managed to get rid of the people round about, and found myself in the
desired open cab driving slowly towards the main streets.
The streets of Athens at night! Take, as a model, Paris, and set it
in surroundings of incredible beauty, hills that soar proudly above,
a sea that stretches below, lit with the lights of a thousand ships.
Fill it with dark, swarthy people, with eyes like stars, who do not
so much walk as sway. Plant along its streets rows of pepper trees,
whose feathery branches dance beneath the lamp-light. Sprinkle among
the crowd young giants in the most picturesque uniform of Europe--a
white kilt that makes them look, in the distance, like ballet girls.
Build your houses of white marble, scatter their gardens with flowers,
breathe over it all a spirit of gaiety and love, light it with a moon
so clear and clean that it might be carved from the marble of the
Acropolis--and then, perhaps, you will have a faint idea of Athens.
Unless, from sheer incapacity, I have inadvertently been describing a
Lyceum pantomime.
And then, most important of all, one could dine like a king in this
paradise, and still can, for less than half a crown. The drachma was
not nearly as low then as it is now, but this was what my dinner cost:
_Wine 15 cents_: A bottle of white wine--tasting of
the tiny yellow grapes that are
good enough to grow on the
slopes of Mount Parnassus.
_Omelette Superb. Greek hens are worthy of
12 cents_: special praise.
_Pilafe de Volaille A pilafe that brings to the dinner,
15 cents_: as the cigarette advertisements
say, something of the ‘romance
of the East.’ Made _à la_ Constantinople,
its rice flavoured
with essences which none but a
Turk could contrive.
_Yaorti 10 cents_: It hailed originally from Bulgaria.
It is a perversely succulent dish
of sour cream and fresh cream
mixed, iced, and sprinkled with
sugar.
_Savoury Apollo Born of an unholy but delectable
12 cents_: union between the lobster and
the crab, and baptized with a
sauce of the cook’s own invention.
_Turkish Coffee Again the Eastern element. Constantinople
5 cents_: is close, you see--too
close for the comfort of Greece.
But, at least, it has taught them
how to make coffee.
Grand Total, including wine, 69 cents.
And that is in the best hotel in Athens. If you go to any of the other
restaurants, you will dine equally well for a good deal less.
But I want to take you with me up to the Acropolis, before we part
company on this most thrilling of all nights. For the Acropolis is the
personification of all Greece, it is the Crown of Athens, the eternal
symbol raised aloft which proclaims that Greece has no kith nor kin
with the crowded barbarians to the North, or the massed savages to
the East. Oh! I know perfectly well that the Turk is a fine fellow--a
finer fellow than the average Greek, and that probably modern Greece
has little in common with the Greece that first lit the lamp of
civilization in Europe. But Turkey has no Acropolis. And as long as
those matchless columns hover, like a benediction over Athens, Greece
will be _different_ from her neighbours.
It was the night of the full moon. As we rattled up the narrow streets,
the roads grew bumpier and bumpier, the lights more and more dim. A
wonderful place, one thought at each street corner, for a murder. It
would be dreadful to be murdered before seeing the Acropolis. After
seeing it, nothing would matter. That at least was how I thought, as
the cab swung round the final bend in the hill, drawing up beneath the
clustered buildings, dreaming on their narrow cleft of rock.
How can I describe it, this milk-white miracle of beauty? Its beauty
does not come from its antiquity alone, for here, among the columns
of dim silver, stained with shadows of violet, one is away from Time.
The temples soar to the stars, like white flowers eternally born anew.
The same moon that lit the face of Alcibiades falls on each fragment
of glittering marble, gilding the stone arms of its warriors and the
silent faces of its maidens, and only yesterday it seems that the voice
of Socrates must have echoed here, carried by this breeze through the
cool, cleft spaces.
At night-time even modern Athens seems to fit into the dream without
disturbing it. One stands by some broken, lovely fragment, looking
over the hills on to the sparkling city beneath. It is a box of jewels
spilt as an offering to the gods. The streets are strung into darkness
like glimmering necklaces, and from far below comes the muffled whir
and murmur of modern life. And then one shuts one’s eyes again, and
there is silence--the silence of eternal things....
I offer no apology for this sentimental outburst. I have no sympathy
with the man who does not grow sentimental among the columns of the
Acropolis. I have read about him in Freud, and he is a very dirty dog.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Concerning the Confidences of a Queen
On the next day I was summoned to the Queen. I must here admit, with
due shame and contrition, that I had never been to see a Queen before.
I really don’t know why. Still, the fact remains that I knew nothing
whatever about Queens, especially Balkan ones. I had read about them
in certain lurid accounts of themselves, from which I gathered that
they must all be very temperamental, and I had seen photographs in the
illustrated papers, from which I concluded that all photographers were
Republicans. Beyond that, my mind was a blank.
Still, two things one knew instinctively about Queens. They liked to
be called Ma’am, and they had to be approached in a morning coat. The
ma’am business struck me as faintly ridiculous. I practised it while
dressing, and pranced round the sunlight-flooded room saying, ‘Yes
ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full.’ However, when one has on one’s
morning coat the ma’am becomes something rather awe-inspiring.
I had to be at the palace at eleven, and at fifteen minutes before that
hour I entered a rickety ‘amaxa,’ drawn by two horses, and trundled
over the bumpy streets towards my destination. A blue, blue sky above
and all the houses glistening white. A faint breeze that drifted in
from the sea. In the distance the Acropolis could be seen gleaming,
like a white rose on a hill. Athens was bustling and wide awake. Little
flower stalls made bright splashes of colour under the pepper trees.
Outside on the boulevards people were drinking coffee and smoking
cigarettes. Now and then a lordly car would sweep by, and one would
catch a glimpse of a rich merchant and his lady, the latter with pale
face and crimson lips, and the glitter of diamonds that come from the
Rue de la Paix. A little bit of Paris, a little bit of the East, a
little bit of the classic past--that is Athens.
We swept through some wide gates after a certain controversy with two
fierce sentries in white kilts. Charming people those sentries. I
have always wanted to have one for a servant. They would create such
a sensation in London. They have a scarlet turban, with a long tassel
that hangs over the left shoulder, a tight-fitting, blue jacket with
rows of buttons like a page, a white sort of ballet skirt, shorter and
more frilled than a kilt, long white stockings, and red shoes with huge
black woollen rosettes on the toes. They told me that the costume was
very comfortable, except for the shoes, which were always coming off.
I don’t suppose we should ever have got past the gates had it not been
for the kindly offices of the Royal Chamberlain, who was waiting for
me, and took me straight to a reception room, then to another reception
room, then to a third such, and finally left me to wait. I had not long
to wait, for after about five minutes an aide-de-camp appeared and told
me that Her Majesty was ready to see me.
I followed him, noting the universal blue in which the palace was
decorated. Blue curtains veiled the glare of the sunlight outside,
casting a sort of haze into the quiet corridors. There were blue vases,
and blue sweet-scented flowers, and an immense staircase covered with
a blue carpet that was like a summer sky.
I negotiated the staircase successfully, walked down a few more miles
of corridor, and was eventually ushered into a long room, very like an
English drawing-room, in which Queen Sophie was standing.
I shall never forget my first sight of her, for she had the saddest
face of any woman I have ever seen. Standing there, dressed entirely
in black, a bowl of lilies by her side, her face rose from the shadows
like one who has known every suffering. Beautiful? I am not sure about
that. A beautiful expression, certainly. A beautiful bearing, too.
But my first impression remains, also my last. The very air which she
breathed seemed heavy with sadness.
(I don’t wish to convey the impression that she was a sort of mute, a
funereal figure. There were many days on which I saw her afterwards, in
which she was one of the gayest and most sparkling of creatures. But
the underlying note of tragedy would always recur.)
Her first words were anything but tragic.
‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘that you don’t try to kiss my hand. Some
Englishmen seem to think that they must do it, and they always look so
embarrassed.’
‘Ought I to have done it--ma’am?’ I said, wondering if I had let fall
the first brick.
She spoke perfect English--or, rather, the sort of English that you and
I speak, which is probably very far from perfect, but at least could
not be accused of any foreign flavour.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘before I tell you about Greece, for Heaven’s sake
tell me something about England. I haven’t been there since the war,
and’--here she shrugged her shoulders--‘I don’t suppose I shall ever be
able to go there again.’
I told her as much as I could. She was absolutely ravenous for
information. Did they still plant the tulips in Hyde Park? Was the
grass as green as ever in Kensington Gardens? (Oh, the green grass
of England!) Were people giving many parties now? And what were the
parties like, gay or sad? Had people got over the war at all? Were
there any very pretty girls running about? Had I any idea whom the
Prince of Wales was going to marry?
I gradually realized, as I endeavoured to supply some form of answer to
this bewildering torrent of interrogatives, that here was a woman who
was sick at heart for the country in which she had played as a child.
For, after all, Kaiser’s sister or no Kaiser’s sister, Queen Sophie,
when a girl, was brought up by her grandmother, Queen Victoria. She
had Kensington Palace for her playground and her first paddling was
performed on the beach at Eastbourne. And now, to be exiled, through
no fault of her own, from the country which she loved so well, to be
forbidden to see her friends, her relatives....
‘I suppose you have heard a great many stories about me?’ she said,
when I had exhausted England as a topic of conversation.
I nodded.
‘For example?’ she asked with a smile.
‘That’s not fair,’ I said. It was quite impossible to tell her even a
fraction of the things one had heard.
‘No. Perhaps it isn’t. Well, I’ll tell you a few of them. I was
supposed, of course, to be in daily touch with my brother in Berlin, by
wireless. I never quite gathered where the wireless was, but I believe
they said it was in a tree in the garden. I was supposed to concoct
elaborate plans for the destruction of the British Army. How, I don’t
quite know, because my husband always tells me I know nothing whatever
about war. I was also reputed to teach all my children nothing but
German. I presume that is why I have had nobody to teach them but an
English governess who has been here for ten years, and whom you must
meet. She’s a very charming lady. In fact--I’m quite impossible. I
wonder you dare come to see me.’
She laughed, and then became serious again.
‘I want you to realize,’ she said, ‘something of the absolute’--she
paused for a word, her hands tightly clenched together--‘the absolute
_agony_ of my position at the beginning of the war. I loved England.
I was brought up there. I had dozens of English relatives. I loved
Germany, too. My brother was the Emperor. That sounds, I suppose, a
crime, to love Germany. But try to clear your mind of the prejudice
of the war. Try to realize--as I think we can now--that every German
wasn’t necessarily a devil, and that every Frenchman wasn’t necessarily
an angel. And then you will realize something of what I have suffered.’
She paused, and then said a sentence which I shall never forget. ‘_I
was in a horrible No-Man’s-Land of distraction!_
‘What did I do? What _was_ there to do, except to shut my eyes, and to
think only of Greece? If I was to follow the struggle--first from this
side and then from that--I should have gone mad. And so, as I say, I
devoted myself to Greece. I nursed. I did my best in the hospitals. I
busied myself in the gardens. I did anything but think....’
She rose to her feet with a sigh. ‘Let’s go into the garden, and forget
all about it.’
She led the way from the room, and I followed her down endless
corridors, in which sentries sprung to attention as we passed, and
ladies-in-waiting smiled and curtsied from the shadows. Out in the
sunshine we paused, and she looked at me with a curious smile.
‘Before we go any farther,’ she said, ‘I want to show you something
which will interest you. You have come out here to write a book,
haven’t you? Well--this thing which I shall show you, will make you, at
least, _think_.’
We turned to the left, skirted the front of the palace, went through a
sort of shrubbery, and then stopped.
‘Look!’ said the Queen.
I looked. Standing straight in front of me, against the wall, was a
fourteen-inch shell. Not a pleasant-looking object. It was about the
height of a child of six, and was, I should imagine, sufficiently
powerful to blow up half the palace if it had landed in the right place.
‘That shell,’ she said quietly, ‘was a present from the French. Every
Englishman who sees it says that surely the French would not bombard a
neutral country? Surely the French, the apostles of culture, would not
bombard, of all places in the world, Athens, the birthplace of culture?
But you have a lot to learn. The date was December 2, 1916. Greece was
still neutral. The bombardment began at ten o’clock in the morning, and
went on intermittently till six at night.’
‘And where were you all that time?’
She laughed. ‘In the cellars. I can laugh at it now, but at the time it
was not a laughing matter. You see, my children were with me. They were
terrified. And I was distracted. Look at that shell, for example. If it
had fallen three feet farther to the right, it would have gone straight
through the window of my husband’s study. He was in there at the time.
It would not have been a very pleasant thing for the Allies, would it,
to have had the murder of the King of a neutral country on their hands?’
There was nothing that I could say. I muttered something about looking
into the matter.
‘Yes. Look into it. That is all we ask of you, that you should try to
find out the truth. And don’t forget that though I may be the sister of
the Kaiser, I’m also the daughter of the Princess Royal.’
I was nearly six months in Athens, with every possible facility for
studying the truth, and I doubt even now if I discovered it. That the
Queen was utterly sincere and genuine, I do not doubt. That the French,
in the desperation of the struggle, behaved foolishly, I am convinced.
But as to the exact measure of blame, I remain undecided.
However, I did not set out to write a book of political arguments, but
a book of human studies. And I hope that by this tiny sketch a few
people at least will see Queen Sophie in a more kindly light than has
hitherto been thrown upon her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Strange Tales of a Monarch and a Novelist
A fortnight later I was sitting in the lounge of the Hotel Grande
Bretagne, when a message arrived saying that Tino would like to see me
at six o’clock.
It was then a little after four, and the hectic, unnatural pageant
of Athenian Society was drifting by in full swing. Look well at that
pageant, for Athens, in this January of 1922, seemed a sinking city in
a doomed land, and there is a romance about such cities which is denied
to the more prosperous metropoles of the West, a romance which comes
from the knowledge that everybody is playing a part, and that a hundred
undercurrents of intrigue are running between the apparently smooth
surface of the waters.
There are several beautiful people in the lounge, and the most
attractive of all are Russians. There are, at the time, nearly ten
thousand Russian refugees in Athens, and their plight is such that,
thinking of them, it is not too easy to sleep at night. The women by
now have mostly found ‘protectors,’ accepting with a bored smile a
situation which, five years ago, they would have found impossible.
Some have attached themselves to rich merchants of the Levant, others
have wormed their way into the affections of the military, a few have
even achieved the success of an unhappy marriage. And now they are all
sitting in this lounge, smoking cigarettes, and blowing out the smoke
through purple and impassive lips, waiting.
The men are worse off than the women. Look at this one who approaches
me. He was once an officer in the Imperial Guard. To-day he wears a
patched white coat, well tied in at the waist, and blue trousers of a
common Russian soldier. One thin white hand is grasping a stick, and
in the other is a little tray containing his paintings--such pathetic,
amateurish paintings, which he is trying to sell. He stands in front
of me and tries to smile. It is a grotesque caricature of a smile--a
little twitch of the lip. His whole body is trembling as though from a
violent chill. Shell shock, and one lung already destroyed.
I buy one of his little paintings, and try to look as though I were
buying it because I wanted it. He is of the stuff which gentlemen are
made of. If there had been no war, he would have been a smart young
fellow playing gentle havoc with hearts in Petrograd.
He passes on, and is lost in the crowd of cosmopolitan adventurers.
There is a fat man from Paris, who is reputed to be doing a big deal
in raisins, and looks as though he had eaten most of them in a fit
of absent-mindedness. There is a little row of very silly _soignée_
Greek women, eyeing each other’s dresses, and pining for Paris. They
think it chic to talk French, and to affect to despise this backward,
out-of-the-way place that they call Athens. There are several young
officers on leave from the front. They stare moodily in front of them,
for they, at least, have a tale to tell, having been mobilized, some of
them, for seven years, and having seen the army gradually losing its
rifles, its boots, and its morale. There are several prosperous-looking
Germans, gabbling at the tops of their voices. One of them has a row
of enormous volumes on Greek statuary in front of him.
I pay for my tea with a bank-note cut in half--a strange procedure
worthy of explanation. Greece was in the direst financial straits. It
was quite useless to suggest a new loan, for nobody would subscribe to
it. And so an ingenious chancellor suddenly thought of a way by which
the peasants could all be made to disgorge half of their savings. Every
paper note in the kingdom had to be cut in half. The left half must
be immediately given to the bank, where it would be credited to one’s
account, with an interest of 5 per cent. The right half might be used
as currency. Thus, a note worth a pound automatically became worth ten
shillings cash, the other ten shillings being placed in the bank. All
this cutting and snipping of notes had to be done in a fortnight.
I arrived at the palace at six o’clock, and was shown up to Tino’s
study--a pleasant, English-looking room, with plenty of books, and
windows that gave on to one of the prettiest parts of the garden. He
was sitting down on the sofa, reading, and as he rose to greet me he
seemed enormous. He must have been at least six feet six, and six feet
six in a soldier who holds himself well erect is a good deal more than
many of the drooping six foot sixers one sees slouching down Piccadilly.
It was characteristic of him, as I afterwards learnt, that as soon
as we had shaken hands he almost pushed me into a chair, practically
stuffed a cigar between my lips (I loathe cigars) and before I had time
to light it, plunged straight into the heart of the controversy which
was raging round his throne.
‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that you’re talking to a King who’s disowned
by the greater part of Europe, and also by the United States. Don’t
you?’
I did realize it.
‘Very well, then. We are therefore in a position to talk quite frankly.
I’ve certainly nothing to lose by telling you the truth.’ He paused.
‘However shocking it may be,’ he added with a grim smile, ‘I’m under
no sort of illusion as to how they regard me in England. I’ve seen
caricatures of myself in every conceivable attitude in the English
papers--some of them rather funny as a matter of fact, funnier, at any
rate, than the German ones. Perhaps it never struck you that they’d
caricature me in German papers? I assure you they do. You see, Germany
doesn’t like me any more than England. I am altogether a most unpopular
person. Except in Greece.’ Again the grim smile.
‘However, we didn’t come here to talk about caricatures. I just want
to give you a few ideas, that’s all. You can verify them afterwards
at your leisure. The first thing on which I want you to fix your
attention is the beginning of the war. When war was declared I
received a telegram from the Kaiser. He writes admirable telegrams, my
brother-in-law. It suggested that I should at once throw in my lot with
the Central Powers. I was at Tatoy when the telegram arrived, having
a very innocent but a very excellent tea. As soon as I had read it I
remember saying to my wife “Good God! He seems to forget that Greece
is practically an island.” By which, I was referring, you see, to the
consummate foolishness of the Kaiser in thinking that any Greek in his
right mind--whatever his private sentiments--should consider, even for
a moment, declaring war against the rulers of the seas.
‘I then summoned certain ministers, and drafted my reply. If you take
the trouble to look it up you will see that it was an emphatic refusal.
I tried to make it polite, but apparently the Kaiser didn’t think it
was polite enough. In any case, he was particularly rude to my minister
in Berlin, Monsieur Theotokis.
‘Nobody has ever quoted that telegram. They probably never will,
because it doesn’t fit in with the Tino legend. However, it is there,
in all the blue books. Just have a look at it when you get the time.
‘The next thing I want you to consider is my various offers of help to
the Allies. I shan’t particularize because you can find them all in
the official résumés of diplomatic correspondence which every country
publishes. Besides, dates and things of that sort are dull.
‘What was my position at the beginning of the war? What was, rather,
the position of Greece? I will tell you. We were in a pretty bad way.
We had none too much money. We had been exhausted by a long series of
wars. We needed, above all things, rest. However, when the Great War
broke out, there were two courses open to us. We could either remain
neutral or we could join the Allies. The idea of throwing our lot in
with Germany was absolutely out of the question, for, as I have said
before, Greece is to all intents and purposes, an island, and it would
have been suicidal to fight England, even had any of us wanted to do
so.
‘Well, as you will see in the blue books, I offered my assistance. It
was refused. Why? Because, according to Lord Grey, it was important not
to _froisser_ Bulgaria, not to annoy King Ferdinand!’ He brought his
fist down on the table with a bang which quite shattered my cigar ash.
‘I warned Grey,’ he said. ‘I warned your Foreign Office, not once but
half a dozen times, that Bulgaria was arming against you, that she
was not to be trusted, that she was about to throw in her lot with
Germany. I was not heeded. I was either answered with polite shrugs of
diplomatic shoulders, or I was not answered at all.’
He stared in front of him gloomily, and when he resumed it was in a
quieter voice.