Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Can a duck swim?

  We climbed the stairs to the guest room of a substantial house built of yellow stone not far from the site of the house where Byron died. The shutters were still closed against the afternoon heat. Solid Victorian furniture fitted with antimacassars materialized in the shadows round the welcoming figure of our host. He was a large and robust man, between sixty and seventy, with jutting black eyebrows and a tufted crop of grey hair and the simple and friendly manner of an old sea captain, which indeed he was. His niece was there with an artillery subaltern, her fiancé. The punctilio of their dress put our tired travelling outfits to shame. The niece busied herself with the ceremonial of a visit, administering spoonfuls of cherry jam, then a glass of water, a thimbleful of coffee and a scruple of mastika. Less forgetful than me, our host had politely greeted me by name at once and fished out my letters; he also placed on the table, among other treasures, a neatly stitched canvas parcel about a foot long, from which we couldn’t take our eyes; in laborious indelible-ink lettering of someone unused to Latin characters were traced the words: The Baroness Wentworth, Crabbet Park, Three Bridges, Sussex . . .

  I congratulated him on ferreting out Byron’s descendant and asked, rather tentatively, how Byron’s shoes had come his way. Had he inherited them?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Though my grandparents, who were both Missolonghiots, must have seen Lord Byron often. Why, my grandpa was forty-two at the time of the siege, and my granny was thirty. He was born in 1784 and he died at the age of a hundred and four, when I was three years old! A hundred and four! He had pre-war bones! Propolémika kókkala! Not like our thin modern ones . . . I can’t remember him, of course, I’m only seventy-eight, but they all said he was a fine old man. He and my granny took part in the great exodus, fighting their way through the besieging Turks, and God be praised,’ he paused to cross himself, ‘they got away safely. This is his yataghan.’ He handed me the curving weapon with its bossed silver sheath and branching bone hilt, I drew it and ran my finger along the notched blade, and wondered whether the edge was dented as he hacked his way out on that terrible day. ‘There are his barkers’—we toyed with a heavy brace of pistols, almost straight ones encrusted with filigree, the butts ending in pear-shaped knobs of Yanina silverwork—‘and this is his balaska, the metal pouch they kept their bullets in, and here’s his powder flask. And this is his pen-case and its little inkwell; the lid clicks open—all silver!—though he wasn’t much of a scribe. But everybody wore them, even the ones without any letters at all, stuck into their belts,’ he said with a smile, making a jutting gesture towards his middle, ‘for the dash of it, dia leventeiá. The more they had in their belts, the better. Well, my absolved* grandparents got away all right, and came back after the battle of Navarino, when the storm had blown over, and went into shipping. In a small way, at first; then he built more and more caiques, carrying cargoes and trading up and down the Gulf and in the Ionian Islands to start with, and especially to Zante—our town has always had a strong link with that place—and then into the Aegean, and, finally, all over the archipelago and the Mediterranean. They were good times. My father carried on and so did I. You see this house? It was built in my father’s day, and every block of it, every block of it, was brought in our own bottoms from—guess where? From Savona in Italy, near Genoa! Every block of it.’ He tapped the wall behind his chair with a bent knuckle. ‘There! As sound and as solid as when it was built!’

  As he spoke we tried to keep our eyes from staring too pointedly at the canvas parcel. It grew darker; his daughter opened the shutters. The grape-green evening light flowed in through the mosquito wire. ‘Things have changed now,’ he went on. ‘We’re not what we used to be, though we’ve still got a roof over our head. But those were the days. They had everything! They could tie up their dogs with strings of sausages.’

  He fell silent as though all had been said. The inrush of evening light revealed that his right eyelid had suffered some mishap on the high seas which gave the illusion of a wink. After a long silence, I ran a forefinger absent-mindedly along the top of the canvas parcel.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ our host said with a sigh. ‘Lord Byron’s shoes . . . This is how they came my way. When O Vyron was in Missolonghi, he used to go duck-shooting in the lagoon in a monóxylo—one of those dug-out canoes they still use—belonging to a young boatman called Yanni Kazis. Kazis had three daughters. Two of them married and left our town and the third went away to Jerusalem,’ he pointed out of the window, ‘and became a nun in an Orthodox convent. Many years later she came back. She was a frail old woman, all skin and bones, in a nun’s habit. Her family had been scattered to the winds and she had nowhere to go, so I gave the poor old woman a room in my house. That was in 1920—or was it 1921? Anyway, she lived with us for the last few years of her life. Just before she died she gave me this box’—he pulled a battered casket from under the table—‘and in it were these papers and books, and the shoes of the Lordos. Also an icon of St Spiridion, which I hung up in the Cathedral.’ The yellowed and flyblown papers turned out to be the black-edged broadsheets published by the Provisional Government of Western Greece and signed by Mavrocordato, announcing Lord Byron’s death and decreeing a salute of thirty-seven cannon—a salvo for each year of the poet’s life—and three days of deep mourning, in spite of the impending Easter celebration. The books were a dog-eared Orthodox missal and two devotional works, all deep in mould.

  ‘The shoes,’ he continued, ‘were given to her father by Lord Byron. Byron used to wear them about the house, when her father had rowed him back from the lagoon. Kazis never wore them, but kept them as sacred relics and when he died, he gave them to his daughter; and when she had no more days left, she gave them to me as a thanks-offering for her bed and board. We buried her, and here they are. She was a good old woman and may the ground rest light on her.’

  He seemed rather loath to undo the neat parcel, but at last snipped through the stitches in the canvas with the tip of his grandfather’s yataghan and began to unwrap the tissue paper. We all craned forward.

  Perhaps with Byron’s Greek costume at Crabbet in mind, I had been expecting a pair of tsarouchia, those heavy Greek mountain footwear, beaked and clouted, sometimes with velvet tufts across the toe, that are the traditional accompaniment of the fustanella. But when the innermost cocoon of tissue paper had been shed, the two faded things that my host gently deposited in my hands were light, slender, faded slippers, with their morocco leather soles and the uppers embroidered with a delicate criss-cross of yellow silk and their toes turning up at the tip in the Eastern mode. They suggested Morocco or Algiers and a carpeted and latticed penumbra, rather than the rocky Aetolian foothills; or, even more, slippers in the oriental taste that a regency dandy might have bought in the Burlington Arcade or at some fashionable shoemakers’ or haberdashers’ in the galleries of Genoa or Venice . . . The two flimsy trophies passed in silence from hand to hand. Something about them carried instant conviction. When we turned them upside down and examined the thin soles this conviction deepened: the worn parts of the soles were different on each. Those of the left were normal; the right showed a different imprint, particularly in the instep. We pointed this out to their owner, but, as he had never heard that there was anything out of the ordinary about Byron’s feet, it evoked no more than polite interest. For us, perhaps because we were so near the scene of the harrowing last moments of the poet’s life, perhaps because of our frustrating search and the sudden simplicity of its solution, these humble relics were poignant and moving to an extreme degree. It was as though that strange young man, as Hobhouse called him, had limped into the twilit room . . .

  The lamps were turned on, and when we had photographed and measured and sketched them, our host wrapped them up once more with a look of slight embarrassment. At last he confessed that, now that it had come to the point, he could not bear to let them leave the family: his niece was about to be married—‘She’s taking this young pallikari here,’ he s
aid, waving the shoes in the direction of the subaltern, ‘and I want to make them part of her dowry. They could hand them on to their descendants, and they to theirs, and so on for ever . . .’ He felt guilty about changing his mind. We assured him no one would dream of blaming him, least of all Byron’s great-granddaughter. She would wish the young couple luck and prosperity and a dozen offspring, as we did. His embarrassment vanished in a moment. We drank a final glass of mastíka, standing up, to toast the coming marriage. Then after a last look at the slippers and vicelike valedictory handshakes, we left our host still holding the slippers in his hand and wishing us godspeed. The town was wide-awake with evening doings and we felt as elated as though we were taking those elusive trophies with us.

  * This word—sjnchoriménos—together with makarítes, blessed, is a slightly more pious way of saying ‘the late.’

  Auberon Herbert

  from Auberon Herbert: A Composite Portrait, ed. John Jolliffe (Compton Russell, 1976)

  Auberon Herbert (1922–74) always felt a particular loyally to the Poles, who had accepted him as a private in the 14th Jazlowiecki Lancers in 1942 after the British, Free French and Dutch armed forces had all turned him down. After the war, he did all he could for the dispossessed Poles in England, and also championed the cause of the Ukraine and Belorussia. A devout Catholic and gifted linguist, he spent his time between his wide acres at Pixton Park, Dulverton, and his house in Portofino.

  It was twelve o’clock on a dirty and rainy morning towards the end of the war, but inside the old Wilton’s just off St James’s Square everything was lamplit and snug. The only other customer was a spectacular young Polish officer who was ordering a double vodka at the bar in such a way that I had to cast a second glance at the white eagles on the collar, the coloured flashes and the blue and white decorations and medal ribbons.

  ‘. . . put in the tomato juice next,’ he was saying, ‘and a lot of Worcester sauce, then a squeeze of lemon and, finally, plenty of pepper and salt.’

  ‘You want a Bloody Mary,’ the barman said.

  ‘No. That’s precisely what I don’t want.’ The Captain in the Carpathian Lancers spoke with a convinced but unruffled affability. ‘The odious roadhouse jauntiness of that name turns a magnificent drink into wormwood and simultaneously traduces the memory of a noble and deeply wronged Queen.’

  At this moment a Polish private came discreedy through the curtained doorway out of the rain. Spotting his officer, he approached, saluted, murmured something in Polish and then handed over a number of banknotes which the Captain thrust into a side pocket in an untidy ball with one hand, while he smote his brow with the back of the other and reinforced the gesture with a cry of Mój Boze! and a stream of Polish self-reproach.

  ‘He’s my soldier-servant,’ he explained when the soldier had gone. ‘Such a dear, good, intelligent man! I had forgotten all my cash on my dressing-table at the Cavendish and it was brilliant of him to find me. May I please offer you a drink?’

  He went on to explain, I think, that the name of the mixture was less an impious misnomer than a failure to pronounce the Slav syllables of a drink called a Vladimir; but I’m not sure; for, as our parallel plates of oysters, escorted by numberless glasses of Chablis, were demolished and replaced and then replaced again, we were soon so deep in the etymology and syntax of half a dozen languages that both the topics and their sequence, even at the time, were hard to keep disentangled. I think he was home on leave from a Polish brigade in the Low Countries, for he was talking about the subjunctive in Dutch and citing useful examples, and this led the way to analogous foibles in the dialects of the Wends, the Sorbs and the Kashubes; and thence to the range of variations that separates the Goidelic from the Brythonic branches of the Celtic tongues. He was tall and thin, and preternaturally pale, and his large green eyes and a cleft jutting chin gave him the good looks of a Bulwer-Lytton or a Disraeli hero. The urgent volubility of his discourse, swelling to vehemence or sinking to confidential apostrophe and adorned with a dazzling escort of similes and tropes, was beautifully under control. It was impossible not to be charmed and amused and a little bewildered. Who could he be? As he enlarged with a puckered brow on the plight of the Mirdites of northern Albania, I kept wondering. The problems of the Tosks south of the Skumbi river were causing him deep concern, also the future of the Chams, the Liaps and the Ghegs, and the movement of political notions among the Kossovars of the old Sanjak of Novipazar and along the banks of the Black Drin. His periods often ended in a wide, sinuous and tightly clenched smile that was half-saturnine and half-comic. He had a habit of holding his cigarette between forefinger and thumb and flourishing it like a piece of chalk to underline the stages of his discourse; it looked as though he might put the wrong end to his lips but it always righted itself just in time. Wilton’s had filled up and emptied again while we were talking. ‘The whole trouble with the Bosnian Moslems,’ he was saying, when suddenly a fiercer gust of rain slashed across the window-panes and a clap of thunder drowned the end of his sentence.

  ‘Shocking weather,’ the barman said.

  ‘It is indeed,’ my neighbour agreed. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but some more Stilton and another glass of port. I’m so delighted to meet someone who appreciates the importance of midday stoking-up in foul weather.’

  I can’t remember whether it was then or later on that he explained the colours under which he was sailing, ‘I tried the Irish Guards,’ he said, sadly, ‘but they wouldn’t take me, because of health. But the Poles did, bless them. And here I am.’

  This was not his only reason for loving the Poles. Shocked at their fate at the beginning of the war, when he was seventeen, and doubly outraged after the Yalta conference, he took their cause to heart as though it were his personal duty to right it. In a post-war world which had become the abomination of desolation for the Poles, this Quixotic and lasting passion, manifesting itself in a wide range of kind acts and moral and material help and backing and solicitude, spread feelings of friendship, warmth and concern exactly when they were needed. There was something very noble about this. Auberon’s devotion to the cause of Poland, and his later championship, as the years passed, of other victims of Eastern oppression, sprang from several sources. He felt a kind of collective guilt on behalf of the West: we had failed to see justice done; and deep feelings of Christian charity and of chivalry impelled him to help wherever he thought help was needed. Finally, he followed the promptings of a heart of gold. In spite of predictable bias and fruity diatribes against his natural foes, he couldn’t bear anyone to be unhappy. There were times both in London and in the country when he seemed swamped under pensioners and protégés: but his good deeds, hidden in a thick smokescreen of humour and deprecation, were always carried out with self-effacing tact. Alongside these, there was, I think, another impulse still: the half-unconscious survival of an atavistic and unhesitating family tendency to attempt, when public justice failed, to take whole nations under their wing. This intuitive, unprovincial and uninsular sympathy with injustice in remote places was a kind of Neville-Chamberlainism in reverse: the farther off a country, and the less that was known about it, the more urgent the need and the darker the wrongs crying out for redress.

  It was not in Auberon’s nature to do things by halves. On a quite different level, uncircumspect recklessness surrounded him with adventures and scrapes and odd events. He hated going to bed. Sharing this noctambulist bent, I found myself, as time passed, sitting up late with him among many changes of scenery: in many pubs and clubs, and, when they closed, in splendid or shady night-haunts; in cafés in Paris and Rome and Portofino; in his own house in Neville Terrace—looked after by Karol, the resourceful soldier of Wilton’s, and his wife—and at Pixton; and finally, in the Mani, where these notes are written. Our meetings were invariably protracted, always stimulating, often full of surprises. I remember him sitting, very late one night, on the end of my bed and analysing point by point the merits and the mistakes of the C
ouncil of Ferrara—Florence. Sleep must have supervened for a moment, or even for longer, for my next vision reveals the posture unchanged except that one of his arms was wound about his neck in such a way that a cigarette was setting fire to the back of his dressing-gown collar and a thin column of smoke was ascending. Outside the dawn was beginning to break, and his discourse had shifted to the early colonization of Brazil.

  Auberon’s zest for hunting had none of the grim monomania of a congenital Nimrod. It was love for the country round Pixton—those tall hangers and deep valleys, the rock-strewn brooks that suddenly open in the wild sweeps of Exmoor—that hoisted him into the saddle; this, and the enjoyment of the oddity and variety of the companions that the chase scattered all round him over the map. He would fix up a visiting friend with a horse borrowed from a kind sister or niece living nearby, but his own mounts were becoming steadily more of a problem. The vicissitudes of life were rearranging the contours of the slender Uhlan of Wilton’s into a still long-legged but sometimes pear-shaped equestrian of a kind that Leech would have loved to depict, and on misty mornings a vast, un-spectacled, utterly benevolent Scamperdale beamed across the tree-tops of Somerset from the back of some almost Trojan steed. He had a gift for naming horses. His last one was called Four Poster. (Auberon always had a look of belonging to a more ancient and rarer species than his neighbours and the gradual change of outline accentuated this: it could make him appear, coming down club steps at the top of St James’s Street, as unexpected as some obsolete creature of the deeps or the forests, an archaeopteryx perhaps, alighting from a glade in the Miocene Age, mopping a pearled brow with a spotted bandanna and radiant with the news that the Slovenes had lost the aorist even earlier than he had thought.) How charming these sojourns at Pixton were! Countless miles across wild and various country and tired hacks homeward long after dark were followed by happy fireside evenings under a lamplit Montagna; one of them, marked by his mother Mary Herbert reading Browning aloud to us in her beautiful voice, survives with a particular lustre.