One day, perhaps, the Turks may hold Malta sacred, for assuredly the cream of her people were gathered there. One might almost have thought that such men as Prince Said Halim (late Grand Vizier), Rauf Bey, Fethi Bey, Hussein Djahid, and my admirable Angora guide,) Vely-Nedjdat, had been carefully selected to keep each other company.
Mrs. Stan-Harding once said of her eight and a half months in a Soviet prison: “At least I had this advantage, I met the best people in Russia.” As her hearers seemed puzzled by such a statement, she added, “They were all, naturally, in prison!”
I must tell them, in Angora, that England, at least, has always honestly tried to put right her own wrong-doings, and one day (may it be soon!) she will “redeem” herself to them also.
Mr. H. G. Wells somewhere describes the strange, great love we often feel for those we have deeply wronged—the wife, the friend, the enemy. May it not, at the long last, be so “after the war?”
Who knows if, indeed, this be not the dark hour before the dawn, of our nation’s friendships—with those we have been led to hate?
CHAPTER IV
ATHENS—“WE HAVE LOVED HELEN; MUST WE DIVORCE HER?”
If only it were always calm, how delightful it would be to travel by sea!
From Malta to Athens, indeed, is not a long run; but when every moment you are tossed from side to side, at the mercy of all the winds in heaven, most things have a disagreeable look. As we approached the brown and arid coast of this historic peninsula, I thought how unjust it seems to have driven the Ottoman Greeks out of fertile Turkey to a fatherland that cannot feed them. You cannot obtain blood from a stone, nor fruitful crops from an unfertile soil. What is Greece to do for these poor people, who cannot all turn merchants or moneylenders?