April 28, 1897
On the Way to Patras on a Steamer.
[DEAR FAMILY:]
It has been a week since I wrote you last, when I sent
you the Inauguration article. Since then I have been having
the best time I ever had any place alone. I have had more
fun with a crowd, but never have been so happy by myself.
What I would have been had I taken some other chap with me I
cannot imagine. But the people of this part of Greece have
been so kind that I cannot say I have been alone. I never met
with strangers anywhere who were so hospitable, so confiding
and polite. After that slaughter-yard and pest place of Cuba,
which is much more terrible to me now than it was when I was
there, or before I had seen that war can be conducted like any
other evil of civilization, this opera bouffe warfare is like
a duel between two gentlemen in the Bois. Cuba is like a
slave-holder beating a slave's head in with a whip. I am a
war correspondent only by a great stretch of the imagination;
I am a peace correspondent really, and all the fighting I have
seen was by cannon at long range. (I was at long range, not
the cannon.) I am doing this campaign in a personally
conducted sense with no regard to the Powers or to the London
Times. I did send them an article called "The Piping
Times
of War." If they do not use it I shall illustrate it with the
photos I have taken and sell it, for five times the sum they
would give, to the Harpers who are ever with us. As I once
said in a noted work, "Greece, Mrs. Morris, restores all your
lost illusions." For
the last week I have been back in the days of Conrad, the
Corsair, and "Oh, Maid of Athens, ere We Part." I have been
riding over wind-swept hills and mountains topped with snow,
and with sheep and goats and wild flowers of every color
spreading for acres, and in a land where every man dresses by
choice like a grand opera brigand, and not only for
photographic purposes. I have been on the move all the time,
chasing in the rear of armies that turn back as soon as I
approach and apologize for disappointing me of a battle, or
riding to the scene of a battle that never comes off, or
hastening to a bombardment that turns out to be an attack on
an empty fort.
I live on brown bread and cheese and goat's milk and
sleep like a log in shepherds' huts. It is so beautiful that
I almost grudge the night. Nora and Mother could take this
trip as safely as a regiment and would see things out of
fairyland. And such adventures! Late in life I am at last
having adventures and honors heaped upon me. I was elected a
captain of a band of brigands who had been watching a mountain
pass for a month, and as it showed no signs of running away
had taken to dancing on the green. I caught them at this
innocent pastime and they allowed me to photograph them and
give them wine at eight cents a quart which we drank out of a
tin stovepipe. They drank about four feet of stovepipe or
thirty-six cents' worth, then they danced and sang for me in a
circle, old men and boys, then drilled with their carbines,
and I showed them my revolver and field-glasses and themselves
in the finder of the camera; and when I had to go they took me
on their shoulders and marched me around waving their rifles.
Then the old men kissed me on the cheek and we all embraced
and they wept, and I
felt as badly as though I were parting from fifty friends.
They told my guide that if I would come back they would get
fifty more "as brave as they" and I could be captain. I could
not begin to tell you all the amusing things that have
happened in this one week. I did not want to come at all,
only a stern sense of duty made me. For I wanted to write the
play in Charley's gilded halls and get to Paris and London.
But I can never cease rejoicing that I took this trip. And it
will make the book, "A Year from a Reporter's Diary," as
complete as it can be. That was why I came. Now I have the
Coronation of the Czar, the Millennial at Hungary, the
Inauguration at Washington, the Queen's Jubilee, the War in
Cuba, and the Greco-Turkish War. That is a good year's work
and I mean to loaf after it. You will laugh and say that that
is what I always say, but if you knew how I had to kick myself
out of Florence and the Cascine to come here you would believe
me. I want a rest and I am cutting this very short.
Don't fail to cut anything Dad and Mother don't like out
of the Inauguration article. You will have me with you this
winter on my little bicycle and going to dances and not paying
board to anyone. Remember how I used to threaten to go to
Greece when the coffee was not good. It seems too funny now,
for I never was in a better place, or had more fun or saw less
of war or the signs of war.
DICK.
