Chapter I: A Visit to Greece in 1888

The year 1888 saw the close of my activities in English public life. How this came about was described in my volume, “The Land War in Ireland.” It told how, having fought my battle for Nationalism there and lost it (for my imprisonment had failed to win me the seat in Parliament which alone would have justified me in English eyes for the part I had played in the Celtic quarrel) I resolved to look no more to action at home but to seek in other ways what I still felt to be my mission in life, that of pleading the cause of the backward nations of the world, and especially those of Asia and Africa, from their slavery to Europe. I knew myself to be regarded as a beaten man, and for the moment my depression was extreme.

Socially, as well as politically, I needed rehabilitation. My “unpatriotic” vagaries, for such they were looked upon, had estranged me from most of my personal friends, my blood relations and those I loved best; nor could I content myself with my new political acquaintances or, with the strong instinct I had of the claims of kinship, shift my heart at once to a new hold and break permanently with the society in which I had been bred. All my relations and nearly all my intimate friends were in the Tory camp, and I had no natural footing in any other. With the exception of the Carlisles and the Harcourts, I was at home in none of the great Whig houses, and in my own county of Sussex I stood absolutely alone in my opinions. Nothing can be conceived more dispiriting than the attempts at social entertainment made that Spring in London by the few Liberal peers who had declared for Home Rule, unwilling followers of Gladstone. I went with my wife to one of these, at Spencer House, but we found ourselves among strangers and did not go to another. At Crabbet it mattered less, for I was Lord there of my own Manor, cock on my own dunghill, yet I had been shocked by the incongruity of being met at my door on my return from Kilmainham by a deputation consisting of three Irish M.P.’s and Langridge, our local cobbler and only Radical. It revealed the full nakedness of the land for me at home, on any lines but those of silence and abstention. And thus the summer passed. I occupied myself once more with my Arab horse breeding, I wrote verses and enjoyed my physical life in the green Sussex woods as in former days, but with the sadness a sense of failure brings. I left off keeping my journal, so little there was of happy interest to record, so much that was unhappy. An unfortunate family quarrel about this time, in which I was constrained, unwillingly, to take a part, added to my bitterness in regard to the public situation, and a gap of four months occurs in the entries. It was not till quite the end of the summer that I was able to rouse myself into any more profitable line of thought than that of vain regrets and hopes made void.

By the middle of autumn, however, tired of inaction, a longing seized me once more to visit Egypt and those desert lands in which so many of my winters had been spent. With the Arabs I had a second home, less estranged from me than the other, and I should find myself, I knew, in that “rut of centuries” which is so soothing to the Japhetic soul troubled with Europe’s ephemeral ills. Thus, on the 9th of November my journal is resumed, and shows me on my way eastwards with my wife and my daughter Judith, now taken for the first time abroad with us, at Paris, enjoying, for a few days, something of my old life with my cousin, Francis Currie, whom I had not for some years seen.

“_10th Nov._—Bitters and I breakfasted together this morning and took one of our familiar walks in the afternoon, visiting Richelieu’s tomb at the Sorbonne and the Panthéon and the Hôtel de Cluny. The tomb is a fine thing in the best style of French sculpture. We also stopped and looked at the new monument to Gambetta [by Aubé, then an unknown name to me] which I like better than I could have thought possible. It has good proportion and a certain movement and originality which have merit. We could not have produced anything half so good in England. They are pulling down the sheds on the site of the Tuileries, leaving the Carousel open to the garden. This has a poor effect, but it leaves a fine opportunity of rebuilding to Boulanger, or whoever else succeeds to the French throne.

“_11th Nov._—Hearing that Lady C. was in Paris, I called on her, and through her persuasion was introduced to her friend Lacretelle, the painter, whose brother, a prominent deputy, was intimate with Boulanger, and he invited me to call upon the _brave général_. Lady C. had already made Boulanger’s acquaintance, and had spoken to me about him when I had seen her in London. Her description of him reminded me not a little of Napoleon III, ‘very amiable, but rather dull, not at all like a soldier, and with a hand the most disagreeable to touch of any she remembered. She could not explain in what the repulsion consisted.’ Nevertheless, she seemed impressed with him. He is floated financially, she tells me, by Mrs. Mackay the American, and if war comes, he may yet achieve his fortune.”

This resulted in my being taken (15th Nov.) by Lacretelle to see the General at his house near the Barrière de l’Etoile. The moment of our visit was that of the very height of his popularity, when it was believed in Paris that he was about to repeat the adventure of Prince Louis Napoleon in 1851, when France, tired of her constitutional _régime_ and a Republic which had brought her no credit, was ready for “a Saviour of Society,” who should restore to her something of her military glory. This might be effected either by a restoration of the monarchy, or by Boulanger’s proclaiming himself Dictator. The thing seemed possible enough, especially in Paris, where the idea of a _guerre de revanche_ against Germany had still many adherents. I, as member of the acting Committee of the Peace and Arbitration Society, was interested to find out how far the General, if he succeeded, was likely to prove a serious danger to the peace of the world, and it was with that view principally that I hailed the opportunity of an interview. Lacretelle, the deputy, though personally friends with the General, was a strict Republican of the Victor Hugo school, and opposed to ideas of war for any purpose, and he had assured me that the popular hero was in reality no swashbuckler, though he gave himself the airs of one for popularity’s sake with his principal supporters, Royalists and Bonapartists, who affected to quarrel with the Republic for having agreed to a cession of the lost provinces when peace was made with Germany in 1871. England, however, was at that date regarded in France as the chief enemy, and Alsace-Lorraine was already beginning to be forgotten in favour of Egypt. The following is the account my diary gives of the visit, but I wrote a much fuller and better one to the “Times,” which was published in it a few days later:

“_15th Nov._—With Lacretelle at 10 o’clock to call on General Boulanger. He lives in one of the streets beyond the Barrière de l’Etoile, and we found the house crowded. Not only were the two anterooms full, but the staircase also, men of every rank of life, from the priest to the decayed soldier and the artisan, a few women, too. After waiting nearly an hour, we were let in by special favour, most of the suppliants (the mulatto button boy who did the honours of the waiting room told us) having no chance whatever of an audience. The General’s reception room is on the second floor, a singular room, as you go down half-a-dozen steps to the level of the floor when the door to it is opened. It is a very large place with a single table at the far end of it and some Louis XIV chairs. The General, who was at the far table in a snuff-coloured morning dress, not uniform, came forward to receive us (Lacretelle has just been painting his portrait for the Salon) and gave us each a hand, and when he heard who I was, led me with some pomp and made me sit on a gigantic Louis XIV chair beside him. Lacretelle began to compliment him as “l’homme du destin,” a bit of flattery which the General took very much as a matter of course, saying that there were moments when people were obliged to act, and that the wave was rising now, and that whether he liked it or not it would carry him on to whatever was intended—just the same words of pleasant fatalism I remember in Arabi’s mouth seven years ago at Cairo.

“The General is a man of about fifty, fair-haired, turning gray, a fresh complexion, a good but not especially military figure, a very pleasant voice, and a quite frank manner. He gave one the impression at once of simplicity and sincerity and of a sort of manly self-reliance which is doubtless his power. There was nothing of the _général de café chantant_ in what I saw of him. After a little desultory conversation I asked him to allow me to put him a serious question. ‘It has been much debated,’ I said, ‘in our Peace Societies, how the quarrel between France and Germany could be settled without war. Is it possible to arrange for the neutralization of the ceded Provinces?’ To this he replied, that such a solution might possibly be in the future, but that he could not say now it was his own; the German Government had made it impossible by their policy in Alsace-Lorraine for any inhabitant of the Provinces to do otherwise than call himself a Frenchman; the only way one had of knowing the opinion of districts was by the ballot, and the Provinces had universally elected deputies who demanded restoration to France; while this was the case neutralization was hardly a practical question; still he did not say it might not become one. As for war, he, Boulanger, knew war too well to take the responsibility of rushing into it without absolute necessity. War is so largely a matter of chance, _chose aléatoire_, that a man must be a traitor who would risk the fortunes of his country on it; therefore I must not doubt him when he told me he was a man of peace. Lacretelle then explained to him my connection with Arabi and Egypt, and his manner became extremely cordial, and he told me that he had English or rather Welsh blood in his veins through his mother [her name, Lacretelle told me, was Griffiths] and begged me when I returned to Paris to come and see him again. I said I would do so and that I might be able to influence public opinion in England somewhat in his favour, at which he was much pleased and we parted the best of friends. Lacretelle tells me that he has never heard him talk so well or so amiably to a stranger, especially an Englishman, as he hates the English in common now with all Frenchmen. My impression of the General is that he is honest, that he is able, and that, the circumstances of France being what they are, he will succeed.”

I had called at the Embassy on arriving in Paris, hoping to find Lytton, who had just been named Ambassador there, but he was unfortunately away delivering his Rectorial Address at Glasgow. “Bitters tells me that Lytton is doing very well here, having made friends with the Press and leaving all real business to Austin Lee.”

Another interesting new acquaintance whom I made during my few days at Paris was Louise Michel, then so popular with the extreme Socialists, almost as notoriously so as Boulanger with the army. This, too, I owed to Lacretelle and his wife and to a certain Madame Dorrian (_née_ Princess Merstcherska), who took me with her to call upon Louise, with whom she is great friends—a most interesting visit. This is the account of it:

“_14th Nov._—We drove to Neuilly where Louise lives in a miserable house on the fifth floor. Her apartment consists of two very small rooms only, without even an ante-room, and when we opened the door I thought we must have come to the wrong place. It resembled a concierge’s box both in appearance and smell, crammed full with four people, three dogs, five cats, a cage of monkeys and a parrot, all screaming at the tops of their voices, and though the rest were silenced the parrot continued its shrieking the whole time we were there. The family party consisted of Louise and another woman, a young man and a fourth person whose sex I forget. They were engaged as we entered on a meal. A deal table, without cloth plates or utensil of any kind but a bottle of wine and some glasses, was covered with roast chestnuts which they were peeling and eating. Louise rose to receive us, a gray-haired woman of about fifty with a wild but honest and kindly face, dressed in a ragged gown of rusty black, guiltless of linen. Her forehead is retreating, her features large, her face colourless, its expression that of a ‘believer.’ It might have been a French country priest’s. She spoke hurriedly, with an excitement which was evidently habitual and was not altogether coherent. She seemed not to hear the fearful screams of the parrot or the yelping of the dogs, or perhaps these excited her, as noise excites the hearing of some deaf people. The Princess kissed her, calling her by her Christian name, and Louise seemed pleased to see her. When Louise was in prison the Princess used to visit and read to her. She tells me Louise is the best of women, giving away everything she possesses to the poor, and serving as midwife to the women of her quarter. She is certainly not a prophet of the sort that goes clothed in purple and fine linen. The Princess explained who I was and how I, too, had been in prison in Ireland, and Louise began to talk about the prospects of Socialism. She said a revolution was certain and near in Germany, and next year would see one too at Paris. She was under the impression that England was mined with Socialism and when I told her how little that was true was visibly distressed. She then read us one of her poems and tore out of a book and gave me the manuscript of one beginning ‘Nul souffle humain ne se trouve sur ces pages,’ and invited us to go with her to a meeting to take place that evening at Belleville, which we promised to do, but later I made the Princess explain to her that it was impossible I should really go, as I have no mind to be mixed up in a free fight, or to be arrested by the Paris police. But it was difficult to make her understand. She imagined that as I had been in prison I must necessarily be ready for everything. ‘Why should he hesitate,’ she said. ‘There will be no danger, we shall all have revolvers.’ I like the woman, as she is evidently honest and of an unselfish kindly heart.”

This is the programme she gave me of the meeting:

Grand Meeting Internationale

à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de l’execution des anarchistes de
Chicago.

Ordre du Jour.

Primo Les Crimes de la Bourgeoisie &c. &c.

Avec Le Concours d’Orateurs Socialistes Révolutionnaires.

Et de la Citoyenne

Louise Michel.

Here is also the full text of her verse:

BOUCHE CLOSE

Nul souffle humain n’est sur ces pages,

Rien que celui des éléments,

Le cyclone hurlant sur les plages,

Les legendes des océans,

Les sapins verts sous les nuées

Tordant les branches remuées

Comme les harpes dans les vents.

Sous les coraux ou sous les sables

La nature parfois ouvrant

Dans les tourmentes formidables

Un cercueil, ville ou continent,

Et l’être ayant la bouche close,

Feuille de chêne ou lien de rose

Tombant au gré de l’ouragan.

LOUISE MICHEL.

14 _Novembre_ ’88.

Souvenir à M. Wilfrid Blunt.

From Paris we travelled on by Marseilles to Greece, where my wife had a family interest through her grandfather Lord Byron’s death there in 1827; how glorious in those romantic days! how disappointing in its results to-day! We had interests, too, in a long promised visit to her relations the Noels in Eubaea, and I was curious to see the changes which should have come about in the thirty years which had elapsed since I first knew Athens as a member of the English Legation in the days of King Otho.

“_20th Nov._—We arrived by night at the Piraeus and landed in the early morning, Frank Noel having come from Achmetaga to meet us. It is thirty years almost to a month since I first drove up the road to Athens, and I find little change. The suburbs have extended somewhat, and the olive groves have shrunk, and the hills are even barer than before, but nothing marks the progress of the age unless it be the overthrow of the fine old Venetian walls of the Acropolis. I regret these as much as if they had pulled down the Parthenon itself. I wandered in the town for a couple of hours, looking for houses I used to frequent, and for friends I used to know, but all of these last were gone. Our diplomatic set at Athens in 1859 was certainly a distinguished one. At the Russian Legation we had Ozeroff for Minister with Staal for First Secretary, now Ambassador in London, and Nelidoff for attaché, now Ambassador at Constantinople. Haymerlé, afterwards Prime Minister at Vienna, was Austrian Secretary. At our own Legation we had that good Irishman, Sir Thomas Wyse, with William Eliot, afterwards Lord St. Germans, for First Secretary. Drummond, Digby, and myself attachés. I was the youngest of all the Corps diplomatique, only eighteen years old, and a favourite on account of my youth. The Dufferins were spending the winter there of ’59-60, he little over thirty, his mother, with whom he had been travelling in Egypt, the most delightful of women. We used all to ride out, a merry party, twice a week, following a paper chase, of which I was generally the leader on an old white horse, which, in memory of Shelley’s lines, I called Apocalypse.”[1]

We used to gallop through the olive groves, armed with revolvers, as robbers were still common in the mountains round, just as described by Edmond About in his “Roi des Montagnes” and “La Grèce Contemporaine,” while one met retired bandit chiefs in the best Athens society. King Otho wore the Albanian _fustanelle_, and that and the costume of the Islands, with its immense balloon-like calico nether garments and red cap, were the common dress of the young Greek bloods. The king’s footmen are the only wearers of the _fustanelle_ to-day.

On the 22nd we paid our visit to Achmetaga, for me a romantic spot, for I had spent some weeks in Eubaea in 1860 in merry company in Frank Noel’s father’s time. Edward Noel had come to Greece soon after the War of Independence in the year 1830, and had purchased a good many thousand acres in the island, mostly mountain and forest land, of a Turkish Aga, who was leaving the country on Eubaea being made over to Greece. He had paid only £2,000 for the whole, and it must be now worth, with its magnesia mines, ten times that price. The value of land (Frank Noel tells me) is still rising, and agricultural Greece is prospering. The peasants are everywhere purchasing their holdings. They have few debts and are saving money. This is due in part to the general advance of the country, in part to the abolition of the land tithe for which a tax on yoke oxen has been substituted. The peasantry round here are an excellent race, sober, hard-working, cheerful, with many pristine virtues. Such is Frank Noel’s testimony. Eubaea, unlike the rest of Greece, is well wooded with pines on the hillsides, and plane trees by the river banks. “I measured the largest of these last while I was there and found it 53 feet in girth, with a circumference round the extreme circuit of its boughs of 170 yards, the finest single tree I ever saw, as it is perfect without break or blemish more than a few bare twigs on the extreme summit.” Returning by road to Athens on 2nd December we slept a night at Chalcis and another at Thebes. The journey was made in lovely weather and along a carriageable road. At Chalcis they were talking of widening the channel between the island and the main land, and of making of it a large naval station for warlike purposes. To do it they will destroy the old Venetian tower which is now a chief ornament. We heard the details of this plan from Admiral Mansell, a fossilized English naval officer who has inhabited Chalcis for the last twenty-five years. Both there and at Thebes we were entertained by Greek friends of the Noels.

During the following days at Athens we enjoyed something of the society of Edmund Monson, our Minister there, at the Legation, afterwards Ambassador at Paris, and of Rennell Rodd, afterwards Ambassador at Rome, the latter a budding diplomatist with a small talent for verse, but no great originality, as to whom I shall have more to say in the course of this volume. All that I need quote from my journal is that on the 3rd December I had an hour’s interesting talk with the then Prime Minister, Tricoupi, on Greek politics, and the ambitions developed later in the direction of territorial expansion at the expense of Turkey.

“_3rd Dec._—Tricoupi is a hard-headed man without any special graces of manner, but he talks straightforwardly and to the point. We discussed finance, agriculture, road making, free trade, peasant proprietorship, debts public and private, the shipping trade, the Corinth Canal, and, lastly, foreign politics and Greece’s prospects in the Ottoman inheritance. On this last point he said that it was impossible for any Greek politician not to look to an extension of territory, and that if Greece did not go forwards she would go back and lose her independence at the hands of either Austria or Russia. They were quite content to let things alone as long as the Ottoman Empire survived, but they must prepare for the future. The Turks were no longer an enemy, but the others were. I asked him where he would draw the line of Greek claims northwards, and he said they could no longer claim the line of the Balkans, but in Macedonia would ask for a boundary as far north as Seres, beyond Salonika, and in Thrace as far as Adrianople. The exact limit, however, could hardly, he thought, be settled without a war with the Bulgarians. Then the conqueror would fix his own limit.

“I asked him about Albania. He said that Southern Albania, which was Christian, would revert to Greece, but Mohammedan Albania, on the extinction of the Sultan’s power, would find itself isolated and might accept a personal union with Greece under the crown, after the model of Hungary with Austria. I told him I doubted the possibility of this. Otherwise I agreed with him in his view that it was necessary Greece should put forward her claims or prepare to put them forward. Also I am of opinion that if England is to have a policy of the future it should be to help Greece rather than Bulgaria. Greece would be always under the influence of pressure from a naval power in the Mediterranean, whereas Bulgaria must remain under pressure of the Continental powers.

“With regard to Greek progress there is no doubt things are improving, though slowly. The revenue has tripled since 1858, when the financial Commission sat, and this without oppressing the peasantry. On the contrary, Tricoupi has lately abolished the land tax, a really great measure, and the peasants, in spite of recent bad harvests, have money to buy their holdings whenever they are not already the owners. He has had the sense to put heavy duties on manufactured imports; and he gives no facilities to the peasantry for borrowing. The country is certainly improving. Only the rascality of the officials remains unchanged. Tricoupi was silent on this head, though he hinted that all was not quite satisfactory. Noel tells me the Constitution is worked by a vast system of jobbery. If so, it differs little from other Constitutions, notably those of France and Italy. On the whole, I find Tricoupi a superior man. All give him a perfectly clean character.

“_4th Dec._—To Corinth alone, to see the Canal. Good luck took me in the train with Mme. Türr whom I had known an extraordinarily pretty woman twenty-two years ago, when I was staying on Lago Maggiore with the Usedoms at the Prussian Legation in Italy. Türr was at that time negotiating co-operation between Bismarck and the Hungarians, or had been doing so, but Bismarck, Mme. Türr tells me, threw them over. Now Türr is President of the Corinth Canal Company, and his wife, a fat good-natured woman, lives at Kallimaki on the Isthmus. She was daughter of Mme. Bonaparte Wyse, wife of my old chief at Athens whom she calls her father, but old Sir Thomas always repudiated the parentage of her and her brother, who were born after his separation from his Bonaparte wife. With her, in widow’s weeds and looking the picture of woe, was a little Greek lady, Mme. P——, and we three are now in the Hotel at Isthmia, the General being away at Paris, and are having a very amusing time, Madame P. having recovered her spirits, and giving us her ideas about Socialism, Eastern politics, and Zola’s novels. She was a Greek, born at Alexandria, but has lived most of her life at Paris. I was sent with an employé to see the Canal works. They are monumental.

“_5th Dec._—On to Nauplia, having spent twenty-four hours very agreeably with these two women. Madame P. has given me a deal of political information. She says every serious person in Greece has been obliged to abandon the _grande idée_ (that of inheriting Constantinople from the Turks). She herself does not think Salonika can be saved from Austria, which is making a successful propaganda there with the Jews and other non-Hellenic inhabitants. The Bulgarians must eventually join Russia, and the Servians too, seeing that they are Slavs. The Roumanians will not do so willingly, but the two great Empires will divide the spoils. The Albanians will be merged either in Greece or elsewhere and lose their nationality.

“_6th Dec._—At Nauplia I find nothing changed since I was last here, not twenty new houses built. The plain, however, which is the richest in Greece, has become wonderfully well cultivated. I drove this morning early to Mycenae to see how much of the ruins Schleimann had left. He has made a sad hash of the town with his excavations, but the Gate of Lions and the Treasury still stand (with Agamemnon’s coat of arms over the entrance). What was most interesting, however, in the place is gone, the ancient ruins virgin of all meddling for three thousand years. Back to Athens by train in the evening. The last time I was here we were travelling on horseback, there being no roads in the Morea except the mountain mule tracks.”

This is all that is worth recording of our visit to Greece. On 8th December we went on by sea to Alexandria, travelling in company with Prince Osman Pasha on his way back from Constantinople, where he had been with his uncle the ex-Khedive Ismaïl, now practically a prisoner in his own palace on the Bosporus. “He gave me a deal of information about Constantinople affairs. There is much sympathy there for the Mahdists, the Sultan having refused to take part against them at Suakim. It is not believed now that the English occupation of Egypt will be permanent. Osman Pasha is a most intelligent good fellow, better worthy of his Khedivial rank than the rest of his race. He narrated to me amongst other things his experience in educating his daughters, which has only resulted in making them unhappy. It was impossible, he said, to find them educated husbands; nearly everybody now at Constantinople has abandoned the practice of polygamy, only half-a-dozen among the men of rank he knew having more than one wife. He named the Grand Vizier, Kiamil Pasha, as one of the few who continued it; the Sultan is of course an exception, but he does what no other Sultan has done for generations; when his women are with child he marries them. Among the common people of the Turks all are monogamists. This may be in part from poverty.”

During my stay that winter in Egypt I was obliged to be very careful how I meddled with politics, even in conversation, for, though Lord Salisbury had given me leave to return there notwithstanding Sir Evelyn Baring’s unwillingness, I was under a certain obligation to avoid any kind of publicity in my sympathy with the National cause. I did not therefore remain more than a few days at Cairo on arrival, but went on to my country place at Sheykh Obeyd, ten miles outside the town, where I got the little garden house ready for my wife and daughter to inhabit, a beautiful retired place on the desert edge far from European intrusion, standing on the old pilgrim camel-track where it branches off to Syria, and little frequented except by the Arab horse merchants, who bring their horses for sale each spring to Cairo. There we lived in seclusion and very happily for the three winter months, building and enlarging the house and recovering the garden from the neglected state into which it had fallen through the roguery of those left in charge. These, getting news of my imprisonment in Ireland, had imagined that my career in life was over and that they might treat the garden as their own, economising the cost of its watering and using it as a run for their cattle. It was a labour of love for me restoring its prosperity and arranging for its future better management. It was only little by little that my peasant neighbours came to pay me their polite visits of congratulation, and then I found that there was much hidden sympathy with me among them, repressed only through fear of the government, to which they knew I had been opposed. My journal, however, of that winter contains little in it that is politically worth transcribing. It is a record of conversations with my peasant neighbours and, as they began to hear of my arrival, with the obscurer members of the old National Party, which still looked to the possibility of their old chief Arabi’s recall to Egypt, and who came furtively to see me under the guidance of Arabi’s old body servant, Mohammed Ahmed, the same who had faithfully preserved and delivered to those who were defending him at his trial his master’s political papers and so saved his life. (See “Secret History of English Occupation of Egypt.”) He had been the first to come to me now, and finding him out of employment I had put my garden under his charge, a fortunate inspiration, for he was a man of integrity and energy and speedily acquired great influence in the neighbourhood and so restored to working order the lands entrusted to him. To these Arabist visitors from Cairo were gradually added other sources of native information, the most important of whom were my old friends Aarif Bey and Mohammed Moelhi, nephew of my other friend Ibrahim Moelhi, both of whom were now much in the confidence of the Ottoman High Commissioner at Cairo, Mukhtar Pasha Gazi. We saw, too, something of Osman Pasha and his sister, Princess Nazli, both of them persons of the highest intelligence and knowledge of affairs, while from the Greeks we obtained much secondhand information of their view of things through Frank Noel, who had come on to Egypt with us. Nor were we wholly cut off from the English official world. We did not think it necessary to call on Baring, but I found my connection, Colonel Charles Wyndham, in command of a regiment of the army of occupation, and Anne her cousin Hugh Locke King. From all these sources, though I hardly stirred from the solitude of my country retreat during the winter, I was able to gather a sufficient knowledge of the situation to be able to piece it together now for the purposes of the present narrative. The political situation in Egypt at the time, as I came to understand it during the four months that I was at Sheykh Obeyd in the winter of ’88-’89, was briefly as follows:

The failure of the Drummond Wolff Convention at the last moment, after it had been already agreed to by its negotiators, through the refusal of the Sultan under French and Russian pressure to ratify their signatures, had left affairs in Egypt diplomatically “in the air.” Not only had further negotiations for evacuating the English garrison been brought to a standstill, but every section of native opinion had been checked and disorganized. Instead of a new beginning having been frankly attempted on lines preparatory to Egypt’s restoration to self-government, all had been left in precisely the same confusion from which the Convention had sought to rescue it. The Khedive Tewfik was still occupant of the Vice- regal throne, but commanding no respect in the country, and dependent for his maintenance on English support which might at any moment be withdrawn, leaving him to deal as he could with the Soudanese menace threatening his frontier at Wadi Halfa. Weak and discredited he was, without personal authority, and he enjoyed less consideration than Mukhtar the Sultan’s Commissioner. Baring, in whom all real power was vested at Cairo, was for the moment without settled policy beyond that of waiting events, a kind of marking time with no definite instruction as to the future of England’s connection with the Nile Valley, except that Lord Salisbury, feeling that he had done what honour required in fulfilment of English promises of evacuation, was resolved now to leave things where they were, including the garrison of occupation.

As to the National Party, whether represented by the former Arabists or by any other group, their condition was one of patriotic torpor; as a party they had ceased to exist, being without leaders and without organization. They were disappointed in the hopes raised at the commencement of the Wolff mission that Tewfik would be replaced as Khedive by Prince Halim, or some other member of the Khedivial family unconnected with the misfortunes of 1882, who should restore their lost constitution of that year, and make good Lord Dufferin’s promises. In default of these and of Arabi’s recall, impossible under Tewfik, what poor hopes they had turned mostly towards the Sultan. But undoubtedly the popular man among the Egyptian fellahin that winter was the Mahdi, or rather his successor the Khalifa Abdallah and his fighting lieutenant, Osman Digna, who carried on a perpetual guerilla warfare in the neighbourhood of Suakim. The popular imagination amongst the fellahin credited these with heroic qualities, and it was confidently believed that the Dervish forces would before long overrun Upper Egypt, and that they were already driving the Belgian Congo Company out of their territory in Central Africa, that they would rid Senegal of the French, and, as the issue of a holy war against all infidel intruders, that they would even reconquer the northern shores of the Mediterranean. News came while I was there that Emin Pasha, to rescue whom Stanley had been sent by King Leopold on his filibustering expedition to the Nile sources, had made his submission to the Mahdists and that Stanley himself had been slain. From the Eastern desert, too, news reached me through the Bedouins of an interesting kind. It was to the effect that my former friend Mohammed Ibn Rashid, taking advantage of a quarrel between the two sons of Saoud Ibn Saoud with their uncle Abdallah, had marched with an army to Riad and made himself master of the whole of Nejd, an event of high importance in Peninsula Arabia. I listened to these stories and found my interest in the East once more supreme over the petty hopes and fears of Western politics, and recovered in this way and in the routine of my daily life in my garden, the peace of mind I had left behind me on leaving England. I find the following description in my diary of my life at Sheykh Obeyd.

“_3rd Jan._ 1889.—I left Cairo on the 27th, escaping like a bird out of the hand of the fowler and am established here at Sheykh Obeyd. It has been a blessed change, and though I have been here all these days alone, I have not for a moment felt otherwise than happy. I have been getting the place ready for habitation by the others, and it is quite comfortable already in an Oriental way. The house is merely the old gardener’s house with two rooms added, four in all, and an open _salamlik_, which I use as sitting room. I have had the floors covered with two inches of clean white sand after the Nejd fashion, and I spread my carpet over it and sit there. For more furniture I have had in a man from the village to make bedsteads, divans, and seats (_gufass_) which he does out of our own palm branches newly cut at the rate of four shillings, two shillings, and seven pence halfpenny a piece. The village carpenter has put up a few screens for more privacy, and the whole furnishing for the family will cost about two pounds. My room is like a lantern with windows facing East, North, and West, and from my bed I can see the first glimmer of the false dawn, which makes the owls hoot and the jackals cry. Then, with the real dawn, crows begin to pass overhead, and I get up and go outside the garden wall where I sit at the desert’s edge and wait for the sunrise. At this hour one sees all the wild life of the place, foxes, ichneumons (_nims_), jackals, and birds in great variety, kites, kestrels, doves, and occasionally a woodcock at flight from the marshes to the garden where he would spend the day. There are night ravens, too, which have their home in the _lebbek_ trees next the house, and now in winter time a flock of rooks with their attendant jackdaws. This is a rarity in Egypt as rooks are never seen south of Cairo. There are two foxes which live inside the garden, and I see them most days; they sleep generally in the day time behind some cactuses or at the foot of a palm tree, and they often jump up as I walk round, and trot away. They come sometimes within a few yards of my feet, being accustomed to the work-people, and not afraid of me because I wear an Arab dress. I have given orders here that there shall be absolute _amân_ even for wolves, and the hyenas which sometimes make their way over the garden wall. I superintend the labour now, mark out the work, and pay the wages, pruning the trees with a pair of garden nippers. This is a delightful occupation.

“_20th Jan._—I don’t know how sufficiently to describe the delight of the life here. Anne and Judith and Cowie (their maid), have joined me here, and we are idly busy all day long. The whole of the garden (30 acres) has now been weeded and dug twice. The irrigation engine has been repaired, and watering will begin regularly next week. Day has gone by like day, each full of interest. This morning we began pulling down an outhouse to clear the land for a new building; thirty men and boys have been working at the job in high good humour, and certainly they are neither lazy nor unintelligent. In the midst of the demolition a large cobra jumped out and put up his hood in the middle of them, but they knocked him over with their picks before he could do any harm. He measured exactly six feet in length, and by general advice he was cut up at once into four portions and thrust down the throat of a sick camel they had with them, for a cure.[2] Four other smaller snakes were also killed, but these were of a harmless kind. They tell me a horned viper was also seen in the garden, a fortnight before I came, but this is unusual except in the extreme heat of summer. Lizards, of course, are plentiful. I have seen one with rudimentary legs only, making its way along the ground as snakes do, its feet hardly helping it.

“_22nd Jan._—We have begun a new wing to the house, building with the ordinary sun-dried bricks, contracted for at the rate of 8 piastres to the cubic metre. There will be three rooms upstairs and three downstairs, and the whole will cost about £80. Also I bought a new engine for irrigation, and I am restocking the garden with young orange plants, and in two or three years, if things go well, it will be a better property than when I bought it seven years ago. I could be quite content to spend the rest of my days in this pleasant work.

“_29th Jan._—To-day two three-year-old colts and a filly arrived at the garden, which I have bought of Ali Pasha Sherif, all three of the Viceroy Abbas I’s stock, one colt and a filly, a Jellabi, the other a Seglawi Ibn Soudan. This last ought to be valuable some day for our stud in England. [This was ‘Mesaoud,’ so celebrated afterwards as our most successful sire.] Ali Pasha’s horses are the only ones of pure Arabian breed in Egypt, and there are certain points about them superior to all others, perhaps. He has an old one-eyed Seglawi named Ibn Nádir, which I consider the finest horse, taking him all round, I ever saw, white, with immense strength and breeding combined, long and low, with splendid legs and hocks, a fine head and neck, tail always carried. Our colts arrived as the noonday gun was being fired from the citadel at Cairo. They had been brought round by the desert entrance through Zeyd’s precaution to avoid the evil eye. He also sacrificed a lamb on the threshold of the garden and sprinkled their foreheads with blood. I like these old Mosaic rites and superstitions. Similarly on Friday the first stone of our new house was laid, and another lamb was slaughtered on the corner-stone, and the blood made to flow over it with a _Bismillah errahman errahim_. It is possible that the blood of bulls and of goats do not wash away sin, but it must be pleasing still, at any rate more so than the godless rites of our own stone-laying with a champagne bottle. The work-people were then feasted, and a heavy shower of rain came down to bless the building. Zeyd is in the seventh heaven at all these high doings, and is encamped with the horses under the great fig tree. The work-people have a merry time here, men and women working together, and there are one or two pretty girls among them who have a deal of attention paid them. They wear no veils while at work, but are quiet and well behaved.” Zeyd, here spoken of, was a Bedouin from Nejd, who had attached himself to our service, a man of imagination, a poet and, like all the Nejd Bedouins, an enthusiast about horses. He was a constant pleasure to us for this reason though repeatedly in trouble through his little respect for persons and the inconsequence of his tongue. He was also of value to us as a centre of Arabian gossip, including political news, sometimes of importance.

“Zeyd tells me that when he was at Damascus in 1887 he learned that the French Government had written a letter to Ibn Rashid and had sent it to Haïl through Mohammed Ibn Abdul Kader, the Emir’s eldest son. It contained an offer of alliance, and to make Ibn Rashid independent of the Sultan under French protection. Ibn Rashid, however, had forwarded the letter to Constantinople, and Ibn Abdul Kader had been hauled over the coals by the Sultan, but had excused himself, saying that as a French subject he could not disobey the order of his government.

“_10th March._—There is certainly just now a movement going on in Egypt in favour of Arabi’s recall, and I have received notices of it from various quarters with a list of those who would act with Arabi in forming a Nationalist Ministry. Also Ahmed Minshawi Pasha has sent one of the principal Sheykhs of Tantah to consult me on the matter, Sheykh Abdul Mejid, and a message has come from a number of ex-officers from Arabi’s army who wish to see me, but I have declined this, as it could do no possible good and might make trouble; the Egyptians have not spirit in them to revolt and if they did it would not profit them. I am glad all the same to find that Arabi is not forgotten.”

One visit only I record that winter of any great interest now. This was one I paid with Lady Anne to Zebehr Pasha, Gordon’s old enemy in the Soudan, now held a prisoner in Egypt. During the troubles at Cairo which had followed Gordon’s death he had been arrested by Baring by an arbitrary act of authority and sent on board a man-of-war to Gibraltar, and there detained at the Queen’s pleasure for two years on no legal charge, for none was brought against him, and there he might have remained for the rest of his days had it not been for the interest excited in his case by Lord Ribblesdale who had made friends with him at Gibraltar and brought his case before the House of Lords. In 1889 he was newly returned to Egypt, and was now once more a State prisoner of the Khedive, occupying one of the minor palaces on the banks of the Nile. It is thus that I describe our breakfast with him.

“Zebehr Pasha is a really charming man who entertained us with the greatest honour at breakfast. He is lodged in the Ghizeh palace where he is a State prisoner, though allowed to go about to a certain extent in Cairo, under the charge of a certain Cashmiri Abderrahman Effendi. Zebehr is a tall, slight man, with long _effilé_ hands, and a face of the profoundest melancholy. His complexion is brown, and his features show a cross between the Arab and the Berberi, the Arab predominating, and a smile of great beauty. He was dressed in Egyptian uniform loosely made, shivered much, though it was a bright sunny day, and complained of the cold. He has a bad cough, and I should think would not live long. State prisoners have a way of dying in Egypt. We talked on most political subjects, but he avoided giving an opinion on the actual position in the Soudan; perhaps he was afraid of the Cashmiri. ‘It is the Government’s affair not ours,’ he said. Of Gordon he spoke with hearty respect, and of Sir John Adye, and of several other English officers he had known, but he had no good word for Baring, who was a financier, he had heard, not a politician. He told us Emin’s history and Osman Digna’s. He spoke highly of Arabi, said that he had been present at a conversation between him and Dervish Pasha in which Dervish had offered Arabi £250 a month if he would go to Constantinople, but Arabi had replied that even if he were willing, there were 10,000 men would stand between him and the sea. He said that he had been very much misrepresented about this conversation in the English papers, and had never spoken a word but what was honourable to Arabi. He could not advise Arabi to come back to Egypt except as Minister; this, however, Tewfik would never have. All our conversation was in Arabic, which he speaks purely, being easy to understand. When I told him the English Occupation would not last for ever he smiled incredulously.

“He took us round the garden, an uninteresting French garden laid out in pebbled walks and rockeries, and imitation lawns. It and the palace cost Ismaïl, they say, several millions, and the building is in ruins already. Then we had breakfast and Zebehr was delighted because I ate with my hands; he would have nothing to do himself with knives and forks. ‘I am only a wild man,’ he said, ‘and use the instruments God gave me.’ And he turned angrily upon the Cashmiri, who was pretending that he could not manage without European ways. Before going I asked him if I could do anything for him, and he said: ‘No, we two are in the same position, the Government does not regard us favourably. We cannot help each other,’ and he laid his hand affectionately on my arm. He complained, however, how badly he had been treated in money matters, and I said that the day might come when I could do something for him. Our visit was, I fancy, the greatest pleasure, poor man, he has had for many months. He came down to put us into our carriage and insisted upon paying the driver his hire.”

We left Sheykh Obeyd on the 8th of March and Alexandria on the 10th.

Here ends our winter’s stay in Egypt of that year.

“_13th March._—We are in the Gulf of Fiume, and our journey is nearly over, on our way to Fiume to spend a fortnight with the Hoyos family before returning home. The captain of our ship, the _Ceres_, is a Dalmatian, and by his own account was much mixed up in past times with revolutionary affairs. He tells me his two brothers emigrated to America after 1848, and his son has recently been in prison for political reasons. He talks of a social war as imminent in Europe, especially in Germany, France, and Italy, and looks upon Bismarck as the deviser of all evil, and on a revolt against him and military ideas as certain. He believes, too, in the overthrow of the British Empire in India by the Russians, who will be joined by the Indians. He has recently seen Arabi in Ceylon. We touched at Corfu and Lissa, and the Ionian Islands, terribly bare and scored with burnings. We saw them well, coasting close under Zante, Ithaca, and Cephalonia. Corfu is a pretty town, little changed since the British evacuation, though the people on board say the place is in decline. Lissa we saw by moonlight. Admiral Tegethoff, who won the battle there for Austria, did so against orders and against rules. The Italian fleet was four times his strength, but his action was fortunate and probably saved the Dalmatian coast to Austria. There are three parties it seems in Dalmatia: a Philo-Russian, the most numerous; a Philo-Austrian, the most wealthy and educated; and a Philo-Italian, confined to a few sea-coast towns. The officers on board are all Catholic and Philo-Austrian but radicals, and talk something very like socialism without disguise. They are bitterly opposed to Russia. They are all Dalmatians. They resent the union of Fiume to Hungary, but admit that there is no National party in Dalmatia. The captain, Gelachich, is a capital fellow, a native of Lessina.”

At Lissa we received news of the discomfiture of the “Times” in the Parnell case, by far the most important incident at home since the overthrow of Gladstone in 1886.

“_18th March, Villa Hoyos, Fiume._—We have been a week here staying with Count and Countess George Hoyos and their children, governesses, and tutors, a large cheerful party of the kind I like. The villa is like Paddockhurst (their place in Sussex) in miniature. The Hoyos’ are of ancient Spanish extraction, brought to Austria by Charles Quint, and she is the daughter of Whitehead, the inventor of the torpedo, who, beginning life as an engineer on board an Austrian Lloyd steamer, has made a large fortune. He is an admirable sample of the self-made man, quiet, unobstrusive, absorbed in his work, liberal to his men, open- handed in all his ways. The Countess is a pretty woman, mother of pretty daughters, he a well-bred man of much sense and information, a first cousin of Hoyos the Ambassador at Paris and of that younger Hoyos who was connected the other day with the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolph’s death. This is what they tell me, or rather what she has told me about that tragedy.

“The Crown Prince Rudolph was a very charming man and had had innumerable successes with women, but had never been in love till at a party last year he met a girl of seventeen, Mademoiselle de Wetschera, daughter of a certain Baroness of that name, of no very honest reputation. The girl, however, was charming, and when the Prince made love to her fell desperately too in love. Their liaison had lasted four months, and though the Prince talked somewhat strangely, nobody suspected there was anything so serious in the case. Hoyos was a friend of the Prince, not in his service but very intimate and in the habit of going with him on his shooting excursions. He went down at the Prince’s invitation to Meyerling, to shoot with him the following day, and they passed the evening till nine o’clock very gaily, when the Prince went to bed. Hoyos knew nothing of Mademoiselle de Wetschera’s being at the shooting lodge. In the morning, however, he was called by the Prince’s servant, who complained that his master’s door was locked, and they went together, and after knocking in vain, broke it open, when they found the two bodies together in the Prince’s bed. The girl was then recognized by Hoyos, and seeing her to be ‘a member of society,’ his first idea was to conceal her presence there. He accordingly carried her with the servant’s help into a distant room, where they left her, undressed as she was, locked up, till her relations should come. This was not till the evening, when her uncle arrived, dressed the girl with his own hands, and placed her in his brougham, upright, beside him, and so conveyed her home, and she was buried with equal secrecy in the night. With regard to the Prince, Hoyos also conveyed the news to the Emperor, and it was tried to hush up the truth but in vain. The Crown Prince had previously written to Sechenyi a letter, part of which only has been made public; the unpublished part contained these words: ‘I am resolved to die, since I am no longer worthy to wear the Imperial uniform.’ The Countess says she knew the Crown Prince well, she had also met the girl and liked her. She could not condemn them for their death, poor things.

“Another topic of conversation has been King Milan’s abdication in Servia. According to the Hoyos’, Queen Nathalie has long been plotting against her husband, hoping to become Regent for her son. She is a very pretty, charming woman, but ‘a Russian, and therefore an intriguer.’ The first hint her husband had of her designs was on his return from his lost battle of Slivnitza in Bulgaria. He was dispirited and thought of abdicating, and, when he told her, she was for his doing it at once. This shocked him. Now she has gained half her object and the other half she will gain soon by returning as Regent to Servia.” The battle of Slivnitza here referred to was one of the earliest of the Balkan internecine fightings after the independence of Servia and Bulgaria had been enforced upon the Sultan by European pressure. It ended disastrously for the Servians who, without much cause of quarrel, had invaded Bulgaria and were routed with heavy loss. The Austrian Empire at that time was believed to be in a very unstable position, held together only by the personal popularity of the aged Emperor. We stayed ten days with the Hoyos’ and while there were shown experiments in torpedo practice by Whitehead, who had his factory adjoining the villa. I find, however, nothing in my diary worth transcribing here, unless it be a list of persons whose acquaintance we made, belonging to Viennese society. This includes Count Zichy, governor of the town, and his father, formerly Austrian Ambassador at Constantinople; Prince and Princess Sanguscko, cousins of our friends the Potockis in Poland, and joint owner with them of their famous Arabian stud; Count and Countess Breuner, Countess Palffy and others. From Fiume we went on by Vienna and the Orient Express to Paris, and so home to England, arriving there on the 5th of April.

Here there is a long gap in my diary and nothing of any public importance, except the record of a second interview I had with Boulanger, who had come to London with the idea of making friends there, and had made an appointment with me to see him at a house he had taken in Portland Place. I write:

“_19th May._—On Wednesday I saw General Boulanger by appointment at his house in Portland Place. He looks older and more worn than when I saw him six months ago, but he talked cheerfully enough. I told him I had been much taken to task by the leaders of the Liberal Party for my avowal of sympathy with his cause (my letter to the ‘Times’ of last year), and asked him to inform me on certain points which might strengthen my position. The first point I put was whether he intended to destroy liberty in France, to shut up the Chambers and make himself Dictator? intentions commonly attributed to him. To this he said that the idea was ridiculous. The French could never get on without talking, and a Parliament in some form they must have. What he wanted was to do away with the personal politics of the Chamber, which he could effect by reforming it (the Revision). Frenchmen must be united into a National Party instead of broken up into small groups. The power of the President must be strengthened, but within limits. Those possessed by the President of the United States will probably suffice. There must be the Veto, but he would not say that in an old society like the French it would do to assimilate the American régime too closely. He had no intention at all of destroying liberty. Thus, in the matter of education he was for full liberty for all creeds, not as at present when religious education was persecuted. The French provinces did not want secular education and it should not be forced on them, but he was not for this a Clerical. He did not himself go to Mass, but he was determined everyone else should do so who liked. If a man chose to go about in fancy dress it was no concern of his neighbours. On my second point, peace and war, he repeated what he had said to me last autumn about the hazards of war, and his unwillingness to rush into hostilities. He could not ever propose to disarm till the question of Alsace-Lorraine was settled. No Government which did so could stand a fortnight. He believed, however, that the question could be settled without war if Frenchmen were united. He would then most gladly propose a disarmament. In this sense I might say of him that his ultimate end was to bring about a disbanding of the great armies of the Continent. This he authorized me to tell my Liberal friends. He invited me cordially to come again any Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning.”

I fear I did little towards helping the General in this or any other way. Politics were at that moment repugnant to me, and I could not bring myself to start on any new campaign. I never saw the General again.