At last Diana regained her feet, and half clothed in a tarpaulin, was used by the sailors as a table on which to cook and eat their meals. The garage had attempted to steal the spare tyres. The Cook’s man went to fetch them, but returned with only one. At the last moment the other had to be retrieved in a cab, after having been extracted from the curtained recesses of the proprietor’s bed-sittingroom. Eventually we left them on board at Patras.
Before finally leaving Brindisi, it may be mentioned that the proprietors of the Hotel International, where we stayed, were extremely dishonest in the matter of exchanging Italian for Greek money, robbing us of nearly six and eightpence in the pound. The American Express Company, in the role of whose agents they cashed our letters of credit, would be well advised to disown them.
We sailed, or rather chugged, out of the harbour as it grew dark, and sat down to dinner. The evening before we had taken a sailing boat and gone in the same direction to bathe. Simon, versed in sailing technicalities after his voyage across the Atlantic, had attempted to explain why sailing boats always travel faster when the wind is dead against them. The water was delicious, fresh and invigorating after the heat of the town. Unfortunately we had no towels, and were distressed when the sun sank with a jerk the moment we emerged in the hope that it would dry us. In compensation, however, the wind had changed, and as it was consequently blowing straight out to sea, we had come home like a bolt from an arrow. It was with regret that we now passed the scene of our frolic of twenty-four hours ago, imprisoned in the fetid little dining-room of the Iperoke. The food was good, and red and white wines were included in the fare, so that we ate and drank our money’s worth. There was an American woman at the next table, anxiously making conversation to her neighbours, who could not understand her. She wore a dress of grey, imprinted with white rings.
Before starting we had purchased two deck-chairs; Simon invariably sits bolt upright. In these David and I sprawled on the top-deck for a while, gazing at the night and inwardly rather stirred at having actually attained the last stage of our journey, of being now certain, whatever might happen, of reaching Greece. About midnight we retired to our cabin-de-luxe, ‘de-luxe’ consisting of a basin and a tap, the only ‘usual offices’ on the ship. The heat and the sensation of claustrophobia were unbearable. Clad in pyjamas, I tiptoed on to the deck, and then into the dining-room, to the surprise and disapproval of a few fully-dressed men and tightly-corseted old ladies embroidered in jet, who were trying to go to sleep. I lay down and went to sleep.
Morning dawned to find the Iperoke at anchor in the harbour of Holy Forty (Santi Quaranta), a port of Albania. All around, large sweeping hills, more stone than scrub, loomed into the water. The sun shot a ray over one, then flooded the bay with light; the hills remained grey, misty and barren. The town consisted of a few big buildings, with stone cabins clambering up the hill behind. Eventually a lighter came off bearing a numerous herd of small, smooth cows. These were packed, like preserved prunes, on to the first-class deck, immediately above our cabin-de-luxe. Odd noises at intervals informed us of this. In addition to them, a number of live chickens and a family of cats with projecting shoulders combined to reproduce the more unpleasant characteristics of the Ark.
About lunch time we reached Corfu, and were obliged to take refuge in the dining-room from the swarm of itinerant boatmen and postcard sellers who infested the ship as soon as the yellow flag of quarantine was hauled down. As we purposely protracted our meal, the portholes became obscured by greedy heads, regarding us as their ultimate victims. Quite firmly we declined to visit the Kaiser’s palace.
But peace there was none. The sultry calm of the afternoon, of the hazy blue water and the vague outline of the wooded island, was torn by the creakings of derricks loading conical baskets of fruit. A blind man and a blasé boy, each twanging a string instrument, came and treated us to the works of Verdi and Novello alternately. Behind sat the American woman in a basketwork hat. She had appropriated the chair of an elderly Greek of military appearance, who with his flowing white moustachios bristling against a skin the colour of smoked salmon, was not slow to turn her out of it. Then the vendors discovered her, and she soon presented the appearance of a stall at a charity bazaar, loaded with appetizing knick-knacks, native baskets, false amber necklets, poker-worked boxes of Corfiote olive-wood, and a positive confetti of postcards of the island from the south-west – and also from the north-east.
A German woman, too, gave us food for enjoyment. Very tan, and tautened in a backward curve rather than erect, her hair scraped back off an abnormally long forehead to show the ears, she trotted about the boat from man to man, stabbing each with a greedy pair of eyes and a succulent curl of the mouth that seemed to say, ‘I’m a woman and I need chivalry. Give me some.’ Her firm muscular form was originally swathed in transparent pink muslin, whence emerged a pair of shiny dark grey, silk calves, finished with dark grey suede shoes. For lunch she had changed into an olive stockinette tea-gown, with a sailor-collar and a slightly-soiled gardenia attached to it. Later in the afternoon she assumed a simple boating tam o’shanter of singularly hirsute yellow plush. Finally at dinner she appeared in a Napoleonic hat of black straw, sporting at one side a bunch of ospreys. The mole-coloured calves flashed their perfection of line throughout.
Eventually the loading was finished, and about six o’clock we began to steam along the coast of Greece. On the right lay Ithaca, overshadowed by two straining storm-clouds that seemed tethered to her like captive balloons. The mainland appeared entirely mountainous, meeting the sea with faces of rose-tinted cliff. Then it grew dark and we went to dinner. The American woman’s conversation was still undaunted. Later we took the air, and were clambering about the rigging, when we found ourselves in conversation with two German Wandervögel, who were trying to beg a slice of watermelon from an Albanian shepherd. They had come on board at Holy Forty.
CHAPTER XVII
IT WAS SCHILLER, more than a hundred years ago, who first instilled into the younger generation of his countrymen that artificial restlessness which can only find expression in forsaking all and setting out upon a walking-tour. Under the disruptive influences of the immediate post-war years, with the fluctuations of the mark, the uncertainty of employment, the threat of starvation, and the consequent break-up of many homes, the vagrant impulse of every young German has been accentuated. Throughout the whole of northern Europe, with the exception of France, in all the countries that once comprised the Austrian Empire, in Switzerland, and above all in Italy, these couples of bare-kneed, khaki-clad figures, dirty, smelly, golden-haired and, perhaps, but probably not, redeeming their sordid exterior by the joint possession of a guitar, are to be seen on all the large main roads, plodding through the dust of summer and the mud of winter. It is said to be a wonderful spirit that actuates them, the love of the earth, of nature, of mankind. In these days, the glorification of YOUTH in capital letters has displaced that universal admiration for MANHOOD which characterized our parents. And so these temporary negations of civilization are condoned, encouraged and admired. It is ‘Wanderlust’, say the young men; instead of becoming clerks, they set off into the unknown, chained to Freedom, carefully careless. With their spare money they purchase Baedekers and atlases.
A little time ago Cambridge scented a new era in this aged, but momentarily exaggerated, doctrine. A magazine bearing the word ‘Youth’ imprinted on a burnt orange cover, began a watery and vaguely improper existence. In the Youth movements of modern Germany, asserted this particular facet of Cambridge opinion, lay the only hope for modern Europe. To us, therefore, at a loss for occupation in the cat-, cow- and chicken-ridden interstices of the Iperoke, the two Messiahs out of Albania presented an opportunity to examine more closely this phenomenon that we had hitherto observed only at a distance or in print. We invited them to a bottle of red wine.
Their names were Herbert Fleischmann and Ludwig Schwert. Fleischmann was five feet eleven inches in height, with matted fair
hair, a pleasant, broad, smiling mouth, and a long plebeian nose with a bulbous end. Schwert was short, but well proportioned, with dark hair and skin. His eyes twinkled and his mouth was elfin with a firm though protruding upper lip. He was Bavarian, Fleischmann Silesian. Both were clothed in a prevailing tone of khaki, varied with occasional knitted garments colourless with age and wear. Fleischmann sported a pair of laced field-boots. Schwert’s legs were encased in Bavarian stockings cut short at the instep to display the tops of two brilliantly-patterned, knitted socks.
For four years they had been at the University of Heidelberg together. At a glance the age of each would have appeared to have been about twenty-two. Fleischmann, however, had served in the war for two years. Then at the end of his time as a student, he had spent eighty-four thousand marks on a woman in Breslau. ‘Four thousand pounds,’ translated David; while I computed it at four and six. In any case disaster had followed. On top of this extravagance the whole of Fleischmann’s family, father, mother, and sister had followed one another to a succession of early graves. Schwert, the faithful Jonathan of old days, had come forward, and they had set off on their Weltreise. In England they would have gone out to the colonies. As Germans, the call to Perpetual Youth had transformed them into parasites.
Schwert provided the brains and resource of the party. This was evident from the overwhelming volume of Fleischmann’s conversation. His sentences were pitched in a monotonous but authoritative key, like those of a guide to St Paul’s. He was, in fact, a guide to his own achievements. His remarks were punctuated with metallic imperatives. ‘Hören Sie!’ and ‘Wissen Sie?’ and he had a habit of emphasizing his facts by wagging a forefinger in front of the bulb of his nose. Whenever he began to speak he gave a heave and threw back his shoulders.
They had already been away three years and they rattled off a sing-song account of their itinerary. First they had made their way to Odessa, and gone thence in a diagonal line across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to Helsingfors. Then, though ostensibly on their way round the world, they had come south. They were absolutely without funds. Schwert, in fact, had lately been obliged to have some gold stopping removed from his teeth, with which to raise money. David said that this was heroic. On the ship they had had nothing to eat all day, until the Albanian shepherd with pleasant smiles had given them some of his melon. Their plan, they said, was to land at Patras, and there find enough work to take them to Athens. David then offered to take them there instead.
This constituted a bond of gratitude. Like chorus girls on the ramp, they produced from their breast pockets photographs of themselves arrayed in their elaborately Wandervögel garb, and posed in manly attitudes before a studio backcloth of classical urns and foliage. These photographs form an important part of the equipment of every professional young German beggar. He can occasionally sell them, or accept charity under the pretence of doing so, thus avoiding obligation. Beneath the pictures in question was announced in almost all European languages the fact that they were going round the world. Fleischmann even boasted an armlet embroidered to the same effect.
It was indeed their real intention to beg, borrow or steal their way over all the five continents. They hoped to be home in 1936. Thus can Youth and Wanderlust convert into a haphazard walking tour the life of a boy and then a man up till the age of 35; and what then?
They drank about half a bottle of wine each, and this began to affect their demeanour. Fleischmann, with excusable pride, produced his stick, proportioned like an ogre’s club. Beneath the knotted handle lay a silver shield embedded in a pointed wreath of bay leaves of the same metal, bearing an inscription of Gothic congratulation and good wishes for the round-the-world trip. The body of the stick was covered with deeply incised names, in all varieties of lettering and alignment. These appeared to be relics of the old Heidelberg days – the Trinknamen of the other members of the drinking-corps of which Fleischmann had been a member. Fleischmann’s own had been ‘Apollon’ he begged us to note.
On Schwert’s stick, which was less like the bole of a giant oak, there were three names only. It was not difficult to visualize how popular Fleischmann had been, how mediocre the devoted Schwert. The couple reproduced many of the more commonplace aspects of the English public school.
They told us of their experiences in Albania. The Mpret or Governor of the country, a bishop, lately a waiter in New York, had at one period of his life had an injured arm cured in Vienna. The Germans had, therefore, pretended that they were Viennese; with the result that he had taken them under his wing and finally presented them with souvenir cigarette-holders, multi-coloured and square in shape, an inch broad, half-an-inch deep and four long. Of these they were forgiveably proud, smoking Simon’s cigarettes with avidity. The Governor, they said, went about armed to the teeth.
Meanwhile more wine had disappeared. Though from all accounts a German university drinking-corps teaches its members to consume as much alcohol in an evening as a modern mother at a dinner table, the formality of our party began to dissolve. They started to play upon a mouth-organ and sing. Fleischman, infinitely the louder of the two, was neither in time nor tune. Schwert had a good voice and some technique. They sang mainly war songs: ‘Der Wacht am Rhein’, and an anti-French ditty which delighted Simon, and made me angry. But the epic of the evening was a long-drawn ballad about a mother visiting her son in hospital and the son’s eventual decease. This would have wrung tears from a stone in 1917. Even on the waters of Greece in 1925 we became thoughtful and serious; though the dramatic intensity with which it was rendered, would, in any case, have necessitated a demonstration of genuine and profound feeling. An elderly Greek asleep in a corner remained entirely unaffected, both by the sentiment and the noise.
The evening ended about one o’clock, after our having vindicated the Union Jack with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on the ship’s tin piano. The Germans went out to curl up in our deck-chairs; we to our cabin-de-luxe, whence I retired to the dining-room. The cows were getting restless, and sleep did not come easily.
Such is the Youth movement in so far as it was brought to our notice. Both Schwert and Fleischmann became eventually very confidential, and the above facts are substantially true. Whether they are interesting I hesitate to say. Perhaps in days to come, the memory of this couple of young men, floating fortuitously over the surface of the earth, will serve to recall not only the miserable tragedy of a European war, but also the unsettled mentalities and bitter disappointments created by the Peace that followed.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
AT FOUR O’CLOCK ON THE MORNING of Saturday, September 5th, the lights of Patras twinkled out of a rather muddy dawn, as the Iperoki glided into the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. To our alarm, instead of mooring up alongside the quay, she dropped anchor 400 yards out to sea; and was immediately surrounded by a swarm of rowing boats anxious to disembark passengers. There followed one small lighter. What was to happen to Diana?
As the darkness disappeared and the mountain-tops began to take shape above the motionless surface of the water and the faintly distinguishable outline of the town, the black form of a larger lighter became apparent, moving silently towards us. This possessed a small deck at either end, perched above an uncovered hold in the middle. Gradually she drew up against the Iperoki. With the aid of the derricks the hold was first filled with barrels. Then the crew, joined by a host of swarthy stevedores, turned their attention to Diana. Fortunately the ropes by which she had been embarked had not been removed; and a second hour’s argument was thereby saved. David and Simon were not present – or if they were, only in the manner of a harem, seeing but invisible. The Germans elbowed their way about, anxious to display their efficiency and make sure of their ride to Athens.
A fiery altercation ensued over the two pieces of wood that the Germans and I insisted should be inserted between each of the pairs of lifting ropes, in order to prevent their crushing the sides of the car. After an infinite variety of abuse
and persuasion, two heavy beam-like boards were lifted from the roof of the Iperoki’s hold and appropriated to the purpose, leaving two yawning cavities in the main deck. The derricks creaked. Shivering all over, Diana, like an unwilling bull, was raised slowly by the nose, and continued thus until she was hanging at an angle of 60 degrees to the horizontal. With a heave, her hind wheels rose up on to the roof of the hold. There was a crash. One wheel had fallen into the slot left by the absent board, and the car came down heavily on the petrol tank, back light and luggage carrier. The Germans, assuming the postures of a platoon caught by a modern sculptor in its own barbed wire, flung themselves beneath Diana’s body, straining every particle of their beings, muscles a-quiver, veins standing in relief. Sweat dripped from their foreheads. Paralysed by the horror of the moment, I was keeping aimless hold upon a rope attached to the luggage carrier, when, with a desperate spasm, the car rose again and threatened to swing right out over the sea. All that was to prevent it was the rope of which I was unwittingly letting go. The captain, choking like a master of foxhounds, seized my hands and transposed them after the fashion of a schoolmaster giving an inept youth his first taste of cricket. My feet he jammed against a beam. I was left like the little boy at the dyke, clinging like grim death to my rope, as the car swung helplessly in the air. Finally the off front mudguard crashed heavily into the bridge, despite the heroic efforts of Fleischmann to interpose his torso as a buffer.
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