Roumeli (23 page)

I had a special reason for halting in Missolonghi; a reason which must carry us back a few months; back to a rainy day in Sussex where I was staying with an old friend, Antony Holland; to a morning when we were driving to luncheon with a neighbour through a downpour of rain.

The prospect was captivating. Lady Wentworth, whose house we were heading for, was Byron's great-granddaughter and, I knew, the owner of a hoard of Byroniana.
[2]
Her father was Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the poet. I knew his legend well: how he lived as an Arab Sheikh and a rebel against British rule in the desert near Cairo and founded the Arabian stud there which was now his daughter's; his association with “Skittles” was a literary link with Meredith's
Ordeal of Richard Feveral
, and perhaps with Lucy Glitters in
Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour
. In my youthful ears, rumours of his literary and sporting regime at Crabbet and Newbuildings had always held, probably wrongly, something of the legendary and lurid glamour of Medmenham and the Hellfire Club. His daughter's marriage was a fragile join with the
Last Days of Pompeii
.

Above all, there was Lady Wentworth's own myth. The portrait of her—a beautiful, smouldering-eyed, pre-Raphaelite girl in elaborate Arab costume—had long been familiar. Her early virtuosity and recklessness on horseback were as famous as her monumental book on the Arab horse was later to become. I knew she lived by a system of private conventions: a melancholy daemon of discord had set her at odds with her family and most of the outside world; rifts which even now, when she was over eighty, had lost none of their acerbity. Isolation surrounded her with a dark halo of fable. By a miracle of exemption, Antony Holland's father and his family were almost the
only old friends or neighbours with whom Lady Wentworth was not in some degree at feud.

Rain was pouring down as we approached the park gates. The number and the fierceness of the warnings to trespassers suggested mantraps and spring-guns and filled the undergrowth with imaginary bloodhounds. Arab horses grazed under the chestnut clumps. We had to stop while a score of beautiful animals galloped across the drive with flying tails and manes and sailed in a long loop towards a tree-reflecting lake. The house appeared and a few moments later we plunged indoors through the deluge.

Nothing had changed since Regency and Victorian times. The sad charm pervading large houses in which only the owner and the servants live was paramount here. Lady Wentworth displayed the same disregard for fashion and change as the house: an indifference discernible in a skirt to the ground like the ones women wore for badminton at the turn of the century; many chains and lockets and a ribboned lace cap, obsolete for many decades, showed the same independence. Her abundant russet coiffure looked as strong in texture as though it were plaited from the strands of her stallions' manes gathered from the briars and the teazles in the park. Going in to luncheon, she said: “I'm sorry appearin' in these,” and pointed to her blancoed gym-shoes. “Just been playin' squash.” By far the most remarkable thing in her appearance was the beauty and distinction of her features: an exquisite high-bridged delicacy of bone-structure and texture that time had spared intact: Byron and Wilfred Blunt leapt to the mind. Her eyes were as clear and smouldering as those in the famous Arabian picture on the wall above the table; they were capable still, it was easy to see, of turning into emblems of her bent for strife. An old-fashioned elimination of final g's and sometimes of initial h's distinguished the chiselled clarity of her speech and her vowels were so patricianly thin that they almost came full cycle. The
tone was sad, sometimes almost sepulchral, as though weighed down by distress. The words “
Have some more spotted dog?
” rang like a knell.

Antony Holland was a great favourite; she seemed really pleased that we had come to see her. Her talk ranged with dark humour over life in the desert and the breaking and training of Arab horses; famous figures long dead were stood up and bowled over like ninepins. Answering a question about a tremendous Edwardian statesman and grandee, she said, “Oh, charmin', charmin', but such a milksop....” She liked the idea of her great-grandfather: “But Lady Byron had rotten bad luck with him,” she said. “You just read my uncle Lovelace's book about it!” The row might have taken place only a few years ago. Afterwards we hunted through a huge, disused and heavily cumbered room for a full-face portrait of Byron as a young man, but we could not find it.
[3]
“It's all a bit topsy-turvey,” she murmured, hopping nimbly over corded trunks and japanned tin cases. I saw, with excitement, that these were labelled on the side, in chalk or in white paint, “Ld. Byron's letters” and “Ly. Byron's letters.”
[4]
“Yes, they're all in there,” Lady Wentworth said sombrely, “and it's the best place for them.” We looked at a case with Byron's Greek-Albanian velvet jacket with its gold lace and hanging sleeves. There were his velvet-scabbarded scimitar and his heavily embroidered velvet greaves—the same accoutrements, I think, that he wears in the famous Phillips portrait. We explored the amassed relics for an hour. Struck by a sudden idea, she led us to her study. It was crammed with portraits, miniatures, framed eighteenth-century silhouettes; books, keepsakes and trophies were gathered in a jungle: rummaging in her desk, she turned over a chaos of farm accounts,
horse-breeding literature, lawyers' letters, a battered missal, seedsmen's catalogues, a rosary, farriers' bills and circulars for cattle cake, until at last she found what she was after.

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.