CHAPTER XXIII ATHENS

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My first leave of absence from Crete had been for two months, afterward extended indefinitely on account of the health of the family, the extension being accompanied with the intimation that my salary would be suspended after a date indicated, unless I returned to Crete. The Cretan committee of Boston, to whom I had, according to our agreement, sent my claim for the excess of expenses over my income,—the excess amounting after the realization of all my private resources, sale of my curiosities, etc., to about $1500, for which I was indebted to Mr. Lockwood,—replied that the funds of the committee were exhausted, and there was nothing to meet my claim. As I had given my leisure in Crete to the practice of photography and was provided with everything necessary to correct architectural work, I set about photographing the ruins of Athens, which I found had never been treated intelligently by the local photographers, and from the sale of the photographs I realized what sufficed, with a sum of 1200 francs accorded us by the Athens Cretan committee from the remainder of the funds in hand when the insurrection collapsed, to meet immediate contingencies. I was in hope that the new cabinet, in which I had a warm personal friend in Judge Hoar, General Grant's attorney-general, would assign me another post, knowing that the Turkish government was so bitterly opposed to my remaining in Crete; but the new Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, was a friend of General King, my discomfited superior at Rome, and he had persistently urged my dismissal as demanded by the Sultan, though, owing to Hoar's opposition in the cabinet this had not been accorded. But I was never forgiven by the friends of King, and one day, when Judge Hoar was absent from a cabinet meeting, Fish succeeded in getting my successor at Crete appointed, and though the judge made an indignant remonstrance at the next meeting, it was too late to help us, for Fish obstinately opposed my having any other appointment, and, as he controlled all nominations to consular posts, it was impossible for the judge to effect anything.

My troubles came to a crisis in the sudden death of my wife. The anxiety and mental distress of our Cretan life, and her passionate sympathy with the suffering Cretans, even more than our privations and personal danger, had long been producing their effect on her mind, and the weaning of the baby precipitated the change into a profound melancholy, which became insanity accompanied by religious delusions from which she sought refuge in a voluntary death. She was given a public funeral, and the government sent a caisson to carry the coffin to the grave, but the Cretans claimed the right to take charge of it, and the coffin was carried to the cemetery on the shoulders of the oldest chiefs. The Cretan women looked on her as their best friend, and always spoke of her after her death as "the Blessed "—their form of canonization, for even in Athens they had been her chief care. The quiet but indomitable courage with which she faced danger in Crete, lest they should be involved in the panic which prevailed all around us, was as remarkable as the humility with which she repelled all acknowledgment of any merit on her part. She indulged in no sentiment, had no poetic prepossession concerning the people she protected and worked for, but the dominant sense of duty carried her through all difficulties. She never gave a thought to personal danger, and though a fragile creature, not five feet high, she was capable of cowing the most brutal of the barbarians who were gathered around us at Khalepa, and, whether to keep the consulate for me while I was away, or to navigate the yacht to meet me on my return from my visits to Greece, nothing made her hesitate to do what she thought her duty. In the three years of almost breaking strain of our residence in the midst of the anarchy of the insurrection, she had only the few days' relief from anxiety of her stay in Syra, while waiting the arrival of the Kestrel, but in all that time I never saw her make the least display of trepidation or anxiety, until the dispatch came from Secretary Washburn to tell us that the salary would be stopped.

I was asked then, as the reader may ask now, why I did not take her away when I found that she was failing. I had not the means to pay my passage to any other country. I was myself nearly prostrated mentally and physically, and unfit for anything but my photography. I was in debt so deeply that I could not honestly borrow, and my brother was dead. The American government pays no traveling expenses for its consuls, and I had not an article that I could sell for a dollar, for the furniture of the little house we lived in had been provided by the Cretan committee. The Greek government was hostile to me until Laura's death stirred the public feeling so profoundly, but even then the king was bitterly opposed to me. I was physically and financially a wreck on a foreign strand, with neither hope nor the prospect of relief. I struggled along as best I could, Mrs. Dickson taking charge of my children, and I made my home with the Dicksons.

In June I had to go back to Crete to make consignment of the consulate to my successor. I found the island materially as I had left it, but almost deserted and quite desolate, and the local administration in the hands of the spies and the traitors of the insurrection; all the brave men in exile and the gloom of death over everything; villages still unrebuilt, and the only sign of activity the building in the most accessible districts of military roads and blockhouses. As my successor delayed, I, to pass the time, went to Omalos to carry out the ancient plan which could no longer be postponed if it was to be carried out, for I never intended to see Crete again. The new governor-general—Mehmet Ali, the Prussian (in subsequent years murdered in Albania)—was an amiable, just, and intelligent man, who would have saved the position if he had been there in the beginning, but now there was nothing to be done. When he learned that I intended to go to Omalos he decided, with a more friendly impulse than any governor of Crete had ever shown towards me, to join me there and make the visit pleasant for me. He preceded me, in fact, and I found the posts all warned to show me the customary honors, and when I reached the plain I found his tent ready to entertain me. The most sumptuous dinner his resources afforded was served in his audience tent; we had a grand acrobatic and dramatic entertainment of the soldiers and a torchlight retraite, and he gave me rugs to cover me, without which I must have suffered severely, for, though in June, it was bitterly cold at Omalos, and I had brought only one rug to sleep on. We returned together next day after I had visited the great ravine of Agios Rumeli, the most magnificent gorge I have ever seen, never taken from the Cretans by an enemy until this betrayal; and, as we went back, we discussed the condition of the island. I told him freely what I thought of the situation, and he so far agreed with me that he begged me to go to Constantinople and lay my ideas before A'ali Pasha, promising to support them.

On my return to Athens I raised money enough to get a return ticket to the Turkish capital, and had an immediate audience of the grand vizier, to whom I stated frankly, and without in the least disguising the faults committed by his government, the condition of the island as I saw it, and the remedies necessary for the restoration of its prosperity. He asked me to give him a written memorandum of my views, which I did, and he then asked me to stay in Constantinople until he could send a commission to Crete and get a report from it. I replied that I had not the means to stay so long, the time he indicated being several weeks, and he offered to pay my expenses liberally if I would stay. I went to the office of the "Levant Herald" to ask for work. They knew me well enough there, for I had been their correspondent from Crete, and the journal had once been fined £100 for one of my letters, and once confiscated for another. On what I earned I lived for the time I had to wait for the report of the commission.

When the report came I was summoned to the grand vizier to receive my reply. A'ali Pasha said that he had found that my statements of the condition of things in the island were correct, and he approved the remedies I proposed; would I go out to Crete with full powers to carry out the measures I recommended, the chief of which was an amnesty for such of the exiles as, knowing them personally, I could trust to carry out my dispositions? He could not give me an official position under the Turkish government, having been reputed so long as an enemy; but a semi-official position for the definite purpose of the pacification he was prepared to offer me with an adequate salary and appointments, and carte blanche for the pardon of whomever I saw fit to name. On one condition, I replied, I would accept the appointment, this being that the persons I pardoned and recalled to the island should also be guaranteed from arrest and molestation on civil process for acts committed in the course of the military operations, such as the taking of cattle or sheep for the subsistence of the bands, but not comprehending criminal acts. On this condition we came to a final difference, as A'ali said that by the Turkish law the government became pecuniarily responsible for all such damages by condoning the acts of the offenders, and that they were not prepared to agree to. But it was impossible for me to enter into an agreement to invite a chief to the island with his pardon, under my full powers, and then see him thrown into prison by civil process for acts which the war had made necessary, as had already happened in several cases, as it impugned my good faith and made the pardon null and void, as much as if the offense charged were the rebellion. A'ali's confidence and the prospect of doing good to my Cretan friends touched me profoundly, and in my destitute condition the salary of a Turkish official was a heavy inducement, but I had to insist on the condition which divided us, and I withdrew.

A'ali asked me to come to the treasury and receive the compensation for my time spent in waiting on his inquiries, but the messenger carrying the money missed or evaded the appointment, or I mistook it; for, after waiting some time, I had to go back empty-handed, and after waiting two or three days longer to hear of the money, with an unjustifiable suspicion of A'ali's good faith, I took boat again for Athens, more destitute than I had come. I had the additional pain of telling the chiefs, on whose behalf I had pleaded, that there was no hope of an amnesty. I shall never forget the despair in the face of old Costa Veloudaki, the chief of the Rhizo district, when I told him of my failure. Tall and straight under his seventy odd years, sickened with a terrible nostalgia away from his mountain home, he listened mute and turned away without a word, bowed with grief and too much moved to risk speaking lest tears should shame him. I had known the old man from the beginning of the troubles, for he was the chief of the mountain country above Canea, and had been the spokesman of the committee when they came to see the consuls,—a noble, honest, and truly patriotic man, and a hero of all the movements since 1827. In one of the first battles, fought in view of my house, his son had been killed, and, taking his hand as he lay on the ground they had successfully defended, he thanked God his son had been worthy to die for Crete. It was, for me, the hard ending of a tragedy in which I had had my part, serious enough to identify myself with my island friends, and I can remember this episode of my life with the consciousness that those who suffered more than I did acknowledged that I had been a true friend and a prudent counselor from the beginning.

On my return to Athens I found Russie limping from the effects of a heavy fall he had had during my absence, and to which no attention had been paid, though it gave him continual pain. I called in the leading Greek physician, who, on examination, pronounced it rheumatism, and prescribed exercise and walks. I took the child on all the excursions I made, to Marathon and other of the local points of interest, for he was a great reader, and interested in Greek history and archeology already, passing most of his time with me in my work on the Acropolis. He limped painfully over all the sites we visited, and presently we accepted an invitation to Aegina, to the home of the Tricoupis, the parents of the well-known premier of later years. We spent some days there, fishing and exploring and photographing the ruins, but Mrs. Tricoupi recognized in Russie's lameness the beginning of hip disease, and, returning to Athens, I had a council on him, when it was placed beyond doubt that that deadly disease was established, aided largely by the false diagnosis that substituted severe exercise for the absolute quiet which the malady required. He was at once put in plaster bandages and we were ordered home. Home! But how? I had not money enough to pay a single passage even to England, and had no friends from whom I could ask the means to get home. In despair I went to the Turkish minister—Photiades Pasha—and told him of the promise of A'ali Pasha to pay me for my time and expenses while waiting at Constantinople, asking him to remind the pasha that I had not been paid, as he probably supposed, possibly through the dishonesty of the messenger. A'ali made inquiry, and, finding it to be the case, sent me, through Photiades, a hundred Turkish pounds, with which I was enabled to pay all local debts and reach London, more grateful to the Turkish sense of justice than to that of my own government.

It only wanted for the diversity of my career that I should have served a term as a demi-official of the Turkish government I had served to undermine. For A'ali Pasha I retain the respect due to the most remarkable ability, honesty, and patriotism combined I have ever known in a man in his position, a most difficult one, surrounded by corruption, venality, and treason as probably the ruler of no other state has been in our day. He was free from prejudice, fanaticism, and political passion, and had he been seconded by his colleagues and administrators, as he should have been, I am convinced that he might have restored the prosperity of his country. But, so far as I know, he stood alone in the government. He was a just and impartial minister where ministers are notoriously unjust, corrupt, and partisan, and, of my past failures, I regret none so much as that I was unable to coÖperate with him in restoring peace to Crete.

At Paris I had the advice of a specialist in hip disease for Russie, and the plaster bandage was replaced by a wire envelope, which fitted the entire body and which made his transfer from vehicle to vehicle without any strain a matter of comparative ease. But the poor child suffered the inevitable acute pains of active hip disease before anchylosis takes place, and he wasted visibly from the incessant pain. He had been, when stricken in his seventh year, a boy of precocious strength and activity, a model of health and personal beauty, whom passersby in the streets stopped to look at, so that from the common people one often heard an exclamation of admiration, as from our English fellow passengers between Calais and Dover, who gathered round him as he lay in his wire cradle with murmurs of admiration, for the pallor which had begun to set in only made his beauty more refined and his color a more transparent rose and white. In London we were warmly received by the Greeks who had been prominent in supporting the insurrection in Crete, and a testimonial was proposed for me of a piece of plate, for which £225 were subscribed, which as testimonial I declined to accept, but did accept on account of the debt which the Cretan committee of Boston owed me. Here I met with great kindness, especially from the Greek consul-general, Mr. Spartali, and I then made the acquaintance of his daughter, who, two years later, became my wife. The Rossettis, especially Christina, who had known Laura and Russie when the latter was a boy of two, were most thoughtful and kind, and I had some wheels put to Russie's cage, so that his passion for seeing, which the incessant pain he was in never abated, could be indulged to a certain extent. Miss Rossetti went with us to the Zoological Gardens to satisfy his passion for natural history, and so far as kindness could compensate for his helplessness he lacked nothing. We sailed for New York and were met at landing by my brother Charles, who told me of the death of our mother, two weeks before. Her last wish had been for my coming, and to be able to embrace our little Lisa, her namesake. I had not seen her for seven years.

I had made preparations while in London, for the publication of a volume of photographs of the Acropolis of Athens, and, when I had left the children with their mother's parents, I returned to London for a few weeks, to superintend the production of it. The American medical man called in to treat Russie proved as great a quack as the Greek, and his case grew worse. Finally he was sent to the hospital, from which he was, after a long treatment, sent back as incurable, and I was told that probably all I could do for him henceforward was to make death as easy as it might be.

The Acropolis book, published privately, cleared for me about $1000. Moreover, difficulties had arisen over the will of my brother, with which none of the parties interested were contented, and so, by a compromise, the family received a part, of which, after the deduction of my drafts from Rome, accepted before his death, there came to me $500. Hence I was, after my straits, at comparative ease for the moment. One of the most generous friends my vagabond past had given me, the late J.M. Forbes of Boston, gave me a commission for a landscape, and I returned to my painting, living in a tent in the Glen of the White Mountains near to the subject chosen. Here I received a visit from Agassiz, and here we had our last meeting and conversation on nature and art. But the long abstention from painting had left me half paralyzed—the hand had always been too far behind the theory. I now began to question if I had any vocation that way, and, with the passing of the summer, I went back to literature and found a place on the old "Scribner's Monthly," now "The Century," under Dr. Holland, the most friendly of chiefs, and there I had as colleague Mr. Gilder, the present editor of the magazine. The greatest mistake, from the business point of view, I have ever made was in leaving the collaboration with Dr. Holland.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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