“No obstacles except those of propriety were ever put between us. I said just now that we were very alike in interests and tastes. But we were opposites in temperament. Lily was always so very self-controlled, patient, helping. I was temperamental. Moody. And very selfish. I never saw her hurt anyone or anything. But if I wanted something I wanted it at once. Lily used to disgust me with myself. I used to think of my Greek blood as ‘dark’ blood. Almost Negro blood.
“And then too I soon began to love her physically. Whereas she loved me, or treated me, more as a brother. Of course we knew we were going to marry; we promised ourselves to each other when she was only sixteen. But I was hardly ever allowed to kiss her. You cannot imagine this. To be so close to a girl and yet so rarely be able to caress her. My desires were very innocent. I had all the usual notions of the time about the nobility of chastity. But I was not completely English.
“There was o Pappous—my grandfather—really my mother’s uncle. He had become a naturalized Englishman, but he never carried his anglophilia to the point of being puritan, or even respectable. He was not, I think, a very wicked old man. What I knew of him corrupted me far less than the false ideas I conceived. I always spoke with him in Greek, and as you perhaps realize Greek is a naturally sensual and uneuphemistic language. I surreptitiously read certain books I found on his shelves. I saw La Vie Parisienne. I came one day on a folder full of tinted engravings. And so I began to have erotic daydreams. The demure Lily in her straw hat, a hat I could describe to you now, still, as well as if I had it here in front of me, the crown swathed in a pale tulle the color of a summer haze… in a long-sleeved, high-necked, pink-and-white striped blouse… a dark-blue hobble skirt, beside whom I walked across Regent’s Park in the spring of 1914. The entranced girl I stood behind in the gallery at Covent Garden in June, nearly fainting in the heat—such a summer, that year—to hear Chaliapin in Prince Igor… Lily—she became in my mind at night the abandoned young prostitute. I thought I was very abnormal to have created this second Lily from the real one. I was bitterly ashamed again of my Greek blood. Yet possessed by it. I blamed everything on that, and my mother suffered, poor woman. My father’s family had already humiliated her enough, without her own son joining in.
“I was ashamed then. I am proud now to have Greek and Italian and English blood and even some Celtic blood. One of my father’s grandmothers was a Scotswoman. I am European. That is all that matters to me. But in 1914 I wanted to be purely English so as to be able to offer myself untainted to Lily.
“You know, of course, that something far more monstrous than my adolescent Arabian Night was being imagined in the young mind of twentieth-century Europe. I was just eighteen. The war began. They were unreal, the first days of that war. So much peace and plenty, for so long a time. Unconsciously, in the Jungian collective id, perhaps everyone wanted a change, a purge. A holocaust. But it appeared to us unpolitical citizens a matter of pride, of purely military pride. Something which the Regular Army and His Majesty’s invincible Navy would settle. There was no conscription, no feeling, in my world, of necessity to volunteer. It never crossed my mind that I might one day have to fight. Moltke, Bülow, Foch, Haig, French—the names meant nothing. But then came the somber coup d’archet of Mons and Le Cateau. That was totally new. The efficiency of the Germans, the horror stories about the Prussian Guards, the Belgian outrages, the black shock of the casualty lists. Kitchener. The Million Army. And then in September the battle of the Marne—that was no longer cricket. Eight hundred thousand—imagine them drawn up down there on the sea—eight hundred thousand candles all blown out in one gigantic breath.
“December came. The ‘flappers’ and the ‘nuts’ had disappeared. My father told me one evening that neither he nor my mother would think the worse of me if I did not go. I had started at the Royal College of Music, and the atmosphere there was at first hostile to volunteering. The war had nothing to do with art or artists. I remember my parents and Lily’s discussing the war. They agreed it was inhuman. But my father’s conversation with me became strained. He became a special constable, a member of the local emergency committee. Then the son of his head clerk was killed in action. He told us that one silent dinner-time, and left my mother and me alone immediately afterwards. Nothing was said, but everything was plain. One day soon afterwards, Lily and I stood and watched a contingent of troops marching through the streets on their way to Victoria. It was wet after rain, the pavements shining. They were going to France, and someone beside us said they were volunteers. I watched their singing faces in the yellow of the gas-lamps. The cheering people around us. The smell of wet serge. They were drunk, marchers and watchers, exalted out of themselves, their faces set in the rictus of certainty. Medieval in their certainty. I had not then heard the famous phrase. But this was le consentement frémissant a la guerre.
“They are mad, I said to Lily. She did not seem to hear me. But when they had gone she turned and said, If I was going to die tomorrow I should be mad. It stunned me. We went home in silence. And all the way she hummed, I now—but could not then—believe without malice, a song of the day.”
He paused, then half sung it:
“I felt like a small boy beside her. Once again I blamed my miserable Greek blood. It had made me a coward as well as a lecher. I see, when I look back, that indeed it had. Because I was less a true coward, a calculating coward, than someone so innocent, or so Greek, that he could not see what the war had to do with him. Social responsibility has never been a Greek characteristic.
“When we reached our houses, Lily kissed my cheek and ran in. I understood. She could not apologize, but she could still pity. I spent a night and a day and a second night in agony. The next day I saw Lily and told her I was going to volunteer. All the blood left her cheeks. Then she burst into tears and threw herself into my arms. So did my mother when I told her. But hers was a purer grief.
“I was passed fit, accepted. I was a hero. Lily’s father presented me with an old pistol he had. My father opened champagne. And then when I got to my room, and sat on my bed with the pistol in my hands, I cried. Not from fear—for the sheer nobility of what I was doing. I had never felt public-spirited before. And I also thought that I had conquered that Greek half of me. I was fully English at last.
“I was pushed into the 13th London Rifles—Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment. There I became two people—one who watched and one who tried to forget that the other watched. We were trained less to kill than to be killed. Taught to advance at two-pace intervals—against guns that fired two hundred and fifty bullets a minute. The Germans and the French did the same. No doubt we should have objected if we had ever seriously thought about action. But the current myth at that time maintained that the volunteers were to be used only for guard and communication duties. The regulars and reservists were the fighting troops. Besides, every week we were told that because of its enormous cost the war could not last another month.”
I heard him move in his chair. In the silence that followed I waited for him to continue. But he said nothing. The stars shimmered in their dustless glittering clouds; the terrace was like a stage beneath them.