VI

To depict a monotony is a difficult and precarious art, and needs for its justification a grand ulterior aim. Such an aim would be out of place in these simple papers. I merely wish to make the reader see, as well as I can, how the glory of war throws a certain sombre shadow over the lives of some obscure seafarers—a shadow in which little save the unregarded virtues of patience and vigilance can grow.

But even in such conditions there are gleams in the dark. Even to phlegmatic Britishers the astonishing phantasmagoria of Balkan life presents occasional phases of comedy and interest. As for example:

Before going aboard I decide to have another drink. At first I think of going into Floca’s. Floca’s is the Ritz-Carlton of Salonika; but it is not Salonika. It is merely a small replica of Walker’s at Alexandria, the Eastern Exchange at Port Said, the Verdi at Genoa, or Florian’s at Venice. The British officer has popularized Floca’s, and so has made Floca, if such a person exist, rich. The uniforms of five nations mingle at the marble-topped tables. It is the only place where you can get tea in a city which never drinks tea. Here the nurses and the subalterns can eat chocolate éclairs and Sally Lunns under the very noses of brigadiers. Floca’s reeks of wealth and Occidental refinement. I stand in the Place de la Liberté and contemplate the glittering throng within the great doors. And I turn away. I decide against Floca’s. I know a less reputable place where it will be quiet, and where the beer is a penny a litre cheaper. Allons donc.

It is round the corner, on the sea front, between the market and an unfortunate alley where mendicants eat fish with their fingers and quarrel over stray lepta. It is what is known as a café-chantant, a large lofty barn of a room, with a plush balcony for customers, a small stage, and a piano. This sort of establishment does its profitable business at night, when I am in bed. Nevertheless, I imagine that it can never be more amusing than when I see it, its harsh decrepitude revealed in the clear dancing sunlight reflected from the sea, and the gloom of its corners alive with bizarre forms.

I order my beer from a Greek gentleman who reluctantly leaves a political conversation to attend to me. Although I am almost the only customer, there are quite a dozen people engaged round the piano and in front of a camera. For this is rehearsal-time for the artists who grace the stage in the evening. A weary pianist in Greek khaki strums the air of a song, and a rouged and jewelled lady leans over him, singing and beating time with her hands and feet. Another young lady sits near me, her feet on the table in front of her, showing much stocking, humming a song, and pretending to study the sheet of music she holds before her. Her hat is on one side. So, for that matter, is her nose. Suddenly she rises and begins to walk aimlessly among the tables, still humming her song. I don’t think it is a very good song, to judge by the hum. Suddenly she emits a squall, which is answered by another squall behind the curtains of the little stage, and a bony female, in green silk and spangles, thrusts her frizzled head and stringy neck through the opening. They talk, and when each has elicited from the other a wild gust of laughter, the spangled one vanishes, only to appear immediately at the side.

My attention is now attracted to a dark corner where strangely garbed forms are writhing in an apparently interminable embrace. The photographer, an itinerant of the streets, fusses methodically with his prehistoric camera. Several Jewesses, their eyes flashing on either side of large powdered noses, sit round, drinking vermouth and gin, and watching the dim performance with tolerant smiles. At length, by moving several tables nearer, I can make out a couple of acrobats engaged in tying themselves into a sort of human clove-hitch. They seem to me to be attempting the impossible. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are idealists, like the brothers in the Goncourts’ novel, “Les Frères Zemganno.” I am, in this matter, par excellence a detached spectator. One is short and thick, the other slim and athletic. I see the face of the latter peering up from between the legs of his colleague—a thin, distorted face, with strained, unseeing, yet strangely watchful-looking eyes, the cheeks smeared with rivulets of perspiration, the brow damp and pallid. Suddenly they collapse and fall apart. Another failure. They hold their wrists, regarding each other with expressions of pain and malevolence. The photographer continues to potter about, ignoring their futile antics until he is given the word.

They elect to take a breathing spell, and the spangled lady assumes her position on the carpet, keeping up all the while a torrent of conversation with the student of song, who is now seated on a table near by. Another figure emerges from the wings of the stage, a dreadful travesty of a hero, a hero with bandy legs, yellow whiskers, and a false nose of heroic dimensions. He is dressed in yellow and red. He and the spangled lady strike a love-attitude, he registering dignity, she hopeless passion. The photographer bestirs himself, dives under his black cloth, and waves a mesmerizing hand back and forth, to lend emphasis to his own muffled commands. With an abrupt gesture he snatches the cap from the lens, beats time in the air slowly—one, two, three—claps it on again, and the group smile foolishly at each other.

It is amusing, yet I see a good deal of pathos in these poor strolling players. They are doing their best. No doubt, in the evening, when the tables are thronged, and the music strives with the babel of voices and the clink of glass, they have their reward.

I confess, however, to a sporting interest in the acrobats who are unable to attain the position in which they desire to be photographed. I order a fresh beer. Several shoe-blacks, paper-boys, peanut-vendors, and itinerant chocolate-merchants have come in, and regard me with chastened expectancy. I am persona non grata to these infernal pests of the Levant. By instinct, when I turn to look at them, they recognize my antipathy. Each in his turn examines my expression with shrewd skill, and fades away into the dazzling clangour of the street. At length our protagonists, emerging from a thicket of stacked chairs where they have been secluded during the last scene, take their stand once more upon the dingy carpet and look around with a morituri-te-salutamus expression. They grasp hands. The tall one pulls sharply. The short one makes a miraculous ascent into the air. For an instant his curved body and bent limbs are poised in unstable equilibrium, and one might imagine him but that moment descended from above. For me he is foreshortened. I see him as one sees the angel who is hurling the thunderbolt in Tintoretto’s never-to-be-forgotten masterpiece. The piano is hushed. Now he is poised on the other’s hands, on one hand. Enfin! In tense silence the photographer removes his lens-cap; there is a quiver of the outflung hand and the tall athlete flutters his eyelids as he looks up with awful anxiety—pouf! It is finished, and we all breathe again as the short athlete comes down with a jump. I feel very glad indeed that they have succeeded. I like to see human beings succeed.

Over at the piano, however, I can detect nothing that resembles success. The peripatetic student of song and the musical reservist are not having a very happy time. She has not even a vaudeville voice. From the manner in which the accompanist slaps the music and snarls over his shoulder at her, I gather that she has not yet mastered the notes. Every minute or so she turns her back on him and feigns a passionate withdrawal. He, poor wight, with a Balkan winter in the trenches in front of him, pays not the slightest attention to her tantrums. Then, after a perfectly furious altercation, they find a basis of agreement. She is to go on the stage and sing the song without words. Bon! She skips up, showing a great deal of stocking as she adjusts her garters and pulls down her cheap little jacket. But it appears that she cannot sing the song, even without words. She begins:

and stops, looking at me, of all people, with profound suspicion, as though I had stolen the rest of her lahs.

A Jewess interjects a sentence, and both the accompanist and the young lady, to my astonishment, shriek with laughter. I laugh, too. It is infectious if bewildering. I realize how hopeless it would be for me to try to comprehend their intricate psychology. I am a mere spectator from an alien planet, watching for a brief instant the antics of inexplicable shadows on a screen. I drink my beer and drift out into the noise and dazzle. I must go aboard.

I skip across the road, dodging a trolley-car, an ambulance wagon, a donkey with silver-plated harness and a raw red chasm on his rump, a mad boy on a pink bicycle, and a cart drawn by two enormous oxen, their heads bowed beneath a massive yoke. I gain the sea wall and follow it until I reach the kiosks that flank the dirty marble steps of the Venizelos landing. A boy in a boat immediately waves his arms and beckons to me as if I were the one person in Salonika who could rescue him from life-long indigence. A lustros, the cynical name given to the home-grown shoe-shine boy, flings himself at my feet and endeavours gently to lift one of them to his box.

I resist this infamous proposal. I ignore the demented youth in the boat. I walk out on the marble jetty and look calmly about for our own dinghy. It occasionally happens that I am in time to join the captain as he returns. I do not think that he likes the idea very much, but he makes no audible protest when an engineer sits beside him. However, there is no sign of either skipper or dinghy, so I turn again to the youth in the boat. He rows hastily to the steps, and motions me to get in and recline on his scarlet cushions. But I am not to be cozened. I demand a tariff. According to the guide-book he may charge me one drachma (about twenty cents) for a trip, without luggage, to the outer harbour. I am prepared to give two, since it is war-time and bread is dear. We begin to haggle. It is a phase of human folly very distasteful to an Englishman, this stupid enthronement of cunning and knavish bluff in the forefront of all levantine transactions. The Anglo-Saxon is torn with the conflict of disparate desires. He wishes to show his unutterable scorn for the whole performance by flinging a triple fare in the huckster’s face, and he has also a profound moral conviction that he ought “on principle” to pay the exact legal demand. I have done both. There is a certain amount of pleasure in each. I weigh their merits as I stand on Venizelos Steps and haggle with the boatman. Thus:

Boatman.—Boat! Boat! You want boat? All right.

Fare.—How much to beef-ship?

Boatman.—T’ree shillin’, yes. You want boat!

Fare.—Yes, I want a boat, but only for hire to go to the beef-ship. How much?

Boatman.—T’ree shillin’.

Fare.—Too much.

[He turns away and fills his pipe with great care, and, sitting on the marble parapet, contemplates the harbour. This is very disconcerting to the Boatman. He ties up and steps ashore, to follow the matter up. He approaches the Fare, who smokes stolidly.]

Boatman.—You want boat?

Fare.—Ah! How much to the beef-ship?

Boatman.—How mooch? T’ree shillin’.

Fare.—No. Two francs.

Boatman.—Come on. T’ree francs, eh? Yaas.

Fare [stolidly].—I will give you two francs.

Boatman.—Yaas. All raight. ’Alf-a-crown, eh?

Fare.—Half-a-crown is three francs. I will give you two.

Boatman.—Two shillin’?

Fare [patiently].—No. You see, it’s this way: if you take me to the beef-ship, I will give you two francs. Do you get that right? Two! One and one. Two.

Boatman.—All raight. Come on.

[He goes down the steps.]

Fare.—You understand then: two francs. No more.

Boatman [blankly].—No more?

Fare [blandly].—No more. What did you think?

Boatman.—T’ree shillin’.

Fare [getting into the boat and taking the tiller lines].—I shouldn’t be surprised if some Englishman killed you for saying “three shillings,” my friend.

If he were not so dirty he would be a nice-looking lad of the 1917 class. He is dressed in the usual composite rags of the Greek proletariat, part khaki, part European, part Turkish. He does not look as if he belonged to a conquering race. Neither, I suppose, do I; but the cases are not similar. My young boatman does not regard Janina as I regard the capture of Quebec, for example. Goodness only knows what he does regard, or how. He may be one of the conquered race. I ask him with large gestures to illustrate my meaning, if he is going to enlist, soldier—fight—gun—bang!—beat Bulgar—eh? He is puzzled, and perseveres with his oars. I reflect that he may be an anti-Venizelist. Presently, as we clear the inside shipping, he asks, as every Greek boatman asks:

“When your ship go away, eh?”

And I tell him a deliberate, cold-blooded lie! We do not inform Greek boatmen when our ships are going away.

About this time my attention is held by the appearance of the sky. It is a sky I have learned to regard with a certain amount of interest. As my young boatman steps his mast and hoists his sail, I observe, high above the rolling banks and islets of cumulous vapour in the bowl of the Gulf, a film of transparent dapple-gray clouds assembling. The whole of the upper air is mottled with their confusing texture. A delightful sky in peace-times, a sky veiling the sun and making high noon agreeable. A sky to watch through the open window in springtime. A sky to paint, with a foreground of yellow crocuses and green grass and brown girls. A sky to look up at, from where one lies on the heather, and dream a boy’s strange and delicate dreams.

One of the advantages of war is the deeper and more intense interpretation one learns to give to the common phenomena. This gay, romantic sky used to be nothing more than gay and romantic. Now I watch it with an experienced apprehension. And as I pass a man-of-war, I observe that the anti-aircraft crew are at drill. There is something curiously affectionate in the aspect of an anti-aircraft crew at work. The gunner is seated and his assistants are all grouped about him, heads together, as though whispering to each other the most delightful secrets. Perhaps they are.

We come leisurely alongside. Standing on the grating at the foot of the accommodation ladder, I pay my young friend his two francs with a bonus of twopence. For a single moment he stands, from life-long habit, in an attitude eloquent of despair. I go up the ladder, smiling blandly at his outflung hands and upraised indignant eyes. Then he recovers himself, makes a gesture consigning the whole race of Englishmen to perdition, pockets the money, and rows away. Once more I am on board, and it is nearly two o’clock.