Читать книгу The Station - Robert Byron - Страница 5

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The sun, admitted at eight o'clock, struck the doors of the cupboard opposite with a meaning that sent a tremor through the nerves and a ball of air into the pit of the body. Over the bed the fringes danced response to a quickened heartbeat. For the day of departure had dawned; day, in another sense, of return.

That afternoon I proceeded to London, and arose next morning to shop. The manager of that imperial institution, Fortnum and Mason's, improvised poems on the contents of the saddle-bags. Six pound tins of chocolate, two of chutney, a syphon brooding like a hen over its sparklets in a wooden box, pills, toilet requisites and stationery gradually accrued, together with the ink in a tin case from which these magic words pour. But to devise chemical armour against the insects which await with hideous patience the infrequent tenants of those musty guest-rooms, defied the ingenuity of every pharmacist from W.2 to E.C.4. I am fortunate, however, in possessing some revolting physical attribute, which prevents me, though not impervious to tickling, from being bitten.

At 10.51 on Friday, August 12th, I left Victoria, surrounded by suit-case, kit-bag, saddle-bags, hat-box (harbouring, besides a panama, towels and pillow-cases), syphon-box, and a smug despatch-case that contained a lesser known Edgar Wallace and credentials to every grade of foreign dignitary, from the Customs to the higher clergy. Only as the train started did I discover the loss of the keys to these receptacles. Fortunately the carpenter of the Channel boat was able to provide substitutes for all but the suit-case. Meanwhile, troubles fell away as the pages of perhaps the greatest master of English fiction disclosed the appalling misdemeanours of Harry Alford, 18th Earl of Chelford. These were tempered with the items of the Central European Observer, a periodical new to my journalistic appetite, whose title had peeped like a succulent strawberry from a cabbage-bed of Liberal weeklies and Conservative quarterlies.

The Channel was rough; but with the undoing of the luggage, the plying of the carpenter with beer, and the delightful spectacle of an arrogant humanity draped about the seats in green and helpless confusion, the passage passed unnoticed. Happiness untrammelled was restored at the sight of the rotund coaches of the Train Bleu. For itinerant comfort, the palm must ever remain with this serpentine palace. Curled against the garter-blue velvet of a single compartment, the French afternoon whirred past me in comatose delight. At length came Paris, the clumped ova of the Sacré Coeur standing high and white against copper storm-clouds. Slowly we shunted round the ceinture amid those intimacies of slum-life presented by the main line traverse of any great city: hopeless figures gazing in immobile despondency through the importance of the train at their own troubles; children roving the open spaces on tenement balconies; garments sexless, patched, one inevitably Tartan, listless on their lines; healthy plants and flowers rendered pathetic by environment; the whole gamut of man's misery, so it seems to the looker. At the Gare de Lyons the train doubled itself, gathered up its passengers, and started for the south.

Dinner was epic. Sleep cradled in the clouds. Morning broke with Avignon. And the sun rose over a barber's chair at Marseilles.

It remained to open the still fastened suit-case. Up a neighbouring street a locksmith of stupendous proportions and his shrewish wife set about to make a key for it. At the end of an hour their patience was exhausted and the upper catch was loosened from the lid by a drill. Now opened, it needed a strap to close it again, in search of which, to the speechless indignation of the shrewish wife, the locksmith and I left the shop. With the advent of the "zip-bag," rational instruments of cohesion seemed to have become extinct. We hurried from street to street, the locksmith scorning my idea of taking a taxi—he never did—and pausing now and again to direct my attention to a bevy of nude nymphs clinging by some process of stomachic suction to the boulders of a municipal fountain. Our quest fulfilled, I piled body and baggage into a diminutive motor, and, telegraphing to herald my arrival in Athens, descended to the docks.

The Patris II lay silent and empty. I was shown my cabin, then left to explore its dark recesses. It was morning; the stewards were hardly aboard; and it was with difficulty that as much as beer and a sandwich were persuaded from the bar. But as the afternoon advanced, peace dispersed. Crowds on deck waved to crowds on shore, serried against the endless vista of warehouse brick. Two women fiddlers and a male harpist scraped discords to the hot air. Ten yards away, the faded rhythm of "Valencia" quavered from a ragged couple, haunted with memories of last year to which I was returning. A fat woman, the hazel of her bare arms emerging inharmoniously from petunia silk, began to cry. As the tea-gong thrummed we moved from the quay-side, threaded the enormous harbour, rounded the outer mole, turned, and sailed east.

The Patris II, a white boat, decorated by Waring & Gillow and sanitated by Shanks, is the pride of her line, which bears the same name as myself. First-class accommodation boasts a ladies' room in dyed sycamore and pink brocade, a lounge in mahogany, a smoking-room, and a bar. The passengers were mainly Greeks, attired in the crest of fashion, and each endowed with sufficient clothes to last them without reappearance through the sixteen odd meals of the voyage. White trouser and mauve plus four flashed above parti-coloured shoe; new tie was child of new shirt; jewels glittered; gowns clung; lips reddened; and all continued to ring the changes in face of the increasing heat; while I lay about, cool and contemptible, in one shirt and a pair of trousers. Music was unceasing. Two pianos and a gramophone ministered to "fox trrott" and "Sharléstoun." While below, in the bows, the incantation of strings impelled the steerage passengers to lose their small-moustached, black-coated selves in a more reserved syncopation. Something inexplicably haphazard pervades Greek dancing: the slowly moving ring of peasants on the sky-line; the inspired solo of an Athenian wine-shop; the applauded pas-de-trois, kicking up the dust of a café circle at a wayside station, with a great trans-European express caught up in amazement; many scenes were hailed from oblivion by the sad rhythm. Till the blare of jazz brought back the West.

First-class society resolved into groups. Seated at meals on the captain's right was Madame Venizelos, uttering words of patronage and comfort to such loose infants as toddled within her orbit. Paying court, on one side, was an ancient scion of the Athenian house of Mélas, a retired naval captain, bearing the magnificent appearance of an English duke of the 'forties, white beard and moustachios a-cock; on the other Sir Frederick Halliday, instrument of that permanent obstruction of the Athens streets, "Freddie's Police." The second stratum centred round a number of young men from the Greek colony in Paris, attired at all moments of the day for every variety of sport. At night there was dancing on the upper deck, which resembled a steeply pitched roof covered in treacle. Overhead, the southern moon hung like a huge gold lantern affixed to the mast, casting romance into the souls of the couples and a path of rippling light over the sea beneath.

The meals were served in the temperature of a blast-furnace, stirred to its whitest by the vibrations of electric fans. One and all were impregnated with the taste of candle-flame, the outstanding feature of that terrifying menace to the palate, "Greek food"—though to me familiar as the smell of a cedar wardrobe to a boy home from school. At my side, thoughtfully placed by the head steward, sat a compatriot, who, after thirty-six hours' unbroken silence, opened conversation with the words: "Do you perspaire much?" Himself, he said, he was resigned to a dripping forehead. Some people, on the other hand, exuded even from their palms. Throughout the voyage we kept our table animated with discussion of the absorbent merits of respective underwears.

The ship was timed to arrive at Piraeus on Tuesday afternoon. Though we had left Marseilles punctually, it was not until the evening of that day that even the western coast of Greece appeared, a shadowy outline. Gradually the mountain gates of the Gulf of Corinth, giant cliff and weathered obelisk, stood softly from the rippled sea, each face a rosy grey, and a luminous blue lurking in the shadow of each easterly cleft. A white blur on the shore bespoke Patras. A three-masted sailing-boat rode by. Astern, the sun lay poised on an indigo hill, like a fairy tinsel flower on a Christmas-tree. A last glimmer trickled down the waves; then only a glow in the sky remained, deepening the hills and giving life to a star in the green opposite. Themistocles, the barman, jangling gin and vermouth, rooted the emotion in the senses. Darkness grew. The dinner-gong rang and rang again. At length it ceased, leaving its hearers filled with that spice of devil-may-care which only extended defiance of a ship's mealtime can induce.

The last evening on board was devoted to what the most sartorially sporting of the Greek youth termed jeux de société. Starting with a species of multi-lingual clumps and a system of forfeits which necessitated the demanding in marriage of the lady opposite, the night was finally launched on an orgy of hide and seek that was only cut short at one in the morning by the advent of the Corinth Canal. Towed by a small tug, the Patris slid slowly into this narrow, electric-lit groove. On either side rose walls of cleft rock as high again as the summit of her topmost mast. Great blasts of heat, conserved from the broiling day, fell down upon the passengers. Gradually, however, as we reached the middle and the bridge over which I had formerly motored to my first view of the Aegean, the novelty waned; and, of the crowd of passengers on the bridge, most were asleep before the passage was completed.

Piraeus next morning presented the picture of webbed and inextricable confusion that large ports always do. Already, before the sun was up, an ominous shimmer, a kind of film, overlay the brown slopes and white houses enclosing the harbour. I was dressing leisurely when there irrupted Nicola, the unscrupulous henchman of an absent friend, shaved, freshly hatted, and leading by the hand a naval officer of inimitable smartness whom I had observed with awe arrive at the side of the ship in a launch. Having packed and breakfasted, I marched in sedate procession through the assembled passengers, already gnashing at the prospect of an hour's wait for doctor's and passport formalities, and descended by the gangway to the boat. Thus was the humble and meek exalted, to the envy of those who had despised him The hands of the douanier were manacled by a laissez-passer from the Greek Minister in London. And in a few minutes we were making fifty miles an hour up the Syngros Avenue, the finest road in the world, as broad as Whitehall from the twin pillars of the temple of Zeus in Athens itself, to the sea two miles away.

The myriad blocks of the town, with the Acropolis perched on its untidy pedestal over to the left and the twisted, wooded spike of Lycabettus dominating its midst, vibrated a mirage of eggshell and white in the quickening heat. We reached the flat destined for my reception. In the absence of the owner, it had apparently become Nicola's perquisite; and a plethora of razor-blades, cake-crumbs, and permanganate of potash testified to his activities as a house-agent. For the moment, a bare-footed old demi-rep was preparing a bedroom, every pouch of her voluminous body quivering with resentment. But, appalled by the garbage of the kitchen, I decided to seek the advice of Lennox Howe, another resident friend. Between the splashings of his bath he offered me two rooms of his own apartment, uttering curdling tales of Nicola's nocturnal parties held in the very teeth of previous lessees. Thither, therefore, to the street of the little female fox the baggage was removed. And Nicola, who had broken, he said, an island holiday to meet me, was free to return to it, richer by 300 drachmas.

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 the 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 of 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 Piraeus. 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 aegina 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 world 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.[*] Here is history woven with the days, not years. But when other races fret and curse, the 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:

[* 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.]

"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 iceman delivered his block. And, as he put it in the chest, still, almost beneath his breath, he wailed the chant, "Ice! I-ice!" 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 common sense 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 unhappy 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 I 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 archaeologist 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.