The Colossus of Maroussi Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the night the Greek army was mobilized. War had not yet been declared, but the King’s hasty return to Athens was interpreted by everyone as an ominous sign. Everyone who had the means seemed determined to follow the King’s example. The town of Corfu was in a veritable panic. Durrell wanted to enlist in the Greek army for service on the Albanian frontier; Spiro, who was past the age limit, also wanted to offer his services. A few days passed this way in hysterical gesturings and then, quite as if it had been arranged by an impresario, we all found ourselves waiting for the boat to take us to Athens. The boat was to arrive at nine in the morning; we didn’t get aboard her until four the next morning. By that time the quay was filled with an indescribable litter of baggage on which the feverish owners sat or sprawled themselves out, pretending to look unconcerned but actually quaking with fear. The most disgraceful scene ensued when the tenders finally hove to. As usual, the rich insisted on going aboard first. Having a first-class passage I found myself among the rich. I was thoroughly disgusted and half minded not to take the boat at all but return quietly to Durrell’s house and let things take their course. Then, by some miraculous quirk, I discovered that we weren’t to go aboard first, that we were to go last. All the fine luggage was being taken out of the tenders and thrown back on the quay. Bravo! My heart went up. The Countess, who had more luggage than anyone, was the very last to go aboard. Later I discovered to my surprise that it was she who had arranged matters thus. It was the inefficiency that had annoyed her, not the question of class or privilege. She hadn’t the least fear of the Italians apparently—what she minded was the disorder, the shameful scramble. It was four in the morning, as I say, with a bright moon gleaming on a swollen, angry sea, when we pushed off from the quay in the little caiques. I had never expected to leave Corfu under such conditions. I was a bit angry with myself for having consented to go to Athens. I was more concerned about the interruption of my blissful vacation than about the dangers of the impending war. It was still Summer and I had by no means had enough of sun and sea. I thought of the peasant women and the ragged children who would soon be without food, and the look in their eyes as they waved good-bye to us. It seemed cowardly to be running away like this, leaving the weak and innocent to their doom. Money again. Those who have escape; those who have not are massacred. I found myself praying that the Italians would intercept us, that we would not get off scot free in this shameless way.
    When I awoke and went up on deck the boat was gliding through a narrow strait; on either side of us were low barren hills, soft, violet-studded hummocks of earth of such intimate human proportions as to make one weep with joy. The sun was almost at zenith and the glare was dazzlingly intense. I was in precisely that little Greek world whose frontiers I had described in my book a few months before leaving Paris. It was like awakening to find oneself alive in a dream. There was something phenomenal about the luminous immediacy of these two violet-colored shores. We were gliding along in precisely the way that Rousseau le douanier has described it in his painting. It was more than a Greek atmosphere—it was poetic and of no time or place actually known to man. The boat itself was the only link with reality. The boat was filled to the gunwales with lost souls desperately clinging to their few earthly possessions. Women in rags, their breasts bared, were vainly trying to nurse their howling brats; they sat on the deck floor in a mess of vomit and blood and the dream through which they were passing never brushed their eyelids. If we had been torpedoed then and there we would have passed like that, in vomit and blood and confusion, to the dark underworld. At that moment I rejoiced