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ATHENS—“WE HAVE LOVED HELEN; MUST WE DIVORCE HER?”

If only it were always calm, how delightful it would be to travel by sea!

From Malta to Athens, indeed, is not a long run; but when every moment you are tossed from side to side, at the mercy of all the winds in heaven, most things have a disagreeable look. As we approached the brown and arid coast of this historic peninsula, I thought how unjust it seems to have driven the Ottoman Greeks out of fertile Turkey to a fatherland that cannot feed them. You cannot obtain blood from a stone, nor fruitful crops from an unfertile soil. What is Greece to do for these poor people, who cannot all turn merchants or moneylenders?

Before landing at Piræus, with my Italian escort, I took the precaution to investigate the rate of exchange—250 drachmas to the £1 sterling.

“It is strange,” said I, “that we have none of this inconvenience in Turkey. There one always gets a fair ‘exchange,’ and no worry.”

The steamer slows down to anchor, and on all sides we are hustled by modern Shylocks. “Two hundred and fifty drachmas for a pound,” I asked, “how many for five shillings?” And the Greek answered: “Fifteen.” “Come and listen to this Greek arithmetic,” I called in Italian; but the man understood me, and let out a hearty laugh. Though I turned from him, without malice, he promptly raised his price from fifteen to forty-five (!), and in the end I bought drachmas enough to take us ashore, hoping for better terms on land.

I shall never forget that day at Piræus—heat and dust, flies and refugees. Could a more terrible combination be imagined? All along the quays lay these wretched folk, many of them fast asleep, with armies of flies crawling over them. If by chance one stumbled over a dusky body, which it was not easy to distinguish from the soil, a cloud of flies rose to smite you in the face—the most fatal of disease-carriers! The brown-faced women, dirtier even than the Neopolitans, now crowded round us, offering cakes and sweets from which they were every moment obliged to brush off thick coatings of flies, that once more struck one in the face or settled over my shoulders.

My Italian escort had, meanwhile, kindly procured a newspaper to act as fan, and now, hurriedly brushing away these horrible pests, he took a silk handkerchief out of his pocket to cover my neck. “What a magnificent husband you will make for someone,” I said, smiling with gratitude; and he blushed with all the charm of his twenty-one years.

In another moment my eye fell on the hard brown faces and big “Jewish” noses of the moneylenders, forcing a smile as they call on you to “buy.” They have very much the same expression as Southern Italians; keeping one eye, it would almost seem, to make a pleasant impression on possible purchasers, while the other betrays the keen and swift reckoning of profits to the uttermost farthing.

Seated behind little tables topped with boxes of glass, they are eagerly displaying their filthy paper money; haggling, arguing, smiling, and cheating you in one breath! Surely no type of humanity could carry us further from the heroes of our schoolday imaginings!

Wearied with fly-dodging, in fact, I had scant energy left for a “good bargain,” over this “paper filth” for honest English sterling.

Sympathy now prompted me to ask the Italian Whether his eyes were not in pain; and, by the power of auto-suggestion, the inquiry caused my own to ache as they had never ached before. Before we landed the captain had given me a solemn warning on no account to rub my eyes, however tormented by the continual glare of a bright sun on white houses, or I should be certain to “catch an incurable eye-disease and go on ‘weeping’ to the end of my days.”

“Never, never speak of disease again,” I had answered. “Misfortunes come quickly enough, without our going to fetch them.”

Fortunately even the flies could not make it a long journey from Piræus to Athens; and we could glance in passing at the quaint and not unattractive bookstalls, now showing large photographs of modern “Heroes”—the Greek generals! After all, they had done their best. They were no more responsible for the mistakes of their Government, than we are for ours.

Taking train for the last part of our route, we were packed like sardines among the ugliest possible types of human beings one could imagine; but, luckily, soon alighted at a station whose magic name should thrill the dullest heart.

We were in Athens! But the Italian could only exclaim: “What women!” I reminded him that they were, after all, descended from Helen of Troy, for whose beauty the world in its youth made war. Yet it seemed almost a heresy to name that name in such surroundings.

If only one could show all men what a tragedy is here.

“There is something I long to do,” I told my companion. “I would summon crowds of my countrymen and my countrywomen to the Albert Hall and borrow the magic tongue of Mr. Lloyd George, to draw their tears for our dear Christian brethren at the mercy of the brutal Turk! And then a deputation of these money-changing Greeks should be brought in to stand at the Welshman’s right hand and his left!”

How many, even then, would read, mark, and digest the grim comment?

But the Italian laughed again and again at the picture my words suggested. I could only murmur: “What is it, to be twenty-one!”

I believe we went into every church in Athens; for ever since I left home I have never passed a church or a mosque without sparing a moment to enter and pray for peace. “It will do no good,” said my companion, and I replied: “It will do no harm.”

We saw many women also at prayer, kneeling before their Ikons—not for victory, but in sad thoughts of their own dead, and for help and strength to bear their own terrible sorrows.

Once the Greek Pope came up and spoke to us, supposing, to my young Italian’s honest confusion, that we were man and wife. The spirit moved him to denounce, in very broken French, the treachery of England; and, whether or no it was from heat and fatigue, or from the sight of those broken-hearted women, something seemed to burst in my throat and bitter tears streamed from my tired eyes. I could not tell him I was English. I could not find words or strength, such as came to me later in Anatolia, to plead a little for England by putting some of the blame on M. Venizelos.

While the Italian discreetly left me—to kneel before an Ikon in silent prayer to the Man of Sorrows—I could but stand and suffer the attack upon my beloved country, choking with tears of humiliation.

Alas, the incident does not stand alone. When taking tea in an hotel, I asked my companion to make inquiries about the best place to buy a Union Jack, and the proprietor seized the opportunity to give us his opinion of British honour.

Now I never heard, throughout the whole of Anatolia, a single Turk speak of Britain or Mr. Lloyd George as these Greeks both spoke. It is a pity that some of our pro-Greek politicians were not with me—to learn the real value of all they have undertaken for their Christian brethren.

In that church, maybe, I was so cruelly overcome because the broken-hearted women had stirred in me a glowing vision of the great Pericles. “For me,” was his proud boast, “shall no man wear mourning. I have not shed one drop of human blood.” Could any ruler leave this earth with a nobler record? Could any conceive for himself so fine an epitaph?

Our rulers, and Venizelos, have wasted the precious blood of Europe to flatter their personal vanity and nurse an idle imperialism for Greece; and when everything goes wrong they have only to resign!

I had determined to ascend the Acropolis, whatever the effort to reach the top, and refused even to be discouraged when at the very entrance our driver pulled up and informed us that “it was forbidden” to drive within.

It did not occur to me to protest; but we had scarcely walked twenty yards up the steep ascent when a carriage (containing the captain and his daughter) and then another carriage (!) drove by. Naturally indignant, we returned to ask the man what he meant. To evade argument, he disingenuously explained: “It would need two horses to get up there, and I have only one.” The subterfuge only infuriated me the more, and when he had six times sturdily refused to obey orders, I simply seized the miserable little being by the shoulders and shook him like a rat. Violence proved the only way, and we had no more trouble with him!

It is horrible, in such hallowed surroundings, to be haggling about money; but, of course, we were cheated over our change!

“Never mind,” said the Italian, “let the creatures rob us. Gentlemen cannot fight with grooms.” And as I looked at the exquisite profile of this young Venetian against the Athenian skies, I could fancy myself accompanied by one of the old Patricians, amidst his degenerate, money-changing descendants.

Almost in silence we wandered over the ruins of a civilisation whence came the highest culture of the world. I felt, indeed, as if I had been born too late; for what have I in common with the century in which I live?

To-day nations are not judged by their lyrics that are the measure of their imagination, and without imagination the race must die. Our standards are skill in commerce!

Had I the art, whether of pen or brush, to pay fit homage to this immortal rock, who would look or listen? Could I invent yet one more machine to “save time”—for making more money—the world would be at my feet.

Where shall we look for a Pericles, who hand our laurels to the presiding genius of a “cash and carry” store?

There is no finer view of Athens than one can gain from the Acropolis, as the city lies at its feet, like some plain of brown paper dotted with green palms and the little white houses drawn in chalk.

“Here,” said I, “is the Greece of Oxford—of Homer and Plato, of Æschylus and of Sophocles! The magnificent traditions of an immortal past.

“It was in Oxford of classic memories, that I first heard the Tales of Greece, first listened to her great scholars telling of Andromache and Antigone in the exquisite language of the finest literature in the world.

“Here, too, is the Greece of Byron—of Childe Harold, and of the Maid of Athens!”

How the voice carries in this clear atmosphere! No wonder these ancient people would crowd under the blue skies to every play, tragic or comic, that their great dramatists could produce.

And now, as the sunset colours—gold, scarlet, violet, and purple—are glowing upon the immortal rock, over the marble ruins, I marvel at “tiny” Athens and her “vast” name.

Alas, for Hellas and modern Greece!

Had her own people been as faithful as Oxford to the traditions of ancient Greece, what would have been the Eastern Question to-day? And for some, no doubt, it is this very honouring of Hellas that has been responsible for our fatal pro-Greek enthusiasms. If we recognise the superiority of the modern Turk, loyalty to Plato, to Aristotle, and to Socrates must forbid speech; gratitude to the lyrcis of Hellas must tie the tongue. Orators and poets, artists and thinkers cannot forget. Hellas still lives and rules in the Republic of Letters and Art.

We understand Oxford; but for those who have been on the spot, facts tell another tale and speak with another voice. Where, in Greece to-day, are her men of intellect or imagination, even her aristocrats or her warriors? The millions spent in propaganda may serve to prolong the legend, they cannot alter facts. To visit, with glowing anticipations, this land of our dreams, means the awakening to bitter disillusion. Those only are still blind who will not see.

In Angora I could but plead for England: “We have loved Helen; must we divorce her?”

More than the eloquence of Venizelos, more than the gold of Zakaroff, more than any pity for Christian martyrs; it is our age-old loyalty to the civilisation to which we owe our visions and our ideals—that has led us so woefully and so wilfully astray. Is there not, after all, some “merit” in British “fair play” to a “lost cause?”