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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Station follows three high-spirited young men visiting the monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927. They examine treasures and sketch the courtyards and those who live in them. They swim ecstatically off the sparkling, deserted beaches, climb mountains, talk and share meals with monks and transcribe these conversations with relish. For life is very different for a celibate hermit on Mount Athos. Time has no meaning: the Son of God, His Virgin Mother, the Angels and the Saints are all living creatures of flesh and blood, and the Pope is a heretic. This slim book was little short of revolutionary in its championing of Greek Orthodoxy and Byzantine civilization, reversing centuries of western prejudice. It was the first of Robert Byron's travel books, revealing the flashing wit, bravery, passion and astonishing powers of visual observation which made him such an exceptional witness.
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5
The Station
Athos: Treasures and Men
ROBERT BYRON
with an afterword by John Julius Norwich
6
Here, in lush valleys, teem bees, figs, and olives. The inmates of the monasteries weave cloth, stitch shoes, and make nets. One turns the spindle of a hand-loom through the wool; another twists a basket of twigs. From time to time, at stated hours, all essay to praise God. And peace reigns among them, always and for ever.
Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Traveller in the East, 1420
Contents
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 10garden 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 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 11Grenadiers’, 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 cottonwool 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 12tussocky 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 13spire 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 crossbow; 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 14State capital.1 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 15of 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 16roof, 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.
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, à 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. 17Viewed 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 made 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 18event 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.
1. Travellers are advised to take consolation in a pink wax bust of Queen Victoria, with tow hair and glass teeth, exhibited on the ground floor of the Art Gallery.
1
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 20the 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 Cœur 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 21to 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 particoloured 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 22pervades 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 Piræus on Tuesday afternoon. Though we had left Marseilles punctually, it was not until the 23evening 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 Ægean, the novelty waned; and, of the crowd of passengers on the bridge, most were asleep before the passage was completed.
Piræus 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 24awe 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.
Howe’s flat, situate in a basement, was cool even in the days that followed – the August tail of the hottest summer within living memory. At first I lay prostrate in the breeze of a fan, unable to move till the evening. At the back, a vine-covered courtyard gave access to numerous other households, whose washing and common idiot enlivened the scene. Lurked also, in its recesses, a tribe of lean and tawny cats, who came speeding day and night through 25the open doors and windows in horrible battle. Heedless of ground glass, arsenic, and entanglements of electric wires, their objective was the kitchen, where platters, cups, and lids of casseroles were flung remorselessly to the floor in their efforts to disinter the few provisions we could afford. Such was the savagery of their onslaughts that every night we stealthily deposited the more decomposed, and therefore magnetic, of the day’s refuse in a near-by street. To these enemies were added gigantic insects, an inch and a half long, and clad in orange armour, that emerged from every crack in the plaster, rendering each doze and bath a period of suspense. Suggestion was immediately telegraphed to Messrs. Duckworth that the public must necessarily be attracted to a work bearing the stirring title:
’TWIXT CAT AND COCKROACH:A Fight for the Union Jack in an Athenian Slum.
But, in view of the less exciting though more protracted events which have since occurred, the idea was not adopted.
For the greater part of 1926, between visits to Turkey and Byzantine monuments of Greece, Athens had been my home. There were calls to pay, acquaintances to cement, friendships to renew. At His Britannic Majesty’s Legation the personnel had changed. But the Minister was on leave, and his mice were at play. Every evening we gathered on the Zappeion, the Hyde Park of the town, where the less exclusive population dines and drinks to the crash of bands among the trees and the harangues of professional orators. As the clock moved into the morning, and tired waiters piled the tin tables for the morrow, still the destiny of man waited our decision. The mainspring of argument was the first secretary, a Scot, struggling between the rationalistic cynicism of his generation and instinctive hope. One of his remarks remains in my mind: ‘It is only since they ceased to exist that God and Royalty have been genuinely revered.’
The pivot of the morning was the English club, where ham sandwiches, gin fizz, and a variety of periodicals, from the Pink ’Un up, made it possible to recover from the dripping exhaustion 26of a hundred yards’ walk. Thence, on the first day, I visited General Phrantzes, the master of the President’s military household, to thank him, to whom I was indebted, for my reception at Piræus. He was installed in the old palace of King Constantine, a spacious, marble-cooled house, having Empire furniture and upholstered with a wealth of original Victorian chintz. Later I proceeded to the Foreign Office, to find George Mélas, formerly attaché in London. We lunched till five o’clock, drinking crème de menthe in deference to a sentimental past (despite the temperature of 105 degrees in the shade) and probing the ideals of Venizelism.
The grades of Athenian social life offer an intricate field for the anxious climber such as myself. In the eyes of the English colony the Legation is Mecca. But the present anti-social tradition of the British Foreign Office renders this an isolated goal rather than a posting-house to greater vantages. For, while winter brings the ordinary round of parties which form a Season and which even our diplomats cannot avoid, the summer is marked by a shifting of social gravities to the golf-club. It is this wired enclosure on the seashore, some five miles outside the town, that would claim the attention, if there were such a thing, of the Tatler foreign correspondent. There he might snap the Turkish Minister, dusky Falstaff, floating playfully among the Americaines after his nine-hole round; monocled counts from the Baltic States arriving in large motors; the Hellenic cosmopolis ignoring one another; and finally Phyllis, rock among quicksands, convoying her new princess or millionaire into a basket chair. In her other moments Phyllis dragoons a shedful of destitute refugees into weaving artistic tweeds, which she sells to her enemies. Gossip circulates, swells, grows titanic. From Oslo to Teheran the scandals of the old world are culled and digested, liaisons woven, marriages unpicked, as the sun falls over Ægina and the huge grey ridge of Hymettus assumes that virulent, blinding petunia which poets have so often mistaken for violet.
Stricken with the weight of unrequited hospitality, I decided, conjointly with Howe, to give a masticha – a form of entertainment peculiar to the Levant, and lately emulated by the Anglo-Saxon 27world in its cocktail-parties. Our establishment was set in activity, the unwilling labours of Augustina, the servant, being supplemented by the hands of sympathising friends. Wines from Crete and Samos, ouzo the national apéritif, gin, whisky, and vermouth, were ranged upon our tables; the folding doors thrown back; and our smiles extended to the reception of some thirty guests. The triumph of the party was the gin, regarded by Greek débutantes as a dilutant, to the excitation of their good humour. Everyone, having arrived at half-past six, remained till a quarter past nine, though it had been hinted in the invitations that the party would end at eight. What greater compliment could we have hoped?
With regret I saw my short stay in Athens drawing to a close. To me the town is a home – that squared modern town reviled of the cultured itinerant. There may I find refuge from the Anglo-Saxon canon. No need to be a gentleman or a good fellow any more. I become a person among persons, instead of a unit in a thousand teams. I can remain English without showing it. A world of friends displaced one of potential enemies. So it is all over the Levant. But Athens, though I am ill three days in seven, stands by herself, the changeless city of dust and politicians, fortress through millennia of the split straw, ill-watered, uncomfortable, but the city of individuals, where the pall of the West has not descended. Cursorily it seems a western town enough, conceived in the days of Otho, the Wittelsbach king of the thirties, when Queen Amalia sat in her Gothic grange upon a Gothic chair, the court wore national dress, and the Duchesse de Plaisance brought social convenances to the families that had led the Revolution and the merchants who had profited from it. Or the political observer may call it Balkan, riddled with intrigue. Yet what draught of happiness to encounter, straight from England, the exiled Dodecanesian leader Zervos, with the tale of his morning’s adventure bubbling on his lips.1 Here is history woven with the days, not years. But when other races fret and curse, 28the Greek smiles, soaring on a contempt for the rest of humanity so profound that even the taxi-driver, plainly directed, will take the unhappy passenger elsewhere, convinced that he knows best. And in the narrow Athenian streets, every doorstep and lintel of Pentelic marble, every cornice serrated with the acroteria that have descended uninterrupted from before Christ to the meanest hovel of the twentieth century, where is Europe? Before the sun is up the vendors are about, uttering the ‘cries of Athens’ in the piercing semi-tones of a people who, like the Jews, are of no continent:
‘Figs, fresh figs!’
‘Pots and casseroles!’
‘I buy old boo-oots!’
‘Chairs to mend!’
‘Lovely lace one drachma an ell!’
‘Ice! I-ice!’
Every morning at eight o’clock the ice-man delivered his block. And, as he put it in the chest, still, almost beneath his breath, he wailed the chant, ‘Ice! I-ice – Пάγος,ὁ Пάγος,’ as though mesmerised with the beauty of his calling.
It is curious fact that, participating as we do in a system of education largely based on Greek literature, no attempt should ever be made to comprehend Greek psychology. The professional pedagogue, ranging himself in opposition to commonsense observation and the whole science of anthropology, affirms, with one snap of his bitten, ink-stained fingers, that the modern Greek is related neither in language, body, nor mind to the ancient. Further, though the average reader of the classics experience no difficulty in reading a modern Greek newspaper, the pronunciation which he has been taught is one that not only no Greek can understand, but which denies, in addition, that very poetry of sound which Greek literature professes to reveal. Not, however, content with this purposeful obscurantism, the Anglo-Saxon professor, with the nauseating self-sufficiency of his kind, must even blame the native for pronouncing his language in the manner it demands. And while aware, if pretending to culture, that a cursive hand has existed for 1,000 years and more, he still forces his 29unhappy pupils to conduct their exercises in disjointed and uncouth hieroglyphics, thus wasting five minutes in every ten so devoted. A gentleman writes politely to The Times. And he receives in reply the ponderous sneer that the headmaster of Eton does not teach Greek in order that his pupils may enjoy the hypothetical advantage of reading the Greek Press in the vernacular. The humanities, in fact, will be enshrined for ever in as cumbersome and repellent a guise as the ignorance of the sixteenth century could devise. They will. But a scrutiny may be cast in passing, and not without relevance, upon the forces of their kingdom.
It is the privilege of the educated, immersed in contemporary duties, to fortify themselves upon the inspiration of the past. The majority has looked hitherto to that chaos of stone photography and sententious inquest on the nature of being, known as Antiquity. We, however, possessors of the twentieth century, have taken a step outside this limitation of spirit. We march hand in hand with science, the Benjamin of Victorian rationalism and now discarding its parent. The palings of the Mediterranean back garden are down. We have the earth instead. ‘Am I? Am I not?’ ponders the secondhand philosopher, head bowed to the cabbages. ‘What matter?’ comes the answer from astride the globe. ‘We run now with the soul, with the spirit that has escaped you, cobwebbed old man, paid instrument of enormous stagnation.’ But whither do we run? As I search, I too need my past. And I find it, now and perhaps for ever, in the Levant after all.
When, in a.d. 330, the year of the foundation of Constantinople, the Greeks took over the lease of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion had at length put them in pursuit of Reality. To analyse the affinity between the Byzantine civilisation that evolved, and our own requires more than this ultimate paragraph. But if, in the following pages, too great a hint of it obtrudes, let it be pardoned in the light of personal inspiration. For, while the classical continues to suckle half the world on a voice of letters and stones, one fragment, one living, articulate community of my chosen past, has been preserved, by a fabulous compound of circumstance, into the present time. Thither 30I travel, physically by land and water, instead of down the pages of a book or the corridors of a museum. Of the Byzantine Empire, whose life has left its impress on the Levant and whose coins were once current from London to Pekin, alone, impregnable, the Holy Mountain Athos conserves both the form and the spirit. Scholar and archæologist have gone before, will come after. Mine is the picture recorded. If patches are purpled with a tedious enthusiasm, or watered with excessive reference to the past, let the reader recall his own schoolroom and discover the excuse.
1. He had gone to bathe before breakfast; and had found, on plunging in, the whole bottom of the sea covered with broken glass, placed there by the calculated animosity of the Italian Legation.
2
Translation
Aided by my greek tutor, I had contrived earlier in the summer to address a letter to the Œcumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, head of the Orthodox Church, to whom I was personally known. Couched in the phraseology of centuries, myself remaining his ‘Most Divine All-Holiness’ faithful child in Christ’, it was despatched, for fear of the inquisitorial Turkish post office, by diplomatic bag. The answer had preceded me, by the same means, to our Legation in Athens. It ran as follows:
‘Basil, by the grace of God Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Œcumenical Patriarch.
‘To the Most Honourable Mr. Robert Byron, the grace and peace of God and of our Saviour Jesus Christ.
‘Having gladly issued, we transmit to your Honour enclosed herewith, our Patriarchal letter of introduction to the Synod of the Holy Mountain, for which you asked in your letter of the 20th ultimo.
‘We pray for you all success in your scientific research, and all good fortune from God, from whom also may your years be of the fullest, healthy and joyful.
‘1927, July 26. 32
‘Of Constantinople. ‘Ardent suppliant of God.’
Save for the last phrase, written in the Patriarch’s own shaky hand, and the two logogriphs in facsimile, the letter was typewritten in Greek. Of the same character was that addressed to the Synod.
‘Basil, by the grace of God, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Œcumenical Patriarch.
‘Most holy Epistatai and Antiprosopoi of the Synod of the Holy Mountain, beloved children in the Lord of our Mediocrity, may the grace and peace of God be to your Holiness.
‘He who formerly visited your holy place, the learned Englishman Mr. Robert Byron, anxious there to pursue his researches in Byzantine art, comes thither for this purpose, intending particularly to photograph the frescoes of the leading churches.
‘We, therefore, gladly urge, through this our Patriarchal letter of introduction to your Holiness, that by your prompt solicitude there be afforded him everywhere a courteous reception and treatment, and simultaneously every facility for the photographing of the said frescoes, and generally throughout his scientific researches there.
‘May also God’s grace and his immense mercy be with your Holiness.
‘1927, July 26.
‘Of Constantinople. ‘Ardent suppliant of God.’
The soul of possibly the most insignificant participant in the British Commonwealth of Nations drank deep of these eulogies. Further, 33a cloud was lifted. For the Patriarch had sponsored the practical object of the expedition, to which another member of the party was devoting time and money on my assurance of its feasibility. A more forcible recommendation to the secretive and independent monks than this, from the very pivot of Christendom, human insistence could not have obtained. A second letter was furnished by the Greek Foreign Office; and a third, to vouch for my companions, by the Metropolitan of Athens. Such a packet, surely, must substantiate our worth with every shade of monastic opinion.
To scraps of paper were added more material comforts: cans of an effective flea-deterrent; five dozen quarter-plate films of six pictures each for landscape; the works of Elinor Glyn in the Tauchnitz edition; and a small phrase-book, externally resembling a Bible, to bridge the gaps in my knowledge of the language. Saturday afternoon came. The suit-case, the kit-bag, the saddle-bags, the syphon-box, and the despatch-case were thrust through a window of the Prague express. And we steamed from the Larissa station at half-past six, my cabin-mate being an obese Greek who had brought his dinner in a bag and had already impregnated the entire coach with the fumes of resin-tainted wine. I was glad, therefore, to seek refuge in that of an American named Marten, whom I had been unsuccessfully trying to disabuse of a belief in the infallibility of Periclean art during a short acquaintance of three days.
After dinner – a parody of a meal – the obese Greek, whose liquor had now transformed the atmosphere of the compartment into that of a public operating-theatre, hoisted his rotund form into that lower berth which had cost me a quarter of an hour’s rhetoric on the previous day to reserve for myself. I produced my ticket; the usurper was impelled up the carpet steps to a higher; and the attendant, tripping over the saddle-bags in the struggle to change the linen, became so enveloped in the sheets as to resemble a new-risen Lazarus. I slept, thereafter, with increased zest.
Dawn broke over the marshes and downlands of Macedonia, dotted here and there with the red-roofed boxes of refugee villages. Salonica was reached at eight o’clock. The London train was moving 34out. Marten and I spurred a two-horse cab to the harbour-front, where there stood, waving from the steps of the Mediterranean Palace Hotel, three figures. The long-planned rendezvous held good. Behold, bobbing on a surf of greeting, the party.
Foremost, like some mythical denizen of the seas twisted back in satisfaction upon the prow of an ancient galleon, was David, body akimbo, visage benign – a David of the font, and not to be confused with the pseudonym of a companion on a former adventure; on one side Reinecker, sparse and sallow, stifling a flow of eternal depreciation; on the other, Mark, in plus fours, a waft of artificial heather in an arid land. In company with Marten, struck dumb by the babble of union, we sank to breakfast, while the concierge enquired our fathers’ Christian names, and the porter, recognising me from last year, poured his blessings on ‘Mr. Robert’.
Eggs materialised in metal pans. As we ate, Marten studied the party; and, summoning a similar detachment, I followed his cue. First sat Reinecker, separate from us in some degree: hardly English, intellectual, and student of art in that aspect; financially independent; and emanating from a large house of his own in Kensington filled with rare and austerely disposed Oriental potteries. In absolute contrast was David, one of life’s familiar pillars from the days of battle at a public school; smoking in the bathing-place, drinking beer among the aspidistras of the adjacent pub; bawling at small boys in boats through a megaphone; rearranging a rather jejune collection of Egyptian figurines in a corner cupboard; and later at Oxford: studious and anthropological, buried in books, or snorting through the town in a motor that looked as if it had been made to transport a Boer family up country; sober always, even in insobriety; now, on the threshold of archæological distinction, unearthing clay fragments at Kish and Constantinople; or at home, flying the walls of the Heythrop country like a sedate heron; cenotaph of competence; monolith of equanimity. Third was Mark, another of school’s mercies: of a frivolous nature, tempered with purpose; proud of Scotland, lover of the moors and all things Scottish; naturalist by descent, artist by choice; solitary by temperament; yet 35beacon-light of parties; careful of appearance; practising economy without stinginess; and, but for a visit to Spitzbergen and a month in the château of a French marquise, where there were caterpillars in the salad, untravelled. To him, after four days in the Orient express, the Near East came as a surprise.
Breakfast over, Mark and I proceeded to St. Sophia, the finest of the town’s churches, to see the eighth-century mosaic of the chocolate-robed Virgin unattended in her vault of dull glowing gold. But we were not alone. For a vast concourse had gathered in homage to those who had fallen in the wars that Greece fought between 1912 and 1922. A service was in progress, and we were ushered, unwitting, to a railed and carpeted enclosure. There we remained for an hour in a poultice of humanity, while the Metropolitan, crowned and enthroned, led the service, and a civilian dignitary spoke interminable commemoration.
Salonica, despised of soldiers, is as curious a town as Europe can show. Achieving immortality with St. Paul, the outstanding event in its subsequent history was the immigration of an enormous band of Jews, driven from Spain with the Moriscoes at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to the ruin of that country’s industries. And still the Jewish women, their red pig-tails knotted in and out of coloured ribbons, trail their full green skirts up the steps of trams and buses; still they utter imprecations which sound to the modern Spaniard as Shakespeare’s jauntier passages to us: ‘Marry come up, sir conductor, thinkee this be a rightful recompense from two drachmas? ’D’s teeth, ’d’s wounds, sirrah! am I a pullet for the plucking?’ etc. Still every variety of Hebrew jostles in the modern streets, from the Whitechapel vendor, with his bowler hat ingeniously shaped to accentuate the nasal curve, to the Elizabethan rabbi, fur-hatted, and gowned in a purple caftan surmounted by a high fur collar. Since the recovery of the town by the Greeks in 1912, it has regained something of that commercial importance which blazed the fame of its fair throughout the mediæval world. At the time of our visit preparations were being made to revive this institution. The municipality was engaged in raising the 36harbour-front. And, needless to say, the work reached the portico of the hotel simultaneously with ourselves. An unceasing train of carts jangled beneath our windows, crashes, oaths, and the ring of shovels intermingling. A strong wind was blowing. And throughout the hotel every vacant inch was coated with desiccated refuse. Mark, snoozing at midday through the noise of a stage battle, wished himself in the Highlands.
There arrived in the afternoon a resident acquaintance to visit us. It was to him, last year, that I had been indebted for my single venture into Salonica society. Though in no way connected with the Far East, he had lately engineered himself into the post of Japanese Consul; and, as he drove us out to inspect the British war-cemetery, the Rising Sun floated over the motor like a pennant at a tourney. Later we attended a dinner-party on the roof of the hotel, where a Tzigane band, passionately conducted by an ancient Russian, was playing jazz.
‘Are there,’ I asked in a fevered impetus of conversation, ‘still many Jews here?’
‘Yes,’ was the reply, ‘there’s me – also Count Morpourgo across the table.’
