Читать книгу Cities of Refuge - Philip Gibbs - Страница 20

Table of Contents

The British Government desired to have a report on the situation in Asia Minor, with particular attention to the possibilities of Greek resistance to an impending attack led by a Turkish patriot named Mustapha Kemal who defied the Peace Treaties and had raised considerable levies with mounted troops and field artillery. Oliver Alden, of Naval Intelligence, was detailed for this task, and proceeded to Smyrna on a Greek boat which had formerly been a pleasure yacht owned by one of the Vanderbilts.

There were several Greek officers on board. At the beginning of the voyage they paced the deck in their smart uniforms with gold epaulettes, looking very pleased with themselves. They talked incessantly, smoked innumerable cigarettes, and fingered strings of beads which are used to work off nervous energy. Down on the lower deck, huddled together, was a crowd of peasants, singing old folk-songs, perhaps as old as the Golden Age of Greece, and very pleasant in their chant-like sound blown to Alden’s ears by a stiff breeze, which increased in strength as Constantinople became dream-like in the distance and the little ship came into the open waters.

One by one, as the stars came out, the Greek officers retired to seek their cabins. The songs on the lower deck ceased and the huddled peasants were also sick. Oliver Alden had become less prone to seasickness after many tossings in the North Sea, and stayed on deck because of a star-strewn sky and a sense of magic on the waters. He was on the sea of adventure in the ancient world. The Greeks of Homer’s age had sailed their boats on these waters and had looked up to those same stars with a belief in the fairy-tales of mythology. Behind those stars they had seen the heroic gods and the beauty of goddess women. Those Greeks had been great traders and pioneers of civilization. They had established colonies in Asia Minor which even now remained. The peasants round Smyrna were of purer stock than the Greeks of Athens. Their spades and ploughs still turned up exquisite bits of pottery and statuary which had been fashioned by their forefathers three thousand years ago, and the foundations of old cities in which there had been noble architecture and a culture more advanced than any that had followed. It was based on slave labour, but Greek slaves had a better time than free labourers in English fields or factories, at least in the Victorian Age. It was astonishing how the Greek spirit had become aware of beauty and had worshipped it. It seemed to be the breath of their life. Everything they worked and fashioned expressed this sense of form and life. Their philosophers had reached out to ultimate truth.

Alden was not very strong on Greek philosophy, but standing there on the deck of a small Greek ship, looking up to those millions of twinkling stars above an iridescent sea, he had an idea that Greek thought had gone as far as human intelligence may get behind the veil of truth. All very astonishing, he thought. In spite of all our mechanization and our discoveries of scientific law, we were not really more civilized. Even Christianity had not gained much of a victory over barbarism. That World War was rather a knock-out blow to man’s belief in progress. What happened in Russia—what was happening—was not very reassuring to our self-conceit. All those cruelties—all those horrors ...

He leant over the rail watching the long white wake of the ship from which little flames seemed to leap because of the phosphorescence.

A girl came up to him and leant close to him with her arms on the rail. He had noticed her sitting alone on a coil of rope forward of the bridge. She spoke to him.

“Say, Mr. English officer, I guess you and I are the only passengers who are not losing our suppers tonight. Those Greek warriors have given themselves up for lost.”

“Travelling alone?” asked Alden civilly. “An American?”

“Greek,” answered the girl with a laugh. “I learnt the American language at their college in Constantinople. But I can speak English with the right accent. I can also speak Russian, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, at least well enough to say, ‘I’m a respectable young woman and though I’m quite willing to be pleasant I’m not going to allow any kissing and hugging.’ ”

Alden glanced at her by the light of a three-quarters moon and those stars above. She was a slightly made young woman, with a rather boyish look because of short hair. She had very bright merry eyes.

“You’re a bit of a linguist,” he admitted. “But why should you lay so much stress on your moral character?”

The Greek girl laughed again.

“Well, it was necessary in the company I’ve been keeping. For the past two years I’ve been living among Red soldiers, Circassian peasants, and Greek sailors. In fact, until yesterday, I was a Greek sailor myself. That’s how I got away from Russia. The boys rigged me out in a pair of their second-best trousers—very loose, you know—and the upper part of a seaman’s kit. I was a nice-looking young seaman. The captain got a bit fresh when he found that I was a perfectly good female. So I said to him in Greek, ‘I’m a respectable young woman. I’m quite willing to be pleasant——’ ”

“Come and have a cup of coffee,” said Alden. “I would like to hear your adventures.”

“Then you will have to sit up all night,” said the Greek girl.

They sat up all night. Alden provided the young woman with cigarettes. She returned the compliment by offering him the contents of a paper bag which held a slab of Turkish Delight and some sticks of chocolate.

Like Miss Browne, she had been a governess in Russia after her education at the American college in Constantinople, where she had learnt the American accent and negro spirituals and funny little coon songs, which she sang to Alden between chapters of amazing narrative. The German lady and her two children had escaped from Moscow at the beginning of the Revolution. This girl had been caught by the Red tide. She had played the piano for them in soldiers’ billets. She had marched with them. She had seen massacres between Whites and Reds. She had been sick at the sight of newly hanged men and then had become hardened to that sort of thing. She had had typhus and slept in pigsties and cattle-sheds. She had wandered all through Russia and lived among Circassians. And somehow through all of it she had kept her gaiety and even her virtue.

“I am still a virtuous young woman,” she said. “And I say my prayers now and then, and I can’t say I regret my adventures. I must say I’ve seen a lot of life. I hope to see some more when I rejoin my parents in Smyrna. It’s a great thing, isn’t it, to go on seeing life and go on laughing at its funny ways?”

Alden lighted his thirtieth cigarette.

“They don’t seem to me so funny as all that,” he remarked. “You’ve told me things which have raised the hair on my scalp. I’m staggered by the cruelty and beastliness of men. And I’m still more staggered at your laughter and high spirits after all those adventures. I find life terrible when I hear such tales.”

“But it’s Life,” said the Greek girl. “Certainly it’s terrible sometimes. But isn’t life like that? And there is always death very near. I laugh at death. I despise it. It can’t frighten me. When one has learnt not to be frightened at death one regains one’s sense of humour. Nothing matters then. And isn’t all history like that? Men have always killed each other and fought like wolves, and at the same time been kind and generous and loving to their womenfolk and devoted to their children. I find that men are children. I can disarm any man who looks like a wild beast by talking nonsense to him, and not being afraid of him. They eat out of my hand. They share their food with me. They don’t lay a finger on me. I’ve nursed their heads on my lap when they were wounded and dying. They’re so much like little children—even the worst of them.”

“I wish I had your pluck,” said Alden, very much impressed by this young woman.

She laughed and her eyes danced with mirth.

“I know that word ‘pluck’. There was an English girl at the American college. She taught me that word.”

“Sing me another coon song,” said Alden. “They’re very amusing.”

She sang him another coon song, about another coal-black mammy. Just before dawn she fell asleep with her head against his shoulder, and he kept very still so that he shouldn’t wake her.