When the Going Was Good Page 7

  When he disembarked he invited me to luncheon at the Grande Bretagne. I said, yes, but next day he did not turn up.

  We arrived just before dinner and moored in Phaleron Bay.

  I had been to Athens once before, at a time when I had never been farther from England than Paris. I shall not easily forget the romance of my first arrival. I came from Marseilles in the Patris II, a Hellenic national ship of fairly recent construction. It was in winter and we had rough weather most of the way. I shared a cabin with a Greek currant merchant who did not move from his bed during the five days’ voyage. The only other English-speaking first-class passenger was a blustering American engineer. I sat on deck most of the time, feeling rather ill and reading James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. At intervals the American and I drank mastika. He said if one ever drank mastika one returned to Greece; sometimes I went and looked over at the ‘deck passengers’, huddled under improvised tents, scratching their feet, and always eating. Piraeus was our first stop. Sun had set and the harbour was all alight when we came in. There was a long delay before we could land. The rowing boats came out all round us packed so tight that one could have walked ashore, all the boatmen shouting for custom. The friends I was visiting had come out to meet me, and sat bobbing below and shouting up, ‘Evelyn’. They had brought their valet with them to deal with the luggage – a man of singular ferocity who had been a hired assassin at Constantinople under the old régime. He and the boatmen took up the cry ‘EE-lin! EE-lin!’

  Then my luggage got into the hands of the wrong boatman, and he and that valet had a fight which the valet won very easily by means of an outrageous but wholly conclusive foul blow. Then we went ashore and drove very quickly from Piraeus to Athens, along a road cleft and scarred as if by bombardment, in a very ramshackle Morris car which had no lamps or brakes or hooter, but was freed from police molestation by a diplomatic number and a little Union Jack between the places where the headlights ought to have been.

  It was the Orthodox Christmas Day, and the streets were full of people shaking hands and kissing and letting off fireworks in each other’s eyes. We went straight to a night club kept by a one-legged Maltese, who gave us cocktails made out of odd drugs and a spirit of his own distilling.

  Later the première danseuse of the cabaret came out and sat at our table and warned us on no account to touch the cocktails. It was too late.

  Later still I drove round the city in a taxi-cab on I forgot what errand, and then back to the night club. The taxi-driver followed me to our table. I had given him as a tip over ten pounds in drachmas, my watch, my gloves, and my spectacle-case. It was too much, he protested.

  The rest of my visit was rather overshadowed by this introduction to Athenian life. That was in my undergraduate days, and it makes me feel unnaturally old to recall them.

  But even now, in comparative maturity, my second visit to Athens coincided with my introduction to a new sort of drink. As soon as I landed I took a taxi into the town, to visit a friend called Alastair who lived at this time in a little house in the eastern quarter, under the slopes of Lycabettus, in a side street off the Kolonaki Square. This house was full of mechanical singing birds and eikons, one of which, oddly enough the most modern, had miraculous powers. One of Alastair’s servants gave notice, on the grounds that it used to stretch an arm out of the picture and bang him over the head when he neglected his work. Alastair was not yet dressed. I told him that I had had a late night, drinking after the ball with some charming Norwegians, and felt a little shaken. He then made me this drink, which I commend to anyone in need of a wholesome and easily accessible pick-me-up. He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. The sugar and Angostura enrich the wine and take away that slight acidity which renders even the best champagne slightly repugnant in the early morning. Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a red grain of pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations. I sipped this almost unendurably desirable drink and played with the artificial birds and musical boxes until Alastair was ready to come out. I had another friend in Athens called Mark, and with these two I spent two delightful days.

  We drove along the Eleusis road, pursued at times by savage sheep-dogs, and then turned off by the cart road below Mount Aegaleos to an isolated café overlooking the bay of Salamis. It was Sunday afternoon, and there were several other parties sitting under the Hawaiian thatched arbour. There was a photographer making little tin-type photographs which, when developed, usually revealed his own thumb print and little else. There were two students, male and female, in football shorts and open shirts, with rugged staffs and haversacks. There was a very happy family of Athenian bourgeoises. They had a baby with them. This they first sat on the table, then on the top of their car; then they put it upside down on a chair; then it was lifted on to the roof of the café, then it was put astride a clothes line and rocked gently backwards and forwards, then it was put into the bucket of the well and let down out of sight, then it was given a bottle of gaseous lemonade, a more perilous drink in Athens than in any town in the world. To all these efforts towards its entertainment it responded with chirrups of happy laughter and big, frothy bubbles dribbling down its chin. There was also a limousine containing two very mondaine young ladies, who would not come into the open, but sat back hardly visible among cut velvet upholsteries and were waited upon by two adolescent military officers; now and then the window would be let down and jewelled fingers would appear, haughtily discarding a sheet of silver paper or a banana skin.

  Mark and Alastair and I sat in the shade and drank a carafe of resinated white wine and ate Turkish delight, while the photographer capered before us with his camera and caused us to purchase enough copies of his thumb print to convict him of any crime in the Greek statute book.

  We went back to the Stella for dinner and then returned to see the night life. First we went to an underground café decorated with pseudo-Russian frescoes. Here we saw most of the English colony, engaged in those fervent intrigues, part social, part political, part personal, which embellish and enrich Athenian life more than that of any capital in Europe. But the entertainment was confined to one pianist in Georgian peasant dress. We asked if there was to be no cabaret. ‘Alas,’ said the manageress. ‘Not tonight. Last night there was a German gentleman here, and he bit the girls so terribly in the legs that tonight they say they will not dance!’

  From there we went to the Folies Bergères, which was very chic and Parisian; the waiter tried to induce us to order champagne, and a Hungarian Jewess performed Oriental dances in a Chu-Chin-Chow slave market costume, modestly supplemented with pink cotton tights. Mark’s boredom soon became uncontrollable, so we called for our bill, paid them half what they demanded (which they accepted with every manifestation of gratitude), and left.

  We walked across the gardens to the poorer part of the town. Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas, and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed. It was in this dusty smell that we walked in the garden, but garlic met us at the bottom of the steps which led from the street to the door of the MΠAP ΘEΛΛATOE; it was garlic sweetened, however, by the savour of roast lamb. There were two lambs impaled horizontally on spits, sizzling over an open charcoal fire. The atmosphere was one of Dickensian conviviality. Only men were present, most of them peasants come up from the country for the night. They all smiled greetings to us, and one of them sent three mugs of beer across to our table. This began a tremendous round of ceremonious health-drinking which was still going on by the time we left. It is the commendable practice of the Greeks ne
ver to serve drink without food, usually a little bit of garlic sausage, or bad ham on the end of a match; these appear in little saucers, and our table was soon strewn with them.

  Two men in the corner were playing guitars of a kind, and others were dancing, with very severe expressions on their faces but a complete lack of self-consciousness. They were Pyrrhic dances of indefinable antiquity. Four of them danced together, going through the various figures with great solemnity. If one of them made a false move it was as though he had dropped a catch in an English cricket match; they accepted his apologies in as sporting a spirit as they could assume, but it clearly was a grave wrong, not lightly to be dismissed or expiated except by prodigies of accuracy in the future. Moreover, as in cricket, the amateur status was jealously preserved. So far from taking a hat round after the performance, the dancers themselves paid a few halfpence to the band. There was keen competition to dance, the fours being already made up and eagerly waiting for their turn to take the floor. The only fight which occurred that evening was occasioned by one rather tipsy young man attempting to perform out of his turn. They all set on him and pummelled him for his bad manners, but later it was made up and they drank his health.

  As the evening went on the conversation became more animated. I was unable to follow it, but Alastair said it was mostly about politics; an uninstructed discussion but full of high feeling. There was an elderly man with a curly grey beard who was much moved. He roared and pounded on the table with his fist; he pounded on his glass, broke it, and cut himself. He stopped arguing and began to cry. Immediately everyone else stopped arguing too and came over to comfort him. They wrapped a grubby handkerchief round his hand, which was not, I think, at all seriously injured. They gave him beer and bits of bad ham on matches; they patted him on the back and put their arms round his neck and kissed him. Soon he was smiling again and the discussion was resumed, but as soon as he showed signs of excitement, they warned him with smiles, by moving his mug farther across the table.

  At last, after a great many adieux, we climbed up the steps again into the fresh air, and so home under the orange-trees through the warm darkness that smelled like tweed.

  Next morning Alastair had to go to the Chancery to decode telegrams, so Mark and I went shopping in Shoe Lane – the street in the old Turkish quarter where all the second-hand dealers have their stalls. Mark continued some negotiations which, he told me, had already been protracted for three weeks, concerning the purchase of a grotto constructed by Anatolian refugees out of cork and looking-glass and pieces of sponge; only the price prevented me from buying a marble statuette of an association footballer.

  The Stella was sailing at noon for Venice, and I narrowly escaped missing the last launch from the shore, Mark delaying me by the gift of three religious postcards, a balloon, and a basket of black olives.

  Immediately after luncheon we passed through the Corinth canal, which, for some reason I could not understand, attracted many of the passengers more than anything they had yet seen on their travels. It took some time to go through, but they remained on deck, photographing it and talking about it and making water-colour sketches of its featureless stone sides, while I went to my cabin and dozed; I had a good deal of sleep to make up and this seemed an opportunity.

  We reached Corfu early next morning.

  When, after my first visit to Greece, I stopped there for a few hours (in a vile ship called the Yperoke, where I was travelling second class in barely conceivable discomfort), it seemed to me then one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. So much was I impressed, that when, later, I found myself writing a novel about someone very rich, I gave her a villa in Corfu, as I thought that, when I was rich, that was one of the first things I would buy.

  The chief merchandise of the island seemed to be live tortoises and olive-wood animals, made by the convicts in the prison. Several passengers in the Stella bought tortoises, few of which survived the voyage; tortoise races became an added attraction to the deck games. The chief disability suffered by tortoises as racing animals is not their slowness so much as their defective sense of direction. I had exactly the same difficulty when I used to take part in sports at my school, and was repeatedly disqualified for fouling the other competitors.

  I drove in a horse-carriage along the Vide Imperatore Guglielmo, which is bordered by groves of olive, rose, and orange-trees, to the little balustraded platform called, in the old style, Canone Point, or, in its Hellenized version, ΣTOΠ KANONI. This is the extreme point of the peninsula that runs out from the town, enclosing the fiord called Lake Kaliki-copulo. There used to be a battery here of one gun. Now there is a café-restaurant. The bank falls steeply down to the water, where there are two tiny islands, the one wooded, containing a villa that was once, I think, a monastery; the other is very small and is completely occupied by a minute chapel, two cypress-trees, and a parsonage. It is accessible from the beach by stepping-stones. I went down to it. There were two little bells in the tower, and, inside, some quite black eikons and a hen laying an egg. The priest appeared magically, rowing a boat full of vegetables from the opposite bank. His son sat in the stern with bare legs crossed under him, nursing a tin of Californian peaches. I gave some money to the church expenses and climbed up the hill path to the café. One or two other passengers had arrived from the Stella. I joined them, and ate sponge fingers and drank some delicious Corfiote wine, that looks like the juice of blood oranges and tastes like cider and costs, or should cost when one is not obviously a tourist, about twopence. A band appeared, of two guitars and a fiddle. The fiddler was quite young but blind. They played, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s my Baby’, in the oddest way conceivable, and laughed aloud with pleasure at the money they collected.

  During the days on our way back to Monte Carlo we were rarely out of sight of land for long.

  I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.

  Monte Carlo was practically deserted; the Sporting Club was closed; the Russian ballet had packed up and left for their last season in London; the dress shops had either already closed or were advertising their end of the season sales; there were shutters up in most of the villas and hotels; a few invalids encumbered the promenades in their bath-chairs; Mr Rex Evans had ceased to sing. And I wondered, as I pottered about those serene and sunny streets or sat drowsily in the shade of the Casino Gardens, at that provision of destiny which has made rich people so rigidly liturgical in their movements that they will come to Monte Carlo in the snow because that is the time ordained for their arrival in rubric and calendar, and will leave as soon as it becomes habitable for their grubby great shambling cities in the north; and how unlike rich people are to the lilies of the field, who do not divide time by any metrical system, but will joyfully put out buds at the first intimation of spring, and lose them, almost immediately, in the intervening frost.

  On Norwegian Independence Day, the Stella was dressed with hundreds of little flags. That evening there were speeches at dinner, and after the dancing a party, given by the officers and the Scandinavian passengers. The first officer made a patriotic speech in Norwegian and then in English, and then he made a speech in English in praise of England and then translated his speech into Norwegian. Then I made a speech in English in praise of Norway, and one of the passengers translated my speech into Norwegian; then she made a speech in English and Norwegian in praise of England and Norway and quoted Kipling. It was all delightful. Then we went down to the lower deck, where the crew were having a tremendous supper of Norwegian delicatessen and sugar cakes and champagne; one of them was in a rostrum made of flags; he was delivering a patriotic speech. Then we all drank each other’s health and danced; it was by no means a calm sea. Then we went
up to the Captain’s cabin and ate a dish called eggdosis, but I do not know how it was spelt. It was made of eggs and sugar and brandy whipped up into a firm cream. Then we went to the cabin of the lady who had translated my speech and there we made more speeches, oddly enough most of them in French.

  I woke up feeling a little ill after Independence Day, and found that we had arrived in Algiers, and that the deck was already covered with stalls as though for a charity bazaar. They were selling filigree gold jewellery, binoculars, and carpets. The water in the harbour was dense with floating refuse; young men swam about, butting and churning back with their arms the scum of empty bottles, sodden paper, grape-fruit skins, and kitchen waste, and calling for coins to be thrown to them.

  After luncheon I climbed rather heavily up to the Kasbar. There is a fine view from there over the town and harbour and the whole Bay of Algiers; the houses are very old and the alleys narrow and precipitous; it has that vivid street life that one sees in every old town which has a slum quarter inaccessible to traffic; there was one street and a little terrace given up to houses of ill-fame – all very gay with bright paint and tiles, and crowded thick at every door and window with plain, obese young women in gaudy clothes. If I had come there fresh from England I should have found it amusing enough, but as a spectacle of Oriental life it was less exciting than Cairo on Bajiram night, and as an example of medieval town-planning less formidable than the Manderaggio at Valletta.

  There was very little begging or street hawking except the inevitable swarm of boot-cleaners, and no native dragomans. Except on the harbour front one could walk about unmolested; there, however, one had to run the gauntlet of a great number of guides – nasty, jaunty young men for the most part, dressed in European suits and straw hats, bow ties, and Charlie Chaplin moustaches; their particular trade was organizing parties to see native dances – fêtes Mauresques – and an intolerable nuisance they were over it. Many of the passengers from the Stella went off with them and came back with very different reports of the entertainment. Some appeared to have seen decorous and perfectly genuine performances in the courtyards of one or other of the medieval Moorish houses; they described a native band with drums and wind instruments and a troupe of veiled dancing girls who went through the figures of various traditional tribal dances; they said it was a little monotonous, but they seemed quite satisfied with their evening. Another party, including two English-women, were led to the top floor of a house of ill-fame, where they were sat round the walls of a tiny room. Here they waited for some time in the light of a small oil lamp, becoming more and more uneasy, until the curtains of the door were suddenly thrust aside and a very large, elderly Jewess pranced in among them, quite naked except for a little cheap jewellery, and proceeded to a danse de ventre on the few yards of floor that separated them. The verdict of one of the Englishwomen on this experience was: ‘Well, I am quite glad in a way to have seen it, but I should certainly never wish to go again.’ Her companion refused to discuss the subject at all, from any angle, with anyone, and for the rest of the voyage entirely avoided the company of the gentlemen who had escorted her that evening.