Childish Loves Read online

  Man, it must be admitted, has suffered rather more from the effects of time. Particularly in these last few years. On the streets of Vathy, you may see (once you have left the square and strayed into the narrower alleyways) children hissing at dogs to claim for themselves the scraps thrown out by the cook. The beggars are mostly young men; a distressing sight. Women of fifty sit darkly in doorways and lift their skirts above the knee as you pass by. Captain Knox, whom I really begin to admire, offered to take me on a tour of this wretchedness – he has done what he can to relieve the worst of the suffering but has never deluded himself into thinking it enough. To refresh his sense of it, he says, he used to walk with a pocketful of coins among the destitute; but has lately suspended the habit, as the children of the poor swarm so quickly and thickly around him he cannot pass more than a hundred feet before turning back. But for my sake he renewed the practice; and as it was the heat of the day, we made our way relatively unmolested.

  I was never more affected by anything in my life, and I have known a great deal of squalor. On our return, I was half inclined to retreat to my room and call for pen, ink etc.; but my appetite for this particular form of diversion … is not what it was. Mrs Knox, who takes a great interest in the situation of the women, has introduced me to one of the families – a widow of Patras, named Chalandritsanos (her husband was killed in the Morea); she is the mother of three daughters, all of them exceedingly pretty and the oldest not more than eleven. Her two sons are away fighting with Colocotroni. The girls reminded me of the widow Macri and her three daughters; and the house in Athens where we stayed, with the courtyard and its lemon-trees, and Hobhouse, almost fifteen years ago. I offered to have them removed to Argostoli at my expense, and cared for, also at my expense; all of which was gratefully accepted, and my last day in Vathy was partly occupied with these arrangements.

  On the morning of our departure, Captain Knox, his wife and five of his children (the two youngest were still asleep) accompanied us to the harbour and remained standing against the walls of the jetty for as long as we stayed in sight. Mrs Knox said to me, as I took my leave, ‘They were all rather afraid of you when you came.’ Knox has asked me to be god-father to his youngest son, but it will not do, and I refused. Whatever I care for dies; I have lost one child already.

  We dined that night at St Euphemia and rode back to Argostoli a different way, climbing the hills of Samos and sleeping at a monastery there. I was told afterwards that I behaved very strangely in the evening – that when the Abbot, who had greeted us, attempted to give me the benediction, I began to shout at him and would not cease shouting until he had removed himself, which is apparently what I had (in the midst of my ravings) demanded of him. Then, calling Fletcher to me, I attempted to run away. But Fletcher resisted, and Dr Bruno at last persuaded me to accept one of his pills, which he had hastily prepared. I afterwards fell asleep and awoke the next morning, a little weak and head-achey, and with no recollection at all of the events of the preceding night. Trelawny (who takes a humorous view of the episode) tells me I called out repeatedly that I was in hell – a delusion which may be partly accounted for by the torches lining the walls of the monastery. But as I say I have no recollection, and we reached Argostoli the following afternoon, on much better roads than those we set out on.

  *

  Botsaris is dead. We had this news on our arrival. It was Napier who told me; he saw us marching down from the hills (as we always attract a considerable following) and walked out to greet us. The story spread quickly among the Suliotes, who had gathered around me. They began instantly to beat their breasts and pull their hair, which is a thing I had read about but never seen; and which in the event made a great impression on me. He died at Karpenisi, leading a troop of two hundred men against a force of some fifteen thousand. But there was nothing we could do, and we managed at last to escape into one of the boats and make our way out to the Hercules, where the first sight that greeted me, on my cabin-table, was a letter from Botsaris. It was sent two weeks before and urged me to come on to Missolonghi. ‘Your Excellency is exactly the person of whom we stand in need,’ he wrote.

  Blaquiere has not returned and I am still awaiting word from Hobhouse and the Committee. But I have written to him and explained myself, and my situation, which in fact is only gradually becoming clear to me. I have no intention of going to the mainland until I can avoid being considered a favourer of one party or another. As I did not come here to join a faction but a nation, and to deal with honest men and not with speculators or peculators (charges bandied about daily by the Greeks of each other), it will require much circumspection for me to avoid the character of a partisan. I have already received invitations from more than one of the contending parties, always under the pretext that they are the ‘real Simon Pure’.

  It was my idea that by staying on board I would spare myself a certain amount of useless annoyance, but the rumour of Lord Byron’s arrival (and his moneys) has spread very far, and the boats ply themselves like so many ducks around us. When once they have got their foot upon the ladder, we can hardly push back into the water the men we have come so far to liberate. The worst of them is that (to use a coarse expression, but the only one that will not fall short of the truth) they are such damned liars. Whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate – not in the expectation of meeting with any special indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time and better treatment may rehabilitate its inmates. When the limbs of the Greeks are a little less stiff from the shackles of four centuries, they will not march so ‘as if they had gyves on their legs’.

  I have come at least to one decision, which is to move ashore, to a small villa in Metaxata a few miles to the south of Argostoli. The Suliotes have really become impossible, and I have had the additional vexation of putting Trelawny in the right. Probably I should not have paid them in advance (which was at their own request) for this has had the consequence that the shopkeepers, who were in the habit of dealing with them on credit, have extorted from them the entirety at once. I have offered them another month’s pay and the price of their passage to Acarnania (where they can easily go, as the Turkish blockade is over) just to be rid of them; and this a part of them have accepted. Though, after all, I am not sorry to see a few remaining, and we continue to ride out together when the roads permit – September has come and gone, but I am still here.

  *

  The house is very pretty, though small; set amidst vineyards and groves, with the castle of San Giorgio sitting on the hill above its shoulder. On the first floor there is a balcony, with a view (if you lean out of it) of the Morea. But our party is somewhat diminished. Aside from the servants, only Pietro and Dr Bruno remain. Captain Scott has taken the Hercules to England, freighted with currants; and Trelawny and Browne (they have lately become very thick) have proceeded to Tripolitza, where they intend to join the party of Ulysses, who commands a wild rabble of men in Eastern Greece. Trelawny is rather enamoured of him and calls him a ‘second Bolivar’, though this was perhaps on my account, as he wished me to ‘bestir myself.

  I am not sorry to see him gone, though I am a little grieved at the manner of our parting. It was already decided he should go, as there was no room for either of them at Metaxata, and he had no wish to join me on shore. ‘If you ever stop for six days in one place,’ he said, ‘you cannot be made to shift for six months. This is your own maxim, and I have found it to be true.’

  On the eve of his departure, he came for the first time to the villa, to take his leave. We had only removed that morning; there was still a great deal to be done. I led him around the rooms and showed him the view from the balcony: of the island of Zante, and the Morea. It was a clear late-summery day, not very warm, but bright and pale at once; and the house, which was cool and still very sparsely furnished, had a kind of ghostly calm. We could see Pietro and Tita some way below, pulling the mules up a track to the front door, each of them loaded with several cases. But w
e could not hear them; they looked no bigger than children.

  I said to Trelawny, ‘The chief charm of the place is that it is out of the way. We were too exposed in the Hercules and could be seen from all sides, which was rather an invitation, to anyone and everyone, who wanted anything. But it is quieter here; perhaps it is even quiet enough for me to write.’

  ‘Have you not been writing?’ he said.

  ‘You have seen for yourself how I have been occupied.’

  He waited a minute, and then he said, ‘Excuse me, I have seen very clearly what you have not been doing.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Why, anything at all; anything to the purpose, that is. You have listened to a great deal of flattery, I grant you that. And written many letters. And gone out riding, with a troop of bandits to whom you gave so little occupation, as you call it, that they themselves had nothing to do but take your money. You have made a tour of Ithaca, and explored the hills above Argostoli, and swum in the bay in the heat of the sun, till your head ached and you were sick in the night; but to the best of my knowledge, you have not taken a single step towards the liberation of Greece.’

  ‘It is not my idea to do anything until I know what is to be done.’

  ‘It is not your idea, and never has been, to do anything at all.’

  The balcony was not very large, and we stood not more than a few steps apart; he had squared himself to face me, with his somewhat foolish good looks (like a gallant cut-purse’s), as if for all the world he meant to push me off it. I said, ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Forgive me, I believe I express myself plainly enough.’

  ‘No, I don’t understand why you are angry at me.’

  ‘I am not at all angry. I have given you up.’

  ‘Oh,’ I could not keep back a smile, ‘then at least you had hopes?’

  ‘Certainly I did, or I would not have come. I thought if I could once get you away from your relations in Genoa, you might begin to act the part you have always pretended to play. You are fond of saying that a man should have something better to do than write verses; well, you have found something better, but you are not doing it.’

  ‘I have not written a line of verse since coming to Greece. I write nothing but government letters.’

  ‘If that is true, then I am sorry for it, for at least you have a talent for writing verses.’

  It is always left to Bruno, wherever we are (since he is a young man, and an Italian, and thinks of nothing but his stomach) to find us good things to eat; and we could see him leading several boys into the courtyard below us, where there was a table set out, and depositing on it what they carried in their arms, bread, cheese, olives, fish and wine. Meanwhile, Pietro and Tita had arrived, and got in everyone’s way.

  ‘Where will you sleep tonight?’ I said.

  ‘It does not much matter to me.’ And then, ‘On board, I believe. Captain Scott has promised to carry us as far as Pyrgos, though we must make our own way ashore. But you are not even angry at me; I had hoped to make you angry.’

  ‘Then you have gone about it in the very worst way. Whenever anyone is angry at me, I wish only to placate them. I could never keep a grudge.’

  ‘Well, shall we go down to eat?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t like to part on these terms. I don’t know if we shall see each other again. Whenever I take my leave, I feel it is for the last time; that everything is being taken from me.’

  ‘As for that,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe we were ever so fond of each other.’

  We ate our lunch together, in the usual way; he, speaking very little and eating a great deal. Afterwards, he shook my hand, and I said, ‘Let me hear from you often. If things are farcical, they will do for Don Juan; if heroical, you shall have another canto of Childe Harold. Come back soon.’

  ‘I think your Harold days are done,’ he said and rode off on one of Pietro’s mules.

  *

  There is always a tax upon kindness, which is paid in further kindness. Mrs Chalandritsanos, whom, along with her three daughters, I had rescued from the squalor of Vathy and set up in some comfort here, is also the possessor of two sons. Both were fighting with Colocotroni in the Morea, when one of them, hearing that his mother had found a patron, immediately took leave of his chief and applied to me. This came at no bad time, as Trelawny had just left me, and I wanted someone to keep the Suliotes in order. Chalandritsanos fils is a boy of some fifteen or sixteen years, dark-skinned (though no darker than some Italians), with an oriental cast of eyes, through which he looks at you with a sort of fierce boredom. His manner was very little appeasing, for one who had come in search of charity; though this is rather the Greek method – to beg haughtily.

  But the others have found me out, too, and I am no safer at Metaxata than I was at Argostoli. Here are arrived English, Germans, Greeks, all kinds of people, proceeding to or coming from Greece, and all with something to say to me. It appears that if I mean to have any quiet, I must make up my mind to join the fighting; it is the only way. Every day there are two or three or half a dozen visitors, who come to plead, stare, gawp, advise, in as many languages; and I receive them all and listen to their case or cause; and every day it grows harder for me to act. I believe Trelawny was right. When once I am settled, nothing can unsettle me; but perhaps I am unsettled enough. The house at least is too small to admit guests. Even as it is, Pietro and Bruno share a room, and the servants make do in the kitchen.

  I have begun to write again, a little at night, when everyone is in bed; but this was always my way. Another canto of Don Juan, the seventeenth – will I live to see it finished? From the window of my apartment, I can see the village below me, in transparent moonlight, which shows beyond it the islands, the mountains, the sea, with a distant outline of the Morea traced between the double azure of the waves and skies. I have put the Don at an English country house, with several ladies of the party, some of them married (though none of them to the purpose). In short, amidst scenes which were once well-known to me; but like Mr Hume’s ideas, they grow dim, dim. And the lines come slowly and painfully. Teresa has complained that I do not write to her. This is untrue; only, I do not write her at length and mostly add a post-script to the letters Pietro sends her, for he is a dutiful brother.

  At present, I am rather plagued with doctors: there are Bruno, Kennedy, Muir inter alia. The Committee has sent a young man, a Dr Millingen, who wishes to see the world and do some good in it. He has this merit, that he listens and does not talk much. But I believe he begins to chafe at our existence (this is not the world he has come to see) and soothes his restlessness by doctoring me. He says he is concerned at my drinking, and I have no reason to disbelieve him: he seems an honest man. But then, I drink mostly at night, when I sleep very little, and since I never get drunk … I tell him, that I drink rather than sleep, but that it comes to the same thing. He has asked Bruno the receipt for the little pills I take, as purgatives, besides doses of Epsom salts. I said to him, ‘There are two things in this world that I especially dread, and to which I am equally predisposed – growing fat, and growing mad. Indeed, I should not like to choose between them.’ But I asked him to examine my teeth; they feel loose in my head.

  The Chalandritsanos boy is an odd mixture. I have seen him playing with the children, no more than ten years old, who sling stones at the trees that grow into the path at the foot of our house; but the Suliotes respect him, and every day he rides out at the head of some dozen men barking commands. His name is Lukas. I have made him my page, since he loves fine clothes and lets me dress him as I please, which is all that I require. He speaks Italian (of a sort), and has attached himself already to Bruno and Pietro, hoping to learn more. But they do not mind him much. To me he says very little, though he is not shy.

  A few days ago we had an earthquake. There have been several on the island in recent weeks, but this was sufficiently powerful to make it a question of prudence to leave the house. I was one of the la
st to remain, and on my way down the narrow stairs opened the door to the other bedroom, where Lukas sometimes sleeps in the afternoon – I should not like to give the news to his mother, in the event of an accident befalling him. But the room was empty; I put my hand on both of the beds myself to make sure, and then sat down for a minute, heedless of the disturbance around me, before continuing downstairs.

  *

  It appears I may really be going. Hobhouse has sent me another colonel, this one by the name of Stanhope, a black-haired though by no means youthful officer of the Committtee, who arrived already in a hurry and with a great many good intentions. He is a rabid Benthamite and believes that the human machine may be easily regulated, with a little pressure here and there; to which end, he has carried with him from England (it weighs not much less than a ton) a printing press, as the best means of applying it. I think he means to persuade the Greeks of their liberty, and to reason the Turks into granting it. In person, he is pleasant enough, brisk and neatly attired, but you have only to say the word, and he cannot resist explaining himself, and it is always the same explanation.

  Millingen is gone already, on to Missolonghi, where the suffering is intensest and direction most needed after the death of Botsaris. Stanhope intends to join him shortly. And I have committed myself to the Morea, the seat of the provisional government, of which I have received several favourable accounts from Browne and Trelawny. But I mean to judge for myself. Browne, meanwhile, has gone back to England with two Greek deputies, seeking an additional loan. And Trelawny has sent me a very amusing letter, quite in my old vein – he has decided to accompany Ulysses on to Negropont, where they will ‘pass the winter, there being excellent sport’, he says, ‘between Turk and woodcock shooting.’ He has been made a kind of aide-camp, with fifty men under his command, and never leaves the General’s side – being accoutred exactly like him, in red and gold vest with sheepskin capote. With gun pistols sabre etc. All this he writes in his letter. There is also some talk (but this I have through other sources) of his being given Ulysses’ daughter or niece or some such relation to marry, as the Greeks have a passion for kinship and press upon perfect strangers, as a sign of their hospitality, their precious women!