Off the Coasts of Greece

I

THE sun sets red among the burned-out hills of northern Epirus. The burnished copper that was the sun’s path spreads wide and thin over the smoothly billowing blue of the Straits of Otranto. Twilight comes on swiftly; a nagging wind whips your face; there is a whistling in the guy ropes, a flapping of canvas, and a plaintive creaking of the ship’s timbers. The horizon draws closer; you can barely see the ominous outlines of the thunderous heights of Acroceraunia. The stars come out: the Seven Plough Oxen who never bathe in the streams of the ocean; the Swan; the Eagle; Jupiter, trespassing as of old in other stars’ blue gardens; Polaris, whose only claim to human attention is his official position. The moon rises, a huge disk edging along on the deepened horizon-line, with a yellow path under which the waves wriggle uneasily.

You feel curiously out of place and out of time.

Over these very waters the Venetian galleons, bent on conquest or trade, swept through the Straits; the proud galleys of the Roman Empire before them; the Greeks still earlier, in their search for lands to colonize. Here Antenor sailed from Troy to found Padua; here the Phœnicians fought with the Minoans, who in their own time had driven earlier traders off the seas. They are all sunken below these oblivious waves, which play as freshly under the ship’s prow as if the world were new-made to-day.

One by one the passengers desert the deck with its confusion of the ages, and settle into the armchairs of the saloon under the reassuringly contemporaneous electric lights. All the passengers are there this evening except an American lady, who has looked us all over and decided we are ambiguous brigands, and dull. By the grace of God — I reflect complacently — I am the only American man on board. We are something of a nuisance to one another, we Americans abroad. We feel too much mutual responsibility, like the members of a family that has lately come up in the world. The American scholar winces when the American business man asks at Tivoli, ‘Who was this fellow Hadrian, anyway?’ The business man winces as he surveys the scholar’s baggy clothes. Both wince as they observe narrow foreign eyes watching the antics of the American young girl of flagrant demeanor and virginal intent.

Foreigners are n’t like that. Most of them limit their sense of responsibility to their own behavior. As we say in America, they have no social sense.

But for the American lady who avoids our company, I alone represent the United States of America on this good ship, bound for Piræus, Stamboul, and Odessa, under orders to bring back a cargo of old iron — bloodstained, I am sure.

First to command your notice is a ponderous old gentleman with a face that reminds you at once of Bismarck and H. G. Wells. He always carries a great wad of manuscript under his arm; he is probably an historian of some forgotten religious schism. He is attended by a rotund, suave man whose profession appears to be deference. The three other Englishmen are coöperators, on a mission to buy Christmas plums for all the Little Jack Horners in Manchester: a spare man with tight lips, a dogged man, and a patient man from Ulster. I doubt if the Turks and Greeks will be able to hold out a single plum on such a team as this. They ignore the presumptive historian of the forgotten schism, and hate his companion cordially for his unctuous way of saying ‘Lady But-lar.’

‘You Yanks,’ remarks the tightlipped coöperator, ‘you Yanks think you won the war. What you really did — you gathered in the shekels.’

’Just so. And incidentally we saved a bit of British bacon.’

These little courtesies, as some wise man has said, don’t cost anything, and they help on marvelously the cause of Anglo-American understanding.

There is a slim dark man, with deep eyes and shoulders made supple by shrugging. A Frenchman? I try my pathetic odds and ends of French on him. No, he is a Spaniard and, Heaven be praised, he speaks French about as badly as I do, hence a meeting of minds is practicable. There are two men chattering volubly in an unknown tongue; one is shifty, subtle, Oriental in manner, with a face that is unimpressive when it is full upon you, but made up of magically flowing lines in profile. The other is blunt-faced, myopic, with the fashionable German hair-cut that reduces the whole expanse of skull to a stubble like a ten days’ beard, except for a forelock equivalent to a shavingbrush. Both are Greeks, I find, but the German clip is a Doctor of Letters from Jena, who likes Ludendorff and admires Mussolini passionately. The other is a merchant, with grandiose political ideas. The solution of the world problem can come, he says, only through a coalition of the three vital nations, Germany, England, and the United States. Germany would contribute order, England would contribute sound ideas of business and social life, and the United States would contribute money. Under such a coalition the little peoples of the world could live in peace and the enjoyment of the good gifts of the gods.

There is a Swiss who looks like the Kaiser but speaks only French. He is a bank auditor, going out to establish clarity in the accounts of a Constantinople branch. He is amiable, but restrained by a feeling that an auditor has nothing to say that anyone wall care to hear, except once a year. There is a square-headed Dutchman who speaks all languages well, has sampled all philosophies, has no convictions, and enjoys life royally. A plump ship’s officer, with enough braid on him for the ruler of the Queen’s Navee, speaks a little English so well you never can convince yourself that those first five sentences are absolutely all he has. Still, his account of the harbor of Yokohama the day after the earthquake, told in explosive phrases of Italian, French, and German, supplemented by a vast repertory of gestures and grimaces, is as vivid as anything I have ever heard.

Finally, at a corner table, sipping Mattoni mineral water, is a married pair. The husband is about sixty, narrow-faced, with pointed old-ivory beard, checks glowing with purplishred surface-capillaries, nose long and thin and sensitive as a rabbit’s ears. The wife may be of any age under forty. Her complexion is a dusky cream; her eyes are dark gems that sparkle, her brows are exquisite curves, and her lips are full and sweet. She carries her shapely head like a caryatid and is altogether lovely. She is an Armenian and her husband is a German who has been so long in Turkey that all his manner is Oriental. He wears the title of Pasha with becoming grace; he wants you to know that he is of some importance, but would n’t for the world have you suspect that he is so important as he really is. He is bound for Angora on a ‘mission.’ He is very pro-Turk, but not so pro-Turk as his lovely Armenian wife. Blood is thicker than water, but Near-Eastern intrigue is thicker still.

II

The sun stands high. Our ship moves slowly in a zigzagging strait with rugged hills of naked red stone on either side: Albania and Corfu. We are about to anchor at our port of call, Santi Quaranta, a fringe of mean houses on the narrow margin between the sea and a steep slope of rocky detritus from a dull brown height. On an adjacent hill is the ruin of a monastery, according to tradition the home of the Santi Quaranta, the Forty Saints. Religious discussion must have run high among them: not only the roof but the whole superstructure of the building appears to have been blown off.

We sit interminable hours under the awning, while valiant brown oarsmen in rowboats tow huge lighters to our ship’s side and tow them away laden with boxes and crates. A drove of savage long-horned cattle files down a military road in a pass between barren crests; the beasts meet a Ford truck and try to climb the perpendicular sides of the road. Presently they disappear behind the buildings of the town. An hour later you see them again, crowded on a lighter that is being towed out to a Greek ship. The manner of loading them on the ship is novel. A noose is dropped from a spar over the horns of an ox and drawn tight. Then a windlass hoists the ox clear of the lighter, his legs straight forward, his tail straight out, like a gigantic animalcracker. Those ox-necks will be substantial eating.

Under the awning we talk intermittently, pooling our English, French, and German, and taking out such profit of understanding as we can. We talk of liberty, the one thing the people on these barren hills have to fight for; of peace, which only the Englishmen and I accept as a practical ideal. The Greek Doctor of Letters returns to his praise of Mussolini; the commercial Greek points significantly toward a hill on our right; just beyond it, he says, is the unfortified town of Corfu, where Mussolini heroically bombarded the home for refugee children and managed to kill and maim a handful of them. The Doctor of Letters retires into disgruntled silence; he knows that his frivolous fellow-countryman will never understand true greatness. The German-Turkish Pasha regales us with anecdotes exhibiting British and American gallantry and magnanimity in the World War, as contrasted with French meanness and barbarity. Like so many of his compatriots, he is very pro-American now, in spite of the fact that he believes firmly that we entered the war to save our British and French investments, and that the Fourteen Points were a clever swindle. I always knew the Germans entertained some such erroneous belief; what surprises me is the number of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians, as well as neutrals, who labor under the same delusion. On the whole it appears to hold sway at least as widely as the dogma of the sole responsibility of Germany for the war.

III

If time meant anything to the mariners on the Ionian Sea we should have rounded Cape Malea by morning. We should then have had the delight of a near view of the eastern shore of Lacedæmon. The widespread arms of Argolis and Sunium would have welcomed us into the Gulf of Ægina and our eyes would have rested on the Acropolis with the last rays of the sun. But in Levantine waters time is a dream, which comes or goes by its own will.

The sun was already low as we issued from the narrow strait between Cythera and the Malea promontory. Cythera is a barren island now, with bold headlands looking out upon the Mediterranean. On one of these stood the temple of Aphrodite within its sacred enclosure. Dark slender maidens attended the rites of the goddess; sailors skimming by prostrated themselves on the decks as their eyes caught the gleam of the marble columns in the morning sun. But that was when Cythera was a fairer, greener land. In the remote south a pyramid point on the misty line of the horizon reminds you of what was once the centre of civilization. It is a mountain peak in Crete, ‘land of a hundred cities.’

Malea promontory stretches out miles and miles, an immense calloused index-finger, crooked with rheumatism, pointing toward Egypt. Infrequent villages of square stone houses find lodgment on its rocky sides; around them a gauze of olive and vine green flutters over the red-brown soil. Near the very point of the cape a precipitous crag throws out two broad arms to the beating surf. Between them is a little garden of vines and fruit trees, with a tiny white house, shaped like the traditional beehive. It is the cell of a holy hermit, who will never be able to get out of his garden until he grows wings. Year after year he will sit before his cell, looking out upon seas magically calm or wild beyond belief. It is calm now. The smooth, coppery wave from the ship’s prow rises through a whole scale of blues, to dip over into ultramarine.

This is Malea, the ‘graveyard of ships’ of Greek times and beyond. For ten thousand years tall ships have been foundering here, under the savage winds that spring out from the Ægean or from the Ionian Sea. The bottom must be paved with bronze beaks, the nautical machinery of all ages, treasure chests, talismans and images that keep the sailor safe from harm. I can imagine no more fitting final restingplace for ship or man than the sea floor under these waves, copper and gold and blue, fringed with dazzling foam at the foot of the brooding cliff.

IV

It is morning, and we are at anchor in the harbor of Piræus. In the remote distance one discerns a tiny gray hill with a bit of toy architecture on it: the Acropolis. Hymettus lies majestically beyond, and Pentelicon, not yet healed of the deep gashes whence all the ancient world drew its finest marble. You try to imagine where the Long Walls ran that protected the road from Athens to Piræus and Phaleron. But Piræus has grown beyond the ancient limits, obscuring the ancient topography with its tedious modern buildings.

Near us is anchored a small ship flying the British flag. It is packed from stem to stern with people of all ages, in clothes of all colors. An excursion boat, we surmise, returned from Delos or some other enchanted isle. No, the captain explains, they are refugees — Asia Minor Greeks, newly expelled from their homes under the treaty clause dealing with ‘exchange of populations.'

I had supposed that this peculiar atrocity of the war period had been long discontinued.

I focus my field glasses on them as they descend the ship’s ladder into the rowboats that are to land them on a soil that their ancestors left — some of them — at the time when Jason set out to loot the Golden Fleece. There are youths and maidens irrepressibly alive to the new world before them; mothers with shapeless bundles on their backs and alert-eyed babies in their arms; wizened old women; tottering old men. I mark the absence of men in their prime.

‘Of course the Turks could not let them go. They might take up arms against Turkey.’ So the Pasha’s Armenian wife explains.

‘They are already dead? Or dying in work-gangs? ‘

She shrugs her shoulders. ‘ I wonder what you Americans would do to aliens who took up arms against you when you were fighting for your national life.’

There is no pity in her face for the refugees. But her jeweled eyes are lovely.

I walk down the deck to the Greek merchant.

‘It ‘s a great problem,’ he comments disconsolately. ‘We have no need for them. Suppose somebody drove fifteen million people into the United States: you’d have a problem like this. What to do with them nobody knows. And they have lost the spirit of work — most of them. They expect to live the rest of their lives at our expense.’

I approach the Dutchman. ‘Sad, sad, of course,’ he remarks briskly, ‘but it was always so in this country. Migrations, massacres, mass expulsions. Many die, but those who live forget it soon. They have short memories, these people of the Levant, and no sense of the future. You know, yourself, you can’t be very unhappy in the present: it is too superficial, without the past and the future. A little pain is all it will hold. Look at them now, on the wharf. It’s a picnic to-day; and to-morrow? You recall the pseudoAnacreon : —

‘τÒ σήμϵρoν μἐλϵι μoι τÒ bδ' ɑvριoν τiς oiδϵν;’

But for me it was the present that was hard to hold fast; and it came to the same thing. Disregard this fungus growth of modern buildings, of people in contemporary costumes, of present hopes and despairs, and Greece lies before you as she lay before the Dorians when they came down from the north three thousand years ago. So she will lie three thousand years hence — tragic, but gay.