King George’s family, as all the world knows, had made magnificent marriages. He was the brother of Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager Empress of Russia, and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the German Emperor’s sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle-regulations were due. The “in-laws” consequently were often being bugled for, and the tram to Phaleron on a Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target for Bolsheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged during these years on her wifely duties, and the arrival of the Empress Frederick in Athens usually implied that there would soon be fireworks in Constitution Square. But when I write of her, there is no opera-bouffe atmosphere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic were her past years, bitter her present years, and grim agonies of mortal disease were already making ambush for her. During the three or four ensuing years, when, instead of being at the British School or at a hotel, I spent some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely personal terms with her. She had been a friend of an uncle of mine, who became a nationalized German after years of living in Wiesbaden, and starting from that, she talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged remarks came out, “You are happy in being English”; or “When I come to London I am only a visitor.” On one occasion I was left alone with her on a terrace above the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my profound discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered ejaculations. Then quite suddenly she said to me, “But Willie is mad!” I suppose I idiotically looked as if this was some joke, and she shook her outstretched hand at me, “I mean that he is mad,” she repeated. “Willie is mad.”... Then quite suddenly, with the arrested movement of a bird, wounded to death in mid-air, she ceased from her tragic flight, and came to earth. “If you are going to bathe again at Phaleron,” she said, with a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, “I must be sure there are no clothes on the beach, before I sit down to sketch. You came out of the water, and there was I....”
Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of oleander. Round the corner came the originators of this disturbance.... King George seemed to have taken a dislike to his sister’s hat, and had plucked it from her head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she followed remonstrating. “But it’s an ugly hat,” said he, delighted to find some kind of umpire, “and therefore I took it and I kicked it, and she cannot wear it any more....” (Was there ever anything so like the immortal Rose and the Ring?) “My hat!” said the injured owner tersely, as she recovered her hopelessly damaged property.... “So rude of you, George.”
My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrilling, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in what purported to be modern Greek, until it became so. There had been considerable excitement about Megalopolis the year before, for the British excavators had thought they had triumphantly refuted the German theory, announced by Dr. Dörpfeld, that fourth century Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their anti-German discovery in the Hellenic Journal with something resembling a crow of satisfaction. On which this dreadful Dr. Dörpfeld came down from Athens with a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so that no further argument was possible, that the British, with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted
E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 26 [[Page 287]
their own evidence, and demonstrated how what they had taken for a stage was merely a back wall. Their researches in fact had merely confirmed his theory. Then he rolled up his measure and went back to Athens.... So another and I cleaned up these rather depressing remains, and when that was done we hired mules and went a-wandering through the country and saw the spring “blossom by blossom” (even as Beesly had read) alight on the hills. Blossom by blossom, too, Greece itself, no longer pictured in photographs or bored for in books, opened its myriad lovelinesses, even as the scarlet anemone made flame in the thickets, and the nightingales “turned the heart of the night to fire” in the oleanders by the Eurotas. We visited Homeric Mycenæ, and Epidaurus, the Harrogate of the fourth century B.C., and in archæological intervals I speared mullet by the light of a flaming torch on moonless nights with the fishermen of Nauplia, and ate them for early breakfast, broiled on the sea-shore, before the sun was up. I crossed the Gulf of Corinth and went to Delphi, where the French school were beginning the excavations that were destined to yield more richly than any soil in Greece except the precinct at Olympia. There, too, I went, and if to me the Parthenon had been a revelation of the glory of God, there I took my shoes from off my feet, and worshipped the glory of man, because the Hermes of Praxiteles “caring for the infant Dionysus,” embodied, once and for all, the possible, the ultimate, beauty of man, even as the Louvre held the ultimate glory of woman.... A few weeks more in Athens were busy with the record of the meagre results from Megalopolis, and I left for England, knowing in my very bones that Athens was in some subtle way my spiritual mother, so that on many subsequent journeys, as I went from England there, and from there back to England again, I travelled but from home to home, οἴκοθεν οἴκαδε.
Dodo had been put back in her drawer, after her expedition to Henry James: now for the second time I took her out and tasted her, as if to see whether she seemed to have mellowed like a good wine, or become sour like an inferior one, in which case I would very gladly have poured her on the earth like water, and started again. But I could not, reading her once more, altogether cast her off: she had certain gleams of vitality about her, and with my mother’s connivance and help again I submitted her to a professional verdict. This time it was my mother’s friend, Mrs. Harrison, known to our admiring family as “Lucas Malet,” author of the adorable Colonel Enderby’s Wife, who was selected to pronounce on my story, and again, I am afraid, it was without the slightest realization of this highway robbery on the time of an author that I despatched the book. Anyhow those two assaults on Henry James and Lucas Malet have produced in me a fellow-feeling for criminals such as I was a quarter of a century ago, so that now, when, as occasionally happens, some light-hearted marauder announces that he or she (it is usually she) is sending me her manuscript, which she hopes I won’t mind reading, and telling her as soon as possible exactly what I think of it, and to what publisher she had better send it (perhaps I would write him a line too) and whether the heroine isn’t a little overdone (but her mother thinks her excellent), and would I be careful to register it when I return it, and if before next Thursday to this address, and if after next Friday to another, etc. etc., I try to behave as Lucas Malet behaved in similar circumstances. I do not for a moment say that I succeed, but I can still remember how pleasant it should seem, from the point of view of the aspirant scribbler, that somebody should be permitted to read what has been written with such rapture and how important it all is....