Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  They were some letters, dated a few years back, from an Australian sergeant in Missolonghi. The Greek he was billeted on, he wrote, owned a pair of shoes belonging to Lord Byron; he said the owner would like to return them to one of Byron’s descendants. “But, of course, knowin’ no Greek, I couldn’t do anythin’ about it,” Lady Wentworth said. “I’d like to have them, if they were really my great-grandfather’s.” She turned the letter over. “He must be a nice kind of a chap, to take all that trouble. I hope I wrote to thank him....” So she lent me the sergeant’s letters and I promised to write to the owner of the shoes. She also gave me a copy of Lord Lovelace’s Astarte and a sheaf of her own poems, printed, I think, in Horsham. They were violent, very colloquial rhyming diatribes against the Germans, written during the war after a stray bomb had destroyed the royal tennis court. (Crabbet was on the direct Luftwaffe route to London.) Her polemic gifts had at last discovered a universal rather than a private target. “You’re smilin’,” she said. “They’re no great shakes, I fear. It doesn’t always run in families....” There was a pause. Then Lady Wentworth said: “You’re not in a hurry, are you? Let’s have a hundred up.”

  She led us along a passage and up three steps into the dim and glaucous vista of a billiard room. A log fire was blazing; brandy and whisky and soda water flashed their welcome. Lady Wentworth gazed out at the dark afternoon. Through the lashing rain we contemplated the sodden park, the weeping trees and a sudden cavalcade of Arab ponies. “What a shockin’ afternoon,” she said. “Let’s draw the curtains.” We sent the tall curtains clashing along their rods and blotted out the diluvial scene and the daylight and switched on the shaded prism of lamps above the enormous table. She slipped off her many rings and lay them by the grog tray in a twinkling heap; then, after interlocking and flexing her fingers for a few moments like a concert pianist, she chose a cue, sighing “spot or plain?”

  We played in rapt silence. A feeling of timeless and remote seclusion hung all about us, a half-delightful, half-mournful spell which the house and our companion conspired to cast. She had taken on both of us and it was soon clear she was a brilliant player: our turns were spaced out between longer and longer breaks. All was quiet, except for the occasional squeak of French chalk, the fall of a log, a splutter of raindrops down the chimney, the occasional hiss of the siphon. Sudden gusts made the trunks of the huge trees creak ominously outside. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t fetch one of them down,” Lady Wentworth said, pausing before a difficult shot. “It’s been a rotten winter.” She played the shot facing away from the table and behind her back, which she arched as pliantly as a girl’s. The balls sped unerringly to their destination and the soft clicks and the thuds on the cushion were followed by two plops. “Put red back, would you, Antony?” She crossed to the other side on silent plimsoled feet....The huge scores mounted up in game after lost game. The whole world seemed reduced to this shadowy room with its glowing green quadrilateral; the slow eddies of our cigar smoke under the lamps and the flickering firelight and the trundling balls. The light caught a brooch here and a locket there as our hostess moved mercilessly to and fro at her effortless, demolishing task. Tea, brought in by a housekeeper and two Irishwomen (identical twins, quite plainly), was no interruption. Lady Wentworth lifted a silver lid. “Oh, good,” she murmured sadly. “Muffins.” We ate them cue in hand, and the massacre went on. She looked disappointed when, night having long ago invisibly fallen, the time came to go. Why didn’t we stay and take pot luck...? Her slim silhouette and the anachronistic headdress were dark in the doorway and she still held a cue in her hand as she waved us goodbye. We drove away through stormy folds of woodland. The 1950’s waited outside the park gates. Meanwhile, shadowy cohorts from Arabia shifted about among the soaking timber. The whites of a score of eyes flashed hysterically or gaze for a moment in the headlamps. Then with a wheel and a flounder they vanished into the dark like rainy ghosts.

  The looming prospect of Missolonghi, as we mooned about Astakos and brooded on our wrongs, had brought all this rushing back.

  I had written to the owner from England and he had sent a friendly answer. Indeed, he said, he longed to send the shoes of the illustrious Lord Byron to his descendant, but he was anxious lest the precious relics should go astray in the post; better wait till some reliable emissary could be found. Since then all had been silence. Well, I had thought in Astakos, I’ll be able to clear everything up in a day or two, when the boat comes. I’ll simply ask the way to the house of Kyrios——

  That was the trouble! Mr. Who? I had forgotten the name. It shouldn’t be hard to find in a little town like Missolonghi. But, to leave nothing to chance, I went to the post office and sent a telegram to Lady Wentworth.

  Her answer was waiting in the Missolonghi poste restante; Sorry very provoking, it read, correspondence mislaid good luck Wentworth. I asked the man behind the counter if he knew anything about a fellow-citizen who owned a pair of Lord Byron’s shoes. No, he had never heard of them, nor had his colleagues, not even the postmaster himself. They and the other people in the post office were full of concern. The words “Tà papóutsia toù Lórdou Vyrónou” began to hum through the building. “Ask at the town hall. They’ve got some Byron things there. The mayor might know....” The mayor, a distinguished, spectacled figure, knew nothing either. We contented ourselves by peering at the sparse Byron relics in the glass cases. There was a cross-section of the last surviving branch of the elm tree under which the poet had reclined at Harrow; an envelope, addressed in the familiar writing, sere with age, to “the Honble. Mrs. Leigh, Six Mile Bottom, Newmarket”; a letter beginning, “My dearest Caroline”; the document declaring Byron an honorary citizen of the town; a picture of his daughter, Augusta Ada, as a girl; Solomos’s commemorative hymn and the broadsheets announcing his death; an aquatint of Newstead Abbey and another of “the Shade of Byron contemplating the ruins of Missolonghi.” A third print, published in 1827, depicted Archbishop Germanos, who had raised the standard of revolt at Kalavryta. The beard and the canonicals vaguely approximated to the attributes of an orthodox prelate; but the background was a soaring, Beckfordian complex of lancets, triforia, clerestories and crocketed finials: a telling proof of how dimly western Europe apprehended what Greece, during the eclipse of Ottoman power, was like.

  But no trace of the shoes.

  We drew blank everywhere; with the clergy, the police, the various banks. There was scarcely a bar in which we did not order a swig as a prelude to enquiry. In desperation, we even accosted likely strangers in the street.

  Maddened by frustration, at a restaurant table near a statue of President Tricoupis under a clump of palm trees, we scarcely touched our luncheon octopus, swallowing glass after glass of cold Fix beer to replace the salt cataract which the heat summoned from every pore. We fretted through fitful siestas and surged into the streets long before the town had woken up, and soon found ourselves at the Kypos tôn Eroôn. I had begun to wonder whether the conversations at Crabbet and the exchange of letters had all been hallucinations.

  This Garden of Heroes is a stirring place. There, among the drooping and dusty trees of midsummer, stood the marble busts and the monuments of the heroes of Missolonghi. It is a mark of the importance of Lord Byron in Greek eyes that his statue, the only full-length figure there, has been accorded the central position in this Valhalla. Dotted about, too, are monuments to the other philhellenes who fought or died for the liberation of Greece: the numerous Germans, the French, the Americans, the English, and, symbolized by a huge granite totem surrounded by boulders, the Swedes; on every side, mingling with these guest-warriors, are the great Greek paladins of the Siege.

  We were sitting rather dejectedly on the low wall outside, and meditating on how to resume our quest, when a flutter of coloured flounces and a plaintive murmur heralded the onslaught of a gypsy woman. But we were in no mood for fortune-telling, and when, driven away at last by the persistence of her litany, which alms had failed
to stem, we rose wearily to return to the town, she gazed balefully in our faces and said she saw unhappiness and failure written there. Further dejected by these tidings, we returned to our quarters.

  But she was wrong. A nice-looking young woman was waiting for us. Her face brightened as we appeared: were we looking for Lord Byron’s shoes? She had heard we had been asking about them. They belonged to her uncle: she told us his name; I recognized it in a flash as that of my correspondent. Could we call at his house in an hour’s time?

  Can a duck swim?

  We climbed the stairs to the guest-room of a substantial house built of yellow stone not far from the site of the house where Byron died. The shutters were still closed against the afternoon heat. Solid Victorian furniture fitted with antimacassars materialized in the shadows round the welcoming figure of our host. He was a large and robust man, between sixty and seventy, with jutting black eyebrows and a tufted crop of grey hair and the simple and friendly manner of an old sea captain, which indeed he was. His niece was there with an artillery subaltern, her fiancé. The punctilio of their dress put our tired travelling outfits to shame. The niece busied herself with the ceremonial of a visit, administering spoonfuls of cherry jam, then a glass of water, a thimbleful of coffee and a scruple of mastíka. Less forgetful than me, our host had politely greeted me by name at once and fished out my letters; he also placed on the table, among other treasures, a neatly-stitched canvas parcel about a foot long, from which we couldn’t take our eyes; in laborious indelible-ink lettering of someone unused to Latin characters were traced the words: The Baroness Wentworth, Crabbet Park, Three Bridges, Sussex....

  I congratulated him on ferreting out Byron’s descendant and asked, rather tentatively, how Byron’s shoes had come his way. Had he inherited them?

  “No,” he said. “Though my grandparents, who were both Missolonghiots, must have seen Lord Byron often. Why, my grandpa was forty-two at the time of the siege, and my granny was thirty. He was born in 1784 and he died at the age of a hundred and four, when I was three years old! A hundred and four! He had pre-war bones! Propolémika kókkala! Not like our thin modern ones....I can’t remember him, of course, I’m only seventy-eight, but they all said he was a fine old man. He and my granny took part in the great exodus, fighting their way through the besieging Turks, and God be praised,” he paused to cross himself, “they got away safely. This is his yataghan.” He handed me the curving weapon with its bossed silver sheath and branching bone hilt, I drew it and ran my finger along the notched blade, and wondered whether the edge was dented as he hacked his way out on that terrible day. “There are his barkers”—we toyed with a heavy brace of pistols, almost straight ones encrusted with filigree, the butts ending in pearshaped knobs of Yanina silverwork—“and this is his balaska, the metal pouch they kept their bullets in, and here’s his powder flask. And this is his pen-case and its little inkwell; the lid clicks open—all silver!—though he wasn’t much of a scribe. But everybody wore them, even the ones without any letters at all, stuck into their belts,” he said with a smile, making a jutting gesture towards his middle, “for the dash of it, dia leventeiá. The more they had in their belts, the better. Well, my absolved[5] grandparents got away all right, and came back after the battle of Navarino, when the storm had blown over, and went into shipping. In a small way, at first; then he built more and more caïques, carrying cargoes and trading up and down the Gulf and in the Ionian Islands to start with, and especially to Zante—our town has always had a strong link with that place—and then into the Aegean, and, finally, all over the archipelago and the Mediterranean. They were good times. My father carried on and so did I. You see this house? It was built in my father’s day, and every block of it, every block of it, was brought in our own bottoms from—guess where? From Savona in Italy, near Genoa! Every block of it.” He tapped the wall behind his chair with a bent knuckle. “There! As sound and as solid as when it was built!”

  As he spoke we tried to keep our eyes from staring too pointedly at the canvas parcel. It grew darker; his daughter opened the shutters. The grape-green evening light flowed in through the mosquito wire. “Things have changed now,” he went on. “We’re not what we used to be, though we’ve still got a roof over our head. But those were the days. They had everything! They could tie up their dogs with strings of sausages.”

  He fell silent as though all had been said. The inrush of evening light revealed that his right eyelid had suffered some mishap on the high seas which gave the illusion of a wink. After a long silence, I ran a forefinger absent-mindedly along the top of the canvas parcel.

  “Ah, yes,” our host said with a sigh. “Lord Byron’s shoes....This is how they came my way. When O Vyron was in Missolonghi, he used to go duck-shooting in the lagoon in a monóxylo—one of those dug-out canoes they still use—belonging to a young boatman called Yanni Kazis. Kazis had three daughters. Two of them married and left our town and the third went away to Jerusalem,” he pointed out of the window, “and became a nun in an Orthodox convent. Many years later she came back. She was a frail old woman, all skin and bones, in a nun’s habit. Her family had been scattered to the winds and she had nowhere to go, so I gave the poor old woman a room in my house. That was in 1920—or was it 1921? Anyway, she lived with us for the last few years of her life. Just before she died she gave me this box”—he pulled a battered casket from under the table—“and in it were these papers and books, and the shoes of the Lordos. Also an ikon of St. Spiridion, which I hung up in the Cathedral.” The yellowed and flyblown papers turned out to be the black edged broadsheets published by the Provisional Government of Western Greece and signed by Mavrocordato, announcing Lord Byron’s death and decreeing a salute of thirty-seven cannon—a salvo for each year of the poet’s life—and three days of deep mourning, in spite of the impending Easter celebration. The books were a dog-eared Orthodox missal and two devotional works, all deep in mould.

  “The shoes,” he continued, “were given to her father by Lord Byron. Byron used to wear them about the house, when her father had rowed him back from the lagoon. Kazis never wore them, but kept them as sacred relics and when he died, he gave them to his daughter; and when she had no more days left, she gave them to me as a thanks-offering for her bed and board. We buried her, and here they are. She was a good old woman and may the ground rest light on her.”

  He seemed rather loth to undo the neat parcel, but at last snipped through the stitches in the canvas with the tip of his grandfather’s yataghan and began to unwrap the tissue paper. We all craned forward.

  Perhaps with Byron’s Greek costume at Crabbet in mind, I had been expecting a pair of tsarouchia, those heavy Greek mountain footwear, beaked and clouted, sometimes with velvet tufts across the toe, that are the traditional accompaniment of the fustanella. But when the innermost cocoon of tissue paper had been shed, the two faded things that my host gently deposited in my hands were light, slender, faded slippers, with their morocco leather soles and the uppers embroidered with a delicate criss-cross of yellow silk and their toes turning up at the tip in the Eastern mode. They suggested Morocco or Algiers and a carpeted and latticed penumbra, rather than the rocky Aetolian foothills; or, even more, slippers in the oriental taste that a regency dandy might have bought in the Burlington Arcade or at some fashionable shoemakers’ or haberdashers’ in the galleries of Genoa or Venice....The two flimsy trophies passed in silence from hand to hand. Something about them carried instant conviction. When we turned them upside down and examined the thin soles this conviction deepened: the worn parts of the soles were different on each. Those of the left were normal; the right showed a different imprint, particularly in the instep. We pointed this out to their owner, but, as he had never heard that there was anything out of the ordinary about Byron’s feet, it evoked no more than polite interest. For us, perhaps because we were so near the scene of the harrowing last moments of the poet’s life, perhaps because of our frustrating search and the sudden simplicity of its so
lution, these humble relics were poignant and moving to an extreme degree. It was as though that strange young man, as Hobhouse called him, had limped into the twilit room....

  The lamps were turned on, and when we had photographed and measured and sketched them, our host wrapped them up once more with a look of slight embarrassment. At last he confessed that, now that it had come to the point, he could not bear to let them leave the family: his niece was about to be married—“She’s taking this young pallikari here,” he said, waving the shoes in the direction of the subaltern, “and I want to make them part of her dowry. They could hand them on to their descendants, and they to theirs, and so on for ever....” He felt guilty about changing his mind. We assured him no one would dream of blaming him, least of all Byron’s great-granddaughter. She would wish the young couple luck and prosperity and a dozen offspring, as we did. His embarrassment vanished in a moment. We drank a final glass of mastíka, standing up, to toast the coming marriage. Then after a last look at the shoes and vicelike valedictory handshakes, we left our host still holding the shoes in his hand and wishing us god-speed. The town was wide-awake with evening doings and we felt as elated as though we were taking those elusive trophies with us.