The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

That journey gave me a sight of one of the remarkable Cretan women, whose reputation for beauty I had always regarded, judging from the women in the cities, as a classical fable. I had been making a visit to the mudir of the province through which we were passing, and, after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse, and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when my eye was caught by the flutter of the robes of a woman in a garden across the road. Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a girl's face presented itself to me at the other side of it, and we stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she—a Mussulman girl—remembered that she must not be seen, when, wrapping her veil around her head, she flew to the house. The vision was of such a transcendent beauty as I had, and have since, never seen in flesh and blood,—a mindless face, but of such exquisite proportion, color, and sweetness of modeling, with eyes of such lustrous brown, that I did not lose the vivid image of it, or the ecstatic impression it produced, for several days; it seemed to be ineradicably impressed on the sensorium in the same manner as the ecstatic vision I have recorded of my wood-life. I suppose such beauty to be incompatible with any degree of mental activity or personal character, for the process of mental development carries with it a trace of struggle destructive to the supreme serenity and statuesque repose of the Cretan beauty. Pashley tells of a similar experience he had in the mountains of Sphakia, and he was impressed as I was.

On our arrival at the city gates, returning to Retimo, we had an experience of the mediaeval ways of the island, finding the gates locked and no guard on duty. We called and summoned,—for a consul had always the privilege of having the gates opened to him at any hour of day or night,—but in vain, until I devised a summons louder than our sticks on the gate, and, taking the hugest stone I could lift, threw it with all my force repeatedly at the gate, and so aroused the guard, who went to the governor and got the keys, which were kept under his pillow. The next day we had an affair with Turkish justice which illustrates the position of the consuls in Turkey so well that I tell it fully. The dragoman and I had gone off to shoot rock-pigeons in one of the caves by the seashore, leaving at home my breech-loading hunting rifle, then a novelty in that part of the world. When we got home at night the city was full of a report that some one in our house had shot a Turkish boy through the body. I at once made an investigation and found that the facts were that a boy coming to the town, at a distance of about half a mile from the gate, had been hit by a rifle ball which had struck him in the chest and gone out at the back. No one had heard a shot, and the sentinel at our doors, set nominally for honor, but really to watch the house, had not heard any sound. The boy was in no danger, and he declared that the bullet had struck him in the back and gone out by the chest. My Canea dragoman, who was reading in the house all the time we were gone, had heard nothing and knew nothing about it; but, on examining the rifle, I found that some one had tried to wipe it out and had left a rag sticking half way down, the barrel. This pointed to a solution, and an investigation made the whole thing clear. The dragoman's man-servant had taken the gun out on the balcony which looked out on the port, and fired a shot at a white stone on the edge of the wall, in the direction of the village where the boy was hit.

The kaimakam of Retimo sent an express to Canea to ask Ismael what he should do, and received reply to prosecute the affair with the utmost vigor. He therefore summoned the entire household of the dragoman, except him and myself, to the konak, to be examined. As they were all under my protection I refused to send them, but offered to make a strict investigation and tell him the result; but, knowing the rigor of the Turkish law against a Christian who had wounded a Mussulman, even unintentionally, I insisted on being the magistrate to sit in the examination. The pasha declined my offer, and I forbade any one in the house to go to the konak for examination. I then appeared before the kaimakam and demanded the evidence on which my house was accused. There was none except that of the surgeon, who was a Catholic, and a bigoted enemy of the Greeks, and especially of the dragoman, with whom he had had litigation. He declared that the shot came from the direction of the town, while the boy maintained the contrary; and as, in the direction from which the boy had come, there was a Mussulman festival, with much firing of guns, I suggested the possibility that the ball came, as the boy believed, from that direction, and put the surgeon to a severe cross-examination. I asked him if he had ever seen a gunshot wound before, and he admitted that he had not. Thereupon I denounced him to the kaimakam, who had begun to be frightened at the responsibility he had assumed, and the man broke down and admitted that he might be mistaken, on which the kaimakam withdrew the charge.

I knew perfectly well that the servant was guilty, but I knew, too, that for accidental wounding he would have been punished by indefinite confinement in a Turkish prison, as if he had shot the boy intentionally. The refusal of the pasha to permit me to judge the case, as I had a right to do, he being my protégé, left me only the responsibility of the counsel for the prisoner, and I determined to acquit him if possible. The bullet had, fortunately, gone through the boy and could not be found; and, as the wound, though through the lungs, was healing in a most satisfactory manner, and would leave no effects, I had no scruples in preventing a conviction that would have punished an involuntary offense by a terrible penalty, which all who know anything of a Turkish prison can anticipate. The governor-general was very angry, and the kaimakam was severely reprimanded, but they could not help themselves. My position under the capitulations was secure, but it made the hostility between the pasha and myself the more bitter.

The accumulated oppressions of Ismael Pasha had finally the usual effect on the Cretans, and they began to agitate for a petition to the Sultan, a procedure which time had shown to be absolutely useless as an appeal against the governor; and, while the agitation was in this embryonic condition, I decided to go back to Rome and get my wife and children. We were still in the state of siege by the cholera, and there was still no communication with the Greek islands, so that I accepted the offer made by my English colleague, the amiable and gratefully remembered Charles H. Dickson, of whose qualities I shall have to say more in the pages to come, of a passage on a Brixham schooner to Zante. Sailing with a clean bill of health, we had to make a fortnight's quarantine in the roadstead, and, taking passage on the Italian postal steamer to Ancona, I was obliged, on landing, to make another term of two weeks in the lazaretto, though we had again a clean bill; and, on arriving on the Papal frontier by the diligence, we had to undergo a suffocating fumigation, and all this in spite of the fact that no one of the company I had traveled with had been at a city where cholera had existed at any time within three months, or on a steamer which had touched where the cholera was prevalent. At that time there was no railway northward from Rome, and traveling was conducted on the system of the sixteenth century, except for sea travel.

I was not long cutting all the ties that bound me to Rome, though I left a few sincere friends there, and, drawing a bill on my brother for my indebtedness to the kind and helpful banker, an Englishman named Freeborn, to whose friendship I owed the solution of most of the difficulties and all the indulgences I had enjoyed while in Rome, I started on my return to Crete in the problematical condition of one who emigrates to a foreign land through an unknown way. I had money enough to get through if nothing occurred to delay me, and no more, for, with the high rate of exchange on America, I felt distressed at the burthen I was laying on my brother, though I had always been told to consider myself as to be provided for while he had the means, and by his will when he died. His death took place at this juncture, and, curiously enough, the draft reached him in time to be accepted, but he died before it was paid. His will made no mention whatever of me, but left all his property to his wife during her lifetime, and to three Seventh-day Baptist churches after her death.

In our consular service there was no allowance for traveling expenses, or provision of any kind for the extraordinary expenses which might fall on the consul from contingencies like mine. The salary at Crete, which had been $1500 during the war, was reduced to $1000 at its close, and in future I had only that and what my pen might bring me. Arrived at Florence on our way to Ancona, we found the Italian government being installed there; and our minister to Italy, Mr. Marsh, knowing my circumstances, insisted on my taking a thousand francs, though his own salary, which was, as in my case, his only income, was always insufficient for his official and social position at the capital. I accepted it, and it was ten years before I paid it all back.

Looking back on this period of my life from a later and relatively assured, though never prosperous condition, I can see that most of my straits in life have been owing to my having accepted the miserable and delusive advantage of an official position under my government. I was not indolent, and asked for an appointment not to escape work, but to be put in the way of work which I wanted to do; and when I was disappointed in the appointment to Venice I should have set to work at home. But my position was a difficult one. The arts were for the war times suspended; I could not get into the army, my mother in an extreme old age was a pensioner at my brother Charles's house, and my sister-in-law refused to allow me to remain in my brother's house. I had, at an earlier date, in obedience to my brother's urgings and in deference to the Sabbatarian scruples, refused all offers to go into business, as he regarded me as his heir, and had formally and at more than one juncture assured me that my future was provided for and that I need have no anxiety as to money.

My brother had urged my acceptance of the post at Rome, and all the disasters of my subsequent life came from that error. My temperament and the habit of my life had always prevented me from anticipating trouble, and I never hesitated to go ahead in what lay before me, trusting to the chapter of accidents to get through, incessant activity keeping anxiety away. I have never flinched from a duty, if I saw it, have never done an injustice to man or woman, intentionally, and at more than one moment of my career have accepted the worse horn of a dilemma rather than permit a wrong to happen to another; and if I have been erratic and unstable it has not been from selfish or perverse motives. I have always been what most people would call visionary, and material objects of endeavor have not had the value they ought to have had in my eyes. As I look back upon a career which has brought me into contact with many people and many interests not my own, I can honestly say that I have not been actuated in any important transaction by my own interest to the disadvantage of that of other people, though I have probably often insisted too much on my own way of seeing things in undue disregard of the views of others. Confronted with opportunities of enriching myself illicitly, I can honestly say that they never offered the least temptation, for I have never cared enough about money or what it brings to do anything solely for it; and, if I have been honest, it has not been from the excellence of my principles, but because I was born so.

But if I could have conceived what this Cretan venture was to bring me to, I should have taken the steamer to America rather than to the Levant. The few days we remained in Florence, then still crowded by the advent of the court, with its satellites and accompaniments, gave me an opportunity to know well one of the noblest of my countrymen of that period of our history, Mr. George P. Marsh. It is difficult even now, after the lapse of many years since I last saw him, to do justice to the man as I came, then and in later years, to know him and compare him with other Americans in public life. As a representative of our country abroad, no one, not even Lowell, has stood for it so nobly and unselfishly; Charles Francis Adams alone rivaling him in the seriousness with which he gave himself to the Republic. Lowell was not less patriotic, but he loved society and England; Marsh in those days of trial loved nothing but his country, and with an intensity that was ill-requited as it was immeasurable. He took a great interest in our little Russie, whom he pronounced the most remarkable child for beauty and intelligence he had ever seen, and his interest followed us in the tragedy of our Cretan life.