“No connection with any one else in the same line of business,” murmured Maurice. “Surely,” he observed aloud, “you would do better if you could unite into one body all who had the same object in view? Then you could moderate the Balkan passion for assassination, and they would bring you a welcome accession of numbers and money.”
Professor Panagiotis laughed bitterly. “Your words prove that you share the usual English ignorance of the state of affairs in Emathia,” he said. “To the schismatic Thracians and Dardanians, an Orthodox Christian is equally hateful with a Roumi, and the same treatment is meted out to him.”
“A pleasant prospect for the future!” said Maurice. The Professor turned upon him almost savagely.
“Joke, jest, mock, Mr Teffany—anything to drive away from your mind the conviction that you are called upon to espouse the cause of your country, your subjects! This is the difference between your case and your grandfather’s—that the crisis which had not arisen in his day now confronts you. We Emathian Greeks are faced by an organised conspiracy to despoil us, slay us, make renegades of us—in fact, to wipe us out, as you would say, from our own country.”
“But how is it? who is doing it?” cried Zoe.
“The schismatics, with Scythia working behind them,” was the reply. “By immemorial right and tradition Emathia is a Greek country, but agitators are being sent among the people—ours predominantly by race, converted, shepherded, educated by us—to persuade them by bribes and threats to declare themselves Thracians, Dardanians, even Dacians—anything that may give colour to the fiction of Slav descent, and consequently alienate them from us.”
“But which are they really? Or are they so mixed that they may be anything?”
“The mixture of races and languages is extraordinary,” conceded the Professor unwillingly. “But in the incredible confusion that exists, we Greeks alone present a clear issue. Until recently, every Christian in the Roumi dominions was styled a Greek without question, and if our people are not tampered with, we can continue to supply them with education and religious ministrations, and confine their agitation for release from Roum within legal limits. But this unites against us all the aspiring nationalities—as they call themselves—that covet Emathian territory, and the result is that our churches are desecrated, and whole families massacred for the sole crime of fidelity to Orthodoxy. I dare not recount in the presence of your sister the fate that has befallen young Greek schoolmistresses, living unprotected in the villages of the parents of their pupils.”
“Why send unprotected girls to run such risks?”
“The girls accepted them of their own free will,” returned the Professor smartly. “They placed the Greek cause—the cause of their race—above life itself.”