compelling read. Byron's eloquent prose and insightful reflections draw the reader into a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds, making it an essential addition to any literary exploration of the early 20th century. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
The Station
Table of Contents
Introduction
A traveler shaped by modern restlessness steps onto a secluded peninsula where austere ritual, Byzantine art, and unbroken silence press him to discover whether curiosity, taste, and doubt can coexist with a life ordered by faith, tradition, and time that seems to have stopped.
The Station is a work of travel writing by Robert Byron, set on the Holy Mountain of Athos in Greece, and published in the interwar period, a time when British travel literature was flourishing. Byron, a British writer with a sharp eye for architecture and art, frames his journey as an encounter with an autonomous monastic world that has preserved its customs for centuries. The book invites readers into a landscape of peaks, seas, and walled monasteries whose rhythms and hierarchies shape everything from daily meals to artistic devotion, situating the narrative between pilgrimage and cultural reportage.
The premise is straightforward yet fertile: Byron travels to Athos to see what remains of Byzantium in living practice and in material form. The journey unfolds through monastery visits, conversations with monks, and close attention to churches, icons, manuscripts, and ruins. Readers encounter the place as he does—by boat, by foot, and by patient observation—without the machinery of plot. The voice is witty, analytical, and self-aware, balancing irreverence with respect. The mood alternates between contemplative stillness and quick, perceptive bursts, offering the experience of a cultured companion talking you through sights that reward lingering attention.
At its heart, the book weighs the claims of ascetic tradition against the appetites of modernity. Byron probes how material beauty—mosaics, frescoes, carved stone—can serve spiritual ends without becoming mere museum pieces. He explores hospitality and discipline, solitude and community, suggesting that Athos functions as both refuge and mirror for those who arrive from elsewhere. The tension between looking and belonging runs throughout: the traveler is always an outsider, yet his sensitivity to form and ritual becomes a way to listen. The Station thus dramatizes an encounter between Western skepticism and Eastern Orthodox continuity without reducing either to stereotype.
Stylistically, Byron blends on-the-spot observation with art-historical insight, producing a sequence of vignettes that feel immediate yet layered. He favors precise description and quick character sketches, then opens into reflections on style, iconography, and the meanings of sacred space. The pace is unhurried, mirroring the place he visits, but the prose is lively, alert to irony and idiosyncrasy. Rather than merely cataloging monuments, he reads them as parts of a living environment whose sounds, smells, and ceremonies shape perception. The result is travel writing that doubles as a portable seminar in how to look—and how to think about what looking entails.
Placed against the backdrop of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the book participates in a broader rediscovery of Byzantine culture by Western audiences. Its relevance endures because it asks how traditions maintain integrity under the pressures of modern attention and changing values. Readers today may find in it a model of slow travel, engagement without appropriation, and the patient study of craft. Questions about cultural preservation, spiritual practice, and the uses of skepticism are addressed not by abstract argument but through scenes where habit, labor, and devotion are visible in stone and pigment.
For contemporary readers, The Station offers a richly textured journey rather than a string of revelations: a careful approach by sea, a circuit of monastic settlements, and a sustained effort to see a world on its own terms. It can be read as a travelogue, an essay in religious and aesthetic perception, and a meditation on what endures. Byron’s sensibility—keen, questioning, and humane—guides without dictating conclusions. The book invites you to pause, to admit wonder, and to recognize the work that beauty performs in ordinary life. Entered with patience, it yields the rare pleasure of attention rewarded.
Synopsis
The Station is Robert Byron’s 1928 travel narrative about Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula of northern Greece. Combining pilgrimage itinerary with art-historical observation, the book records visits to monasteries, sketes, and hermitages, observing rites, architecture, and collections. Byron frames Athos as a self-governing enclave preserving Byzantine culture in a living setting. The narrative proceeds in chronological order, tracing the author’s journey from the mainland to the peninsula, then around its communities. Without polemic, it documents daily rhythms, landscapes, and artworks, noting how religious practice and material heritage coexist. The purpose is descriptive: to convey what the traveler saw, heard, and consulted in situ.
The journey begins with preparations and permits (diamonitirion), necessary for entry into the all-male monastic republic. Byron travels through Macedonia to the coast, embarks on a small vessel, and approaches the steep, forested peninsula rising from the Aegean. The book describes the landing at Dafni, the modest port that serves as gateway, and the initial procession of coastal monasteries glimpsed from the water. Early pages establish constraints and courtesies governing visitors, including guest quarters, meal times, and expectations during services. The tone remains factual as the author situates Athos within modern Greece yet emphasizes its autonomy and continuity with older Byzantine arrangements.
From the landing, the narrative follows a sequence of visits by boat and on foot to major houses. Reaching Karyes, the administrative center, provides orientation and contacts. The author then proceeds among monasteries renowned for their riches, including the Great Lavra, Vatopedi, and Iviron, as well as smaller foundations and sketes along ridges and coves. He records receiving hospitality in the archontariki, eating in refectories, and attending parts of the long offices. Architecture is described in situ, with attention to fortresslike walls, courtyards, and the katholikon that anchors each community. The book notes variations between coenobitic discipline and idiorrhythmic practice without extended digression.
Art and manuscripts occupy a central place in the account. The Station inventories fresco programs, iconostases, and portable icons, often noting inscriptions, donors, and stylistic features. It describes treasury items such as reliquaries, textiles, and liturgical vessels, and it visits libraries holding Greek and Slavic codices. Examples are tied to specific spaces, like exonarthex murals or chapels off the nave. The narrative remarks on condition, conservation challenges, and measures taken by monks to safeguard works. Musical and ritual elements, including chanting and processions, are related to the visual environment, presenting Athos as a coherent ensemble of worship, art, and built form.
Travel conditions and geography shape the middle chapters. Paths climb through chestnut forests and along precipitous slopes, so movement depends on weather, daylight, and the availability of mules. The author encounters hermits and small sketes such as Saint Anne, where craftsmanship and devotional life are closely linked. Caves, vineyards, and garden terraces illustrate how subsistence supports contemplation. The book narrates ascents above the tree line toward the mountain’s summit and visits to chapels like the Panagia near the peak, using these episodes to frame the peninsula’s scale. Accounts of storms, fog, and sea crossings highlight the practical demands of an Athonite circuit.
Administrative structures are explained through scenes in Karyes and monastery councils. The Holy Community coordinates common concerns, while each house governs its internal rule. The text outlines the roles of abbots, stewards, and guestmasters, and it notes the presence of a civil governor representing the Greek state. Economies are described: metochia on the mainland, fisheries, and workshops that maintain buildings and support liturgy. The distinction between communal and idiorrhythmic houses is clarified through schedules, work assignments, and refectory customs. These observations situate devotion within governance, showing how Athos sustains its daily life and cultural assets under a framework that evolved over centuries.
The multinational character of Athos appears in visits to Slavic and Romanian establishments alongside Greek houses. The book observes the large Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon and comments on changing numbers following upheavals after 1917, alongside Serbian Hilandar and Bulgarian Zograf monasteries. It records differences in language and chant while emphasizing shared monastic aims. Practical consequences of political events emerge in supply lines, endowments, and correspondence. Without argument, the text places these details in a wider Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean context, indicating how external history affected recruitment, maintenance, and the fate of certain treasures, yet leaving theological debates outside its scope.
Late chapters complete the coastal circuit, including remote communities toward the cape and return legs by sea. The scenery’s alternation between cliffs, coves, and terraced slopes frames a concluding synthesis of impressions. The author revisits themes of endurance and fragility: sturdy masonry and venerable paintings set against erosion, fire risk, and limited resources. Departure repeats the formalities of arrival, with the final boat serving as threshold back to ordinary travel. The book leaves the reader with a sense of Athos as both secluded and connected, its seaborne access and administrative ties balancing an internal rhythm largely shaped by the liturgical year.
Overall, The Station presents Mount Athos as a living repository of Byzantine tradition, where daily worship and artistic inheritance reinforce each other. Its central message is descriptive and preservational: to make visible a coherent religious culture persisting into the twentieth century and to register its works and practices in their setting. By following the path of a single journey, the book offers a structured view of places, objects, and routines rather than abstract theory. It concludes by implying the value of sustained care for the peninsula’s buildings, libraries, and rites, and by anchoring Athos within the cultural map of Europe.
Historical Context
Robert Byron’s The Station is set in the late 1920s on Mount Athos, the Orthodox monastic peninsula in Chalkidiki, northern Greece. The work unfolds in the interwar years, when the “Holy Mountain” lived under Greek sovereignty yet retained its centuries-old autonomy and pan-Orthodox character. Byron travels via Thessaloniki and the small ports of the Athonite coast to monasteries such as the Great Lavra, Vatopedi, Iviron, and the Russian St. Panteleimon. The period is marked by postwar upheaval, administrative reorganization, and demographic change across Macedonia. Against this backdrop, Athos functions as a living repository of Byzantine civilization, its rhythms contrasting with a rapidly modernizing and unsettled Balkans.
A decisive prelude to Byron’s setting was the transfer of Athos from Ottoman to Greek control during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The Greek Navy secured Chalkidiki in autumn 1912; following the Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913), the region’s integration into Greece proceeded, while Athos preserved its internal self-government. The Holy Community at Karyes continued to administer the 20 ruling monasteries, their sketes, and metochia under Greek oversight. This shift ended centuries of Ottoman suzerainty and altered patronage patterns. In The Station, Byron moves through institutions negotiating that transition: Greek officials issue permits, yet monastic councils still set terms of access and uphold Athonite custom.
World War I (1914–1918) transformed the Macedonian hinterland through the Salonika Front (1915–1918), where Allied forces under General Maurice Sarrail and the British Salonika Force entrenched around Thessaloniki. The city suffered the Great Fire of 18–19 August 1917, which destroyed two-thirds of its urban fabric and displaced over 70,000 residents, prompting Ernest Hébrard’s celebrated reconstruction plan. War logistics reshaped ports, roads, and health controls that travelers used thereafter. Byron’s route to Athos traces this altered landscape: embarking from a city newly planned yet still scarred, he reaches the monastic harbors of Daphne and arsanas landings that had escaped industrialization but not the war’s economic aftershocks.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the USSR’s anti-religious policies devastated Athos’s Russian communities, especially at St. Panteleimon. Before 1914, Athos housed roughly 6,000–7,000 monks, including well over 1,500 Russians at St. Panteleimon alone; by the late 1920s, numbers and funding had sharply declined. A foretaste of turmoil came with the 1913 imiaslavie (Name-Worshipping) controversy, when Tsarist forces intervened on Athos to quell dissent and deport monks. After 1917, pilgrimages and remittances from Russia collapsed, properties were confiscated, and aging brotherhoods dwindled. Byron registers these consequences directly: he encounters Russian refectories half-used, treasuries short of support, and liturgical life continuing amid material privation.
The Greco–Turkish War (1919–1922) and the ensuing Treaty of Lausanne (1923) mandated the compulsory population exchange that moved about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Anatolia to Greece and roughly 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. Macedonia absorbed vast numbers of refugees, including into coastal villages near Athos such as Ouranoupoli, developed in the 1920s around the Prosforio tower with aid from relief workers like Sydney and Joice Loch. Monasteries lost metochia and rents in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, constricting income and supply chains. In The Station, Byron travels through this refugee-laden landscape and notes how Athonite economies and hospitality adapt to new borders, new neighbors, and curtailed Ottoman-era ties.
Greek political upheaval framed Athos’s interwar status. The 1922 military revolt led by Nikolaos Plastiras, the Trial of the Six (November 1922), the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924), and the brief dictatorship of Theodoros Pangalos (1925–1926) all signaled volatility. Yet successive governments reaffirmed Athos’s self-governance under Greek sovereignty, embedding it in constitutional and statutory provisions while regulating access through the diamonitirion (entry permit) and policing. Byron’s encounters with Karyes officials and monastery councils mirror this arrangement: a modern republic asserting borders and bureaucracy, and an ancient federation of monasteries retaining canonical authority over property, archives, and liturgy despite the state’s secularizing pressures.
A wider interwar movement to document and preserve Byzantine heritage shaped Byron’s project. In Greece, the Byzantine and Christian Museum was established in Athens in 1914, and the Archaeological Service expanded its Byzantine ephorates; in France, scholars like Gabriel Millet advanced Athonite studies; British and American institutions catalogued icons, manuscripts, and fresco cycles. This climate fostered inventories, photography, and conservation of Athonite treasures, from portable icons to codices and wall-paintings at Great Lavra, Vatopedi, Iviron, Hilandar, and Simonopetra. The Station participates in that effort: Byron records typika, reliquaries, and architectural phases, translating monastic patrimony into accessible historical knowledge at a moment when war and austerity endangered collections.
As social and political critique, the book juxtaposes a precarious modern Balkans with a resilient, if impoverished, monastic commonwealth. Byron exposes how nationalism, war, and bureaucratic centralization severed Athos from the cosmopolitan networks that once sustained it, leaving Russian and Balkan brotherhoods isolated and their endowments uncertain. He highlights refugee hardship around Athos and the uneven distribution of state resources after 1922. By insisting on the intrinsic value of Byzantine art and ritual against utilitarian modernization, the work rebukes Western indifference and local neglect. It thereby questions interwar priorities—border-making, militarization, and political purges—through the survival, and fragility, of a spiritual polity.
The Station
PRELUDE. AN ENGLISH YEAR
Letters from foreign countries arrive in the afternoon. Each envelope advertises a break in the monotony of days; each reveals on penetration only one more facet of a standard world. But latterly another kind has come, strangely addressed, stranger still within. "We learn," runs one, "that you are safely returned to your own glorious country and are already in the midst of your dearest ones, enjoying the best of health...PS.—We have experienced no cold this year hitherto." "I am proud," says another, "that the all-bountiful God has allowed us to see you again...May he guard you from all evil, world without end. Send me from England ten metres of black stuff that I may make a gown." As the unfamiliar hieroglyphics resolve, memory evokes the senders, their fellows, and the weeks of their company. Till the whole excursion into their impalpable world stands defined as the limits of a sleep. But the experience, being personal, is framed in a larger retrospect. The colour of their environment lives by contrast with my own. Without that measure, its romance fades away.
Conveniently, as it happens, the period previous to this particular adventure from the earth falls within a year. It is precisely a period; because September witnessed my departure from a latitude whither, in the August following, I was to return. On the home journey we travelled from Constantinople; up the Black Sea by Rumanian boat to Constanza; from there to Bucharest; and on to Vienna, where an industrial exhibition, housed in three buildings each larger than the Albert Hall, consisted wholly of saucepans. There followed a few days in Paris. And so back to England, to a garden of Michaelmas daisies; with the bracken turning to gold, and thin blue columns of smoke filling the air with the scent of burning leaves. Cubbing[1] had begun, disclosing those unknown hours when the dew sparkles thick in the hazy light and the trees and plants are twice alive. Ultimately the middle of November brought an upper floor in London, connected, despite the proximity of the Marylebone Road, with that zenith of residential snobbery, the Mayfair telephone exchange.
The house in which body and soul were now enshrouded was kept by Mrs. Byrne, an Irish Catholic. The upper floor had formerly been tenanted by a dotard, to whose tappings and ravings came responses in kind from an incurable ex-officer next door. But his death had coincided with my return to England. And, needing a room, I was immediately ensconced upon the bed which for six years had quaked beneath the struggles of the demented.
The other tenants, as they arrived, proved not less distinctive than he who had departed. Above, the Misses Jimmie led lives of mouse-like though sinister seclusion. While below, a Mademoiselle Péron, having a pale face and flamboyant hair, spent such hours as could be spared from the drama, in pacing the hall, sparsely wrapped in soiled cretonne. Her pom was the permanent inmate of this oil-clothed passage, where the air hung thick with kitchen whiffs and the odour of collected dust. To the intermediate and "drawing-room" floor she introduced a tenant of her own, an attaché at one of the Balkan legations. The common staircase thus became a channel of turbulent domesticity which spared its other patrons no embarrassment.
Outside, the fogs rolled up to stay and the organ-grinders gathered. Through the former only the blurred yellow stars of answering electric lights proclaimed the street's other wall. Of the latter there were often two, equidistant, mingling crises of discord with their own intrinsic melancholy. On alternate afternoons came an old man with bowler hat and concertina, whose répertoire, constant through nine months, started with a Highland jig, and, continuing with "The Lakes of Killarney" and "The British Grenadiers," ended on "God Save the King." Meals, other than a greasy breakfast, were to be had near by at a pleasant, economical restaurant, frequented, as I discovered, by people who did not wish to be seen. Since I myself, being inevitably tired and dishevelled, was in a like case, the annoyance was mutual. Later on, the clientele became uncomfortably swollen owing to the misadventure of one of the waiters' wives, whose dismembered person was discovered in a trunk. She had already forsaken her husband; in which example I had followed her on account of his persistence in speaking Italian. It was noticeable that the queue of cars outside the doors of the establishment was transformed by this circumstance from the £400 to the £800 class.
Christmas set in early. The small shops sported tinsel and stockings; the large, elaborate tableaux, ugly fancy dresses, and bazaars in cotton wool grottoes. In the country, hunt balls began. Staying in a house for one of them, I found myself alone at breakfast with a man whom I had previously insulted in print under the impression he was someone else. I explained this, and then, since the rest of the party elected to remain in bed till lunch, we discussed the army and Parliament as alternative careers. Being a soldier, he maintained that the former offered wider scope. At home we enjoyed our own ebullient function, attended by flutterings on behalf of the master's wife, whose official patronage had not been requested. Apart from the peculiar pasts of those who control them, the local packs of hounds are distinguished for hunting over country which contains a larger percentage of wire than any known area outside New Zealand. This, however, does not save them from focusing to themselves those latent social aspirations and malignities which are investing English country life with an artificiality comparable to that of London, and less excusable. It seems there are only a few who still comprehend the spirit of the countryside and the unconscious details that compose it: the trees and hedges closing to eternal forest in the blue distance; the whistle of a train down the wind; shadows of clouds running atilt the fields; the riders on the crest of a hill where a clump of beeches and a tussocky rampart of prehistory stand between them and the sky; the stripes of a new-ploughed field glinting in the leaden dusk of winter sunsets; the reins slipping through sodden gloves; and at last that elusive shiver, common to all countries, of the arriving night. The perception of such, of the happiness they give, is waning. It is the point-to-point that clamours on the morrow. Bookmakers and fish and chips; snuffling tents; champagne picnics; tweed skirt and plus four; shooting-stick and glasses; the altitude of behaviour in a cutting wind. Better take a walk up the back drive.
In London again, the New Year opened. Resentfully its first nondescript months allowed the days to lengthen. Birds twittered in the adjoining square. A dozen daffodils stood above the gas-stove. It was imperative to seek the country.
Having in past years reached Ireland from Holyhead, the call of the unknown and the saving of 4s. 6d. now involved a night journey to Fishguard. The sea was calm; the train beyond, ramshackle and unreal, empty. Slowly we wound up the coast, the gulls crying unhappily over the sedges and sad, peaty hills stretching mysteriously inland. The fields, uneven and gorse-grown, seemed shrunk between their banks. A salt wind blew cold through the window. To one released from the turbid interiors of London these details obtruded themselves. At length the station was reached; a drive, a bath, and breakfast.
The sun shone, and all varieties of rhododendrons—huge clumps, single bushes, and cone-shaped, broad-leaved trees from the Himalayas—blazed their permutations of red, white, and purple. Tree ferns drooped; aloes poised grey armouries above the lawns; butterflies embarked on tentative flights. The house, of fabricated stone, sparkled like a porcupine of Gothic quills within its wooded cup. Beneath the trees, anemones and violets fought the moss. Primroses were on the banks; wild strawberry flowers between the brambles in the clearings. The sun lay hot on the face of the hill, calling the scents of the earth and its buds. Below, the tree-tops fell down to a river, which reappeared on the horizon to meet the sea. Here lay the town, Catholic cupola and Protestant spire distinguishable, with a many-arched bridge at the mouth and ships at anchor within the mole. Sometimes we motored; but to such objectives as a spit of sand, or a mountain where gold was found. At the foot of the latter the chauffeur uttered warning that those who ascended never returned. Throughout the afternoon we persisted, plodding from each promised summit to its superior, till there lay beneath us an enormous tract of land, turbulent and irregular, without habitation or cultivation, where five years ago the rebels killed any man who ventured. In the distance the hills rose to mountains again. Over them a storm was in progress. The colour of the land, of the sodden heather and soft brown virgin turf, had risen to the sky. There was a brown in the clouds; a brown in the gold of the misty rays that pierced them; a brown in the battle of the wind. Might the chauffeur, perhaps, have been right?
From here, after a day of poignant gloom in Dublin, I travelled west. The first house had been historically an abbey, displaying the form of such in every crocket of its eighteenth century exterior. The second was no less a castle. In the back parts the marks of Cromwell's cannon balls might still be seen. The nineteenth century, however, had witnessed a reversion to more chivalrous methods of defence. Each bedroom had been slitted anew with openings for the cross-bow; each archway punctured for the engulfing of unwanted guests in boiling oil. The garden, too, was peculiar in that not only was it extensively and emotionally romantic, but was impregnated in addition with the excited phantasy of the early Victorian engineer. The lake, instead of nestling, as lakes are wont, in a hollow, hung suspended on a platform. Separate streams, whose mingling waters might have been the delight of poets, were carried one above the other. A miniature suspension bridge, long-previous prototype of Menai and Clifton, spanned elsewhere the pellucid brook, riven immediately beneath to spume and roar in imitation of the lately discovered Zambezi. Fringed by bamboo, narcissi and grape hyacinths flowered in the grass.
It was now my intention to proceed to the north of Scotland. Yet another valued fraction of life's little day was mouldered in the Free State capital.[*] At six o'clock I boarded a steamer lying forlornly in the Liffey. And, after a strange meal of tongue and khaki pickles, at which the other passengers drank tea, I slept in solitary peace till awakened by the steward's announcing the banks of the Clyde. Only he whose reason has survived it, can grasp the implication of a Glasgow Sunday. To obtain a glass of beer it was necessary to affirm on paper my bona fides as a traveller and order a hot omelette. Late in the afternoon of the following day I arrived in the Highlands, having taken sixty hours to accomplish a single journey in the British Isles.
The colour of Scotland was the antithesis of Ireland, a liquid silvery light deepening the purple mountains to damson and the cold green of pines and firs to an equal tone. Snow lay still along the summit of the Cairngorms. Over the heather the curlews wailed and the grouse called, "Go back, go back." On top of the hills, blue hares scurried in and out of the clouds. A pink granite obelisk commemorating King Edward's coronation also emerged, strangely urban at the height of 3,000 feet. At times we fished, struggling waist-deep in a current that was taking daily toll of similar invaders. To those who have not previously wielded a salmon rod in a gale, the experience is a memorable one. Only, however, when a third suit had been torn from my back by the flies' preference of tweed to fish, did I retire indoors, to spend the remaining days in a dinner-jacket.
Once more I returned to London—to find my sitting-room transformed, in the exuberance of Mrs. Byrne's good heart, from dull mustardy yellow to vociferous canary. With May and the coming of summer a new complexion overspread the routine of days. Pansies and bachelor's buttons twinkled in shallow boxes outside the greengrocer's shop on the way to the restaurant. Sunbeams crashed into the lumber-rooms of the dealers, bringing new life to furnishings not old enough to be antique. The paving-stones were hot; the shop-fronts let down sunblinds; from the road came the smell of basking tar and the fumes of exhausts. And when, having worked till half-past seven, the hour called to chase the gossamers of organised pleasure, there was a new thrill in thrusting the naked bosom of a stiff shirt upon the undarkened summer evening. The days, aided by the Government, had succeeded after all. Pale green feathered the tree-tops in the square. Railings and front doors bore the laconic boards of decorators. Enormous cars bowled through the streets. It was the Season, unanimously acclaimed, with the eternal optimism of the Press, as the most brilliant since the war. Débutantes were photographed; their idiosyncrasies, pet lizards and back hairs, noted. In the provinces, tired huzzifs consumed the details of their waistlines. In London they seemed frousled and uncouth, either speechless or prisoned in the opposite extreme of chatter.
An analysis of those metropolitan activities which provide the newspapers' dessert must infringe the moral copyright of too large a body of publicists to be attempted. To me, successive evenings seemed each a compartment; band of ballroom, gramophone of attic; each a dungeon of stereotyped outlook; one and all attuned to the quality of the buffet. A face, a charm, might salve the wreckage of the night; both probably were otherwise employed. Sometimes the compartments opened into one another, and the party succeeded and became an entertainment. Old ladies found vodka in the lemon squash, young ones men whose knowledge of the fox was hatred. Princesses ate free food that others might honour them with ribbons and stars. The joined of God came together, though the judge had put them asunder. Such occasions were rare. But each reinforced hope eternal of the next. At the brink of all yawned that festal pit, the night-club. Formerly, in those sparse hours snatched from the cold years of education, what ecstasy had filled these temples of illicit bibbing. Now, crouched over the spine of an eighteen-shilling kipper, the glamour had departed. And there was the morning to be faced, punctual and sane. Truly, my sympathies are with the law. Why, then, break it?
At each week-end, each attainment of a garden, the plants had jumped; some were out, others were dead; there was none of the customary imperceptible procession. From home I brought boughs of light green beech, which caught the children's eyes to the taxi roof, and embowered the room from floor to ceiling with the freshness of a summer rain. Later came rhododendron and azalea. So the days lengthened and began to shrink again, till the eve of that incalculable moment, the eclipse[2].
My imagination had been fired. People whispered of a great black shadow that should come rushing over land and sea, trillions of miles to the minute. It was, they said, a sight that Englishmen had not witnessed for two centuries, and would not for another one. We should tell our grandchildren. Determining to tell mine, I telephoned to the owner of a car. At half-past seven in the evening we left London for the north.
It was ten o'clock when we reached Stamford. Stopping at the hotel for a slice of ham, we encountered an inebriate cleric, who, being a guest and therefore able to obtain it after hours, stood us a whisky each. More, he regaled our meal with tales of his youth; informed us, â propos his prowess at the butts, that he had been a "bogshootah at Caembridge in the year umptah"; and made much of the fact that in his parish the public-house was kept by the sacristan's sister, whose respect for the Church permitted her to take liberties with the law—one advantage at least of his profession. He, also, then decided to accompany us to the eclipse; but became disengaged from the dashboard where he was travelling, half-way down the High Street. Cheered by this jovial offspring of a sombre calling, we proceeded to Doncaster. There, in the small hours of the morning, we fell in behind the rest of England.
It was as though the Germans had landed in the South. Through the night, headlight to tail, a continuous queue of cars rushed feverishly towards the Orkneys; cheap cars, sports cars, limousines; bicycles, motor and push; every variety of wheeled automaton, directed by every variety of human being, blazing searchlights, flickering wicks, came tearing in pursuit of this astronomical phenomenon. By the road meals were cooking, bodies sleeping, tents encamped, motors overturned. Haggard policemen waved at corners. In the Yorkshire villages, the cottagers stood at lighted doors; hotel-keepers beckoned; garage proprietors thanked God. Viewed from a hill-top, the stream hummed back into the dark, mile upon mile, like a vast illuminated snake. The first glimmer filtered up from the Antipodes. We had motored from day to day. Then the lights of Richmond twinkled in the void. With the rest of the world, we took to our feet.
Lit by gas flares, we bore with the crowd to the appointed wold. Only Epsom has witnessed such a scene; and that by day. Beshawled matrons sold rasping tea with sandwiches that no mouth could encompass. Boys make jokes. Flappers shrieked. Hawkers bawled the menace of the corona and the efficacy of smoked celluloid to preserve the sight. Over the cold, sopping grass we trudged. A girls' school chattered hysterically on a wall; a widow stood apart, tense with the weaving of a mystic spell. It was light. Out of space hailed a friend who had motored with aged mother since tea-time yesterday, and was this moment arrived. It was lighter. We waited. We talked. Then the minute of the eclipse began. Half the hour passed in hopeless commonplace. At length a kind of scenic effect was set in motion. With a series of jerks the visibility changed. The cows galloped hither and thither in troubled herds. The crowd breathed, hallooed, and was silent. The jerks became quicker; women gulped; parsons expired. Till suddenly a deep blue veil swept over the country and slowly lifted.
Hurrying down, we breakfasted at York and continued, stupid with sleep, to a neighbouring house for lunch. There my companion collapsed. I returned by train.
It was July. Parties had become freakish. Night upon night Mrs. Byrne stitched me into a new variation on the theme of a pirate king. Nor was there any symptom of cessation. None the less, nerves frayed and bank impatient, I decided to exchange the husks of the swine for more solid comfort. The rooms were re-let. I packed my chattels into boxes and trunks, suit-cases, cloths, and crates. And, with nineteen shillings' extra luggage crowded on the taxi, I bade Mrs. Byrne good-bye as she barred the egress of Mademoiselle Péron's pom upon the doorstep. There followed a month of peace at home amid the sweet soporific of phloxes, peace such that no single event has remained to chart it. Till the last days of preparation and purchase were come.
For through all this English year, a varied complement of days but coloured with the thread of a discontent, the sunlit image of a mountain had shone like the star to the wise men. It was arranged, throughout, that I should return; that I should assume, if only temporarily, my own enterprise in a world of arid sequences. In dejection the image had called hope. In presumption, rapture. Now it was at hand. Content stretched illimitable.
Chapter I. THE LEVANT
The sun, admitted at eight o'clock, struck the doors of the cupboard opposite with a meaning that sent a tremor through the nerves and a ball of air into the pit of the body. Over the bed the fringes danced response to a quickened heartbeat. For the day of departure had dawned; day, in another sense, of return.
That afternoon I proceeded to London, and arose next morning to shop. The manager of that imperial institution, Fortnum and Mason's, improvised poems on the contents of the saddle-bags. Six pound tins of chocolate, two of chutney, a syphon brooding like a hen over its sparklets in a wooden box, pills, toilet requisites and stationery gradually accrued, together with the ink in a tin case from which these magic words pour. But to devise chemical armour against the insects which await with hideous patience the infrequent tenants of those musty guest-rooms, defied the ingenuity of every pharmacist from W.2 to E.C.4. I am fortunate, however, in possessing some revolting physical attribute, which prevents me, though not impervious to tickling, from being bitten.
At 10.51 on Friday, August 12th, I left Victoria, surrounded by suit-case, kit-bag, saddle-bags, hat-box (harbouring, besides a panama, towels and pillow-cases), syphon-box, and a smug despatch-case that contained a lesser known Edgar Wallace and credentials to every grade of foreign dignitary, from the Customs to the higher clergy. Only as the train started did I discover the loss of the keys to these receptacles. Fortunately the carpenter of the Channel boat was able to provide substitutes for all but the suit-case. Meanwhile, troubles fell away as the pages of perhaps the greatest master of English fiction disclosed the appalling misdemeanours of Harry Alford, 18th Earl of Chelford. These were tempered with the items of the Central European Observer, a periodical new to my journalistic appetite, whose title had peeped like a succulent strawberry from a cabbage-bed of Liberal weeklies and Conservative quarterlies.
The Channel was rough; but with the undoing of the luggage, the plying of the carpenter with beer, and the delightful spectacle of an arrogant humanity draped about the seats in green and helpless confusion, the passage passed unnoticed. Happiness untrammelled was restored at the sight of the rotund coaches of the Train Bleu. For itinerant comfort, the palm must ever remain with this serpentine palace. Curled against the garter-blue velvet of a single compartment, the French afternoon whirred past me in comatose delight. At length came Paris, the clumped ova of the Sacré Coeur standing high and white against copper storm-clouds. Slowly we shunted round the ceinture amid those intimacies of slum-life presented by the main line traverse of any great city: hopeless figures gazing in immobile despondency through the importance of the train at their own troubles; children roving the open spaces on tenement balconies; garments sexless, patched, one inevitably Tartan, listless on their lines; healthy plants and flowers rendered pathetic by environment; the whole gamut of man's misery, so it seems to the looker. At the Gare de Lyons the train doubled itself, gathered up its passengers, and started for the south.
Dinner was epic. Sleep cradled in the clouds. Morning broke with Avignon. And the sun rose over a barber's chair at Marseilles.
It remained to open the still fastened suit-case. Up a neighbouring street a locksmith of stupendous proportions and his shrewish wife set about to make a key for it. At the end of an hour their patience was exhausted and the upper catch was loosened from the lid by a drill. Now opened, it needed a strap to close it again, in search of which, to the speechless indignation of the shrewish wife, the locksmith and I left the shop. With the advent of the "zip-bag," rational instruments of cohesion seemed to have become extinct. We hurried from street to street, the locksmith scorning my idea of taking a taxi—he never did—and pausing now and again to direct my attention to a bevy of nude nymphs clinging by some process of stomachic suction to the boulders of a municipal fountain. Our quest fulfilled, I piled body and baggage into a diminutive motor, and, telegraphing to herald my arrival in Athens, descended to the docks.
The Patris II lay silent and empty. I was shown my cabin, then left to explore its dark recesses. It was morning; the stewards were hardly aboard; and it was with difficulty that as much as beer and a sandwich were persuaded from the bar. But as the afternoon advanced, peace dispersed. Crowds on deck waved to crowds on shore, serried against the endless vista of warehouse brick. Two women fiddlers and a male harpist scraped discords to the hot air. Ten yards away, the faded rhythm of "Valencia" quavered from a ragged couple, haunted with memories of last year to which I was returning. A fat woman, the hazel of her bare arms emerging inharmoniously from petunia silk, began to cry. As the tea-gong thrummed we moved from the quay-side, threaded the enormous harbour, rounded the outer mole, turned, and sailed east.
The Patris II, a white boat, decorated by Waring & Gillow and sanitated by Shanks, is the pride of her line, which bears the same name as myself. First-class accommodation boasts a ladies' room in dyed sycamore and pink brocade, a lounge in mahogany, a smoking-room, and a bar. The passengers were mainly Greeks, attired in the crest of fashion, and each endowed with sufficient clothes to last them without reappearance through the sixteen odd meals of the voyage. White trouser and mauve plus four flashed above parti-coloured shoe; new tie was child of new shirt; jewels glittered; gowns clung; lips reddened; and all continued to ring the changes in face of the increasing heat; while I lay about, cool and contemptible, in one shirt and a pair of trousers. Music was unceasing. Two pianos and a gramophone ministered to "fox trrott" and "Sharléstoun." While below, in the bows, the incantation of strings impelled the steerage passengers to lose their small-moustached, black-coated selves in a more reserved syncopation. Something inexplicably haphazard pervades Greek dancing: the slowly moving ring of peasants on the sky-line; the inspired solo of an Athenian wine-shop; the applauded pas-de-trois, kicking up the dust of a café circle at a wayside station, with a great trans-European express caught up in amazement; many scenes were hailed from oblivion by the sad rhythm. Till the blare of jazz brought back the West.
First-class society resolved into groups. Seated at meals on the captain's right was Madame Venizelos, uttering words of patronage and comfort to such loose infants as toddled within her orbit. Paying court, on one side, was an ancient scion of the Athenian house of Mélas, a retired naval captain, bearing the magnificent appearance of an English duke of the 'forties, white beard and moustachios a-cock; on the other Sir Frederick Halliday, instrument of that permanent obstruction of the Athens streets, "Freddie's Police." The second stratum centred round a number of young men from the Greek colony in Paris, attired at all moments of the day for every variety of sport. At night there was dancing on the upper deck, which resembled a steeply pitched roof covered in treacle. Overhead, the southern moon hung like a huge gold lantern affixed to the mast, casting romance into the souls of the couples and a path of rippling light over the sea beneath.
The meals were served in the temperature of a blast-furnace, stirred to its whitest by the vibrations of electric fans. One and all were impregnated with the taste of candle-flame, the outstanding feature of that terrifying menace to the palate, "Greek food"—though to me familiar as the smell of a cedar wardrobe to a boy home from school. At my side, thoughtfully placed by the head steward, sat a compatriot, who, after thirty-six hours' unbroken silence, opened conversation with the words: "Do you perspaire much?" Himself, he said, he was resigned to a dripping forehead. Some people, on the other hand, exuded even from their palms. Throughout the voyage we kept our table animated with discussion of the absorbent merits of respective underwears.
The ship was timed to arrive at Piraeus on Tuesday afternoon. Though we had left Marseilles punctually, it was not until the evening of that day that even the western coast of Greece appeared, a shadowy outline. Gradually the mountain gates of the Gulf of Corinth, giant cliff and weathered obelisk, stood softly from the rippled sea, each face a rosy grey, and a luminous blue lurking in the shadow of each easterly cleft. A white blur on the shore bespoke Patras. A three-masted sailing-boat rode by. Astern, the sun lay poised on an indigo hill, like a fairy tinsel flower on a Christmas-tree. A last glimmer trickled down the waves; then only a glow in the sky remained, deepening the hills and giving life to a star in the green opposite. Themistocles, the barman, jangling gin and vermouth, rooted the emotion in the senses. Darkness grew. The dinner-gong rang and rang again. At length it ceased, leaving its hearers filled with that spice of devil-may-care which only extended defiance of a ship's mealtime can induce.
The last evening on board was devoted to what the most sartorially sporting of the Greek youth termed jeux de société. Starting with a species of multi-lingual clumps and a system of forfeits which necessitated the demanding in marriage of the lady opposite, the night was finally launched on an orgy of hide and seek that was only cut short at one in the morning by the advent of the Corinth Canal. Towed by a small tug, the Patris slid slowly into this narrow, electric-lit groove. On either side rose walls of cleft rock as high again as the summit of her topmost mast. Great blasts of heat, conserved from the broiling day, fell down upon the passengers. Gradually, however, as we reached the middle and the bridge over which I had formerly motored to my first view of the Aegean, the novelty waned; and, of the crowd of passengers on the bridge, most were asleep before the passage was completed.
Piraeus next morning presented the picture of webbed and inextricable confusion that large ports always do. Already, before the sun was up, an ominous shimmer, a kind of film, overlay the brown slopes and white houses enclosing the harbour. I was dressing leisurely when there irrupted Nicola, the unscrupulous henchman of an absent friend, shaved, freshly hatted, and leading by the hand a naval officer of inimitable smartness whom I had observed with awe arrive at the side of the ship in a launch. Having packed and breakfasted, I marched in sedate procession through the assembled passengers, already gnashing at the prospect of an hour's wait for doctor's and passport formalities, and descended by the gangway to the boat. Thus was the humble and meek exalted, to the envy of those who had despised him The hands of the douanier were manacled by a laissez-passer from the Greek Minister in London. And in a few minutes we were making fifty miles an hour up the Syngros Avenue, the finest road in the world, as broad as Whitehall from the twin pillars of the temple of Zeus in Athens itself, to the sea two miles away.
The myriad blocks of the town, with the Acropolis perched on its untidy pedestal over to the left and the twisted, wooded spike of Lycabettus dominating its midst, vibrated a mirage of eggshell and white in the quickening heat. We reached the flat destined for my reception. In the absence of the owner, it had apparently become Nicola's perquisite; and a plethora of razor-blades, cake-crumbs, and permanganate of potash testified to his activities as a house-agent. For the moment, a bare-footed old demi-rep was preparing a bedroom, every pouch of her voluminous body quivering with resentment. But, appalled by the garbage of the kitchen, I decided to seek the advice of Lennox Howe, another resident friend. Between the splashings of his bath he offered me two rooms of his own apartment, uttering curdling tales of Nicola's nocturnal parties held in the very teeth of previous lessees. Thither, therefore, to the street of the little female fox the baggage was removed. And Nicola, who had broken, he said, an island holiday to meet me, was free to return to it, richer by 300 drachmas.
