CHAPTER ELEVEN

Concerning the Confidences of a Queen

On the next day I was summoned to the Queen. I must here admit, with due shame and contrition, that I had never been to see a Queen before. I really don’t know why. Still, the fact remains that I knew nothing whatever about Queens, especially Balkan ones. I had read about them in certain lurid accounts of themselves, from which I gathered that they must all be very temperamental, and I had seen photographs in the illustrated papers, from which I concluded that all photographers were Republicans. Beyond that, my mind was a blank.

Still, two things one knew instinctively about Queens. They liked to be called Ma’am, and they had to be approached in a morning coat. The ma’am business struck me as faintly ridiculous. I practised it while dressing, and pranced round the sunlight-flooded room saying, ‘Yes ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full.’ However, when one has on one’s morning coat the ma’am becomes something rather awe-inspiring.

I had to be at the palace at eleven, and at fifteen minutes before that hour I entered a rickety ‘amaxa,’ drawn by two horses, and trundled over the bumpy streets towards my destination. A blue, blue sky above and all the houses glistening white. A faint breeze that drifted in from the sea. In the distance the Acropolis could be seen gleaming, like a white rose on a hill. Athens was bustling and wide awake. Little flower stalls made bright splashes of colour under the pepper trees. Outside on the boulevards people were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Now and then a lordly car would sweep by, and one would catch a glimpse of a rich merchant and his lady, the latter with pale face and crimson lips, and the glitter of diamonds that come from the Rue de la Paix. A little bit of Paris, a little bit of the East, a little bit of the classic past--that is Athens.

We swept through some wide gates after a certain controversy with two fierce sentries in white kilts. Charming people those sentries. I have always wanted to have one for a servant. They would create such a sensation in London. They have a scarlet turban, with a long tassel that hangs over the left shoulder, a tight-fitting, blue jacket with rows of buttons like a page, a white sort of ballet skirt, shorter and more frilled than a kilt, long white stockings, and red shoes with huge black woollen rosettes on the toes. They told me that the costume was very comfortable, except for the shoes, which were always coming off.

I don’t suppose we should ever have got past the gates had it not been for the kindly offices of the Royal Chamberlain, who was waiting for me, and took me straight to a reception room, then to another reception room, then to a third such, and finally left me to wait. I had not long to wait, for after about five minutes an aide-de-camp appeared and told me that Her Majesty was ready to see me.

I followed him, noting the universal blue in which the palace was decorated. Blue curtains veiled the glare of the sunlight outside, casting a sort of haze into the quiet corridors. There were blue vases, and blue sweet-scented flowers, and an immense staircase covered with a blue carpet that was like a summer sky.

I negotiated the staircase successfully, walked down a few more miles of corridor, and was eventually ushered into a long room, very like an English drawing-room, in which Queen Sophie was standing.

I shall never forget my first sight of her, for she had the saddest face of any woman I have ever seen. Standing there, dressed entirely in black, a bowl of lilies by her side, her face rose from the shadows like one who has known every suffering. Beautiful? I am not sure about that. A beautiful expression, certainly. A beautiful bearing, too. But my first impression remains, also my last. The very air which she breathed seemed heavy with sadness.

(I don’t wish to convey the impression that she was a sort of mute, a funereal figure. There were many days on which I saw her afterwards, in which she was one of the gayest and most sparkling of creatures. But the underlying note of tragedy would always recur.)

Her first words were anything but tragic.

‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘that you don’t try to kiss my hand. Some Englishmen seem to think that they must do it, and they always look so embarrassed.’

‘Ought I to have done it--ma’am?’ I said, wondering if I had let fall the first brick.

She spoke perfect English--or, rather, the sort of English that you and I speak, which is probably very far from perfect, but at least could not be accused of any foreign flavour.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘before I tell you about Greece, for Heaven’s sake tell me something about England. I haven’t been there since the war, and’--here she shrugged her shoulders--‘I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to go there again.’

I told her as much as I could. She was absolutely ravenous for information. Did they still plant the tulips in Hyde Park? Was the grass as green as ever in Kensington Gardens? (Oh, the green grass of England!) Were people giving many parties now? And what were the parties like, gay or sad? Had people got over the war at all? Were there any very pretty girls running about? Had I any idea whom the Prince of Wales was going to marry?

I gradually realized, as I endeavoured to supply some form of answer to this bewildering torrent of interrogatives, that here was a woman who was sick at heart for the country in which she had played as a child. For, after all, Kaiser’s sister or no Kaiser’s sister, Queen Sophie, when a girl, was brought up by her grandmother, Queen Victoria. She had Kensington Palace for her playground and her first paddling was performed on the beach at Eastbourne. And now, to be exiled, through no fault of her own, from the country which she loved so well, to be forbidden to see her friends, her relatives....

‘I suppose you have heard a great many stories about me?’ she said, when I had exhausted England as a topic of conversation.

I nodded.

‘For example?’ she asked with a smile.

‘That’s not fair,’ I said. It was quite impossible to tell her even a fraction of the things one had heard.

‘No. Perhaps it isn’t. Well, I’ll tell you a few of them. I was supposed, of course, to be in daily touch with my brother in Berlin, by wireless. I never quite gathered where the wireless was, but I believe they said it was in a tree in the garden. I was supposed to concoct elaborate plans for the destruction of the British Army. How, I don’t quite know, because my husband always tells me I know nothing whatever about war. I was also reputed to teach all my children nothing but German. I presume that is why I have had nobody to teach them but an English governess who has been here for ten years, and whom you must meet. She’s a very charming lady. In fact--I’m quite impossible. I wonder you dare come to see me.’

She laughed, and then became serious again.

‘I want you to realize,’ she said, ‘something of the absolute’--she paused for a word, her hands tightly clenched together--‘the absolute _agony_ of my position at the beginning of the war. I loved England. I was brought up there. I had dozens of English relatives. I loved Germany, too. My brother was the Emperor. That sounds, I suppose, a crime, to love Germany. But try to clear your mind of the prejudice of the war. Try to realize--as I think we can now--that every German wasn’t necessarily a devil, and that every Frenchman wasn’t necessarily an angel. And then you will realize something of what I have suffered.’

She paused, and then said a sentence which I shall never forget. ‘_I was in a horrible No-Man’s-Land of distraction!_

‘What did I do? What _was_ there to do, except to shut my eyes, and to think only of Greece? If I was to follow the struggle--first from this side and then from that--I should have gone mad. And so, as I say, I devoted myself to Greece. I nursed. I did my best in the hospitals. I busied myself in the gardens. I did anything but think....’

She rose to her feet with a sigh. ‘Let’s go into the garden, and forget all about it.’

She led the way from the room, and I followed her down endless corridors, in which sentries sprung to attention as we passed, and ladies-in-waiting smiled and curtsied from the shadows. Out in the sunshine we paused, and she looked at me with a curious smile.

‘Before we go any farther,’ she said, ‘I want to show you something which will interest you. You have come out here to write a book, haven’t you? Well--this thing which I shall show you, will make you, at least, _think_.’

We turned to the left, skirted the front of the palace, went through a sort of shrubbery, and then stopped.

‘Look!’ said the Queen.

I looked. Standing straight in front of me, against the wall, was a fourteen-inch shell. Not a pleasant-looking object. It was about the height of a child of six, and was, I should imagine, sufficiently powerful to blow up half the palace if it had landed in the right place.

‘That shell,’ she said quietly, ‘was a present from the French. Every Englishman who sees it says that surely the French would not bombard a neutral country? Surely the French, the apostles of culture, would not bombard, of all places in the world, Athens, the birthplace of culture? But you have a lot to learn. The date was December 2, 1916. Greece was still neutral. The bombardment began at ten o’clock in the morning, and went on intermittently till six at night.’

‘And where were you all that time?’

She laughed. ‘In the cellars. I can laugh at it now, but at the time it was not a laughing matter. You see, my children were with me. They were terrified. And I was distracted. Look at that shell, for example. If it had fallen three feet farther to the right, it would have gone straight through the window of my husband’s study. He was in there at the time. It would not have been a very pleasant thing for the Allies, would it, to have had the murder of the King of a neutral country on their hands?’

There was nothing that I could say. I muttered something about looking into the matter.

‘Yes. Look into it. That is all we ask of you, that you should try to find out the truth. And don’t forget that though I may be the sister of the Kaiser, I’m also the daughter of the Princess Royal.’

I was nearly six months in Athens, with every possible facility for studying the truth, and I doubt even now if I discovered it. That the Queen was utterly sincere and genuine, I do not doubt. That the French, in the desperation of the struggle, behaved foolishly, I am convinced. But as to the exact measure of blame, I remain undecided.

However, I did not set out to write a book of political arguments, but a book of human studies. And I hope that by this tiny sketch a few people at least will see Queen Sophie in a more kindly light than has hitherto been thrown upon her.