Few of those who witnessed the event will ever forget it. On the eve of the King's return (18 Dec.) Athens could scarcely contain her emotion. All day long her beflagged streets rang with the cry: "_Erchetai! Erchetai!_" ("He is coming! He is coming!")--hardly anybody failed to utter it, and nobody dared to say "_Then erchetai_" ("He is not coming"), even if referring to an unpunctual friend. At night the song in which Constantine was alluded to as "The Son of the Eagle" echoed from one end of the illuminated city to the other. But this was only a preparation for next morning's welcome.
Owing to stress of weather the cruiser carrying the King and Queen of the Hellenes was compelled to put in at Corinth, where the exiles landed. From that point to the capital their journey was a triumphal progress. The train moved slowly between lines of peasants who, their hands linked, accompanied it, shouting: "We have wanted him! We have brought him back!" [3] When { 228} the King stepped out at the station, officers fought a way to the carriage with blue and silver dressed postillions which waited for him and the Queen. He had to keep tossing from one hand to the other his baton, as men and women pressed upon him for a handshake. The carriage struggled forward, men and women clinging to its steps and running with it, trying to kiss the hands and feet of the royal pair, and baulked of this, kissing even the horses and the carriage itself. All the way dense masses of people pressed round the carriage, shouting: "He has come!" or singing the chorus, "Again our King will draw the sword." An eye-witness had a vision of a soldier who, amid cries of "We will die for you, Godfather!" clambered into the carriage head first and fell to kissing the knees of the King and Queen, while around people fainted and stretchers pressed through the crowd.[12]
And so the fight for the soul of Greece ended in a victory for Constantine.
The character of this prince has been painted in the most opposite colours, as must always be the case when a man becomes the object of fervent worship and bitter enmity. But the bare record of what he did and endured reveals him sufficiently. His qualities speak through his actions, so that he who runs may read. His most conspicuous defect was a want of suppleness--a certain rigidity of spirit which, when he succeeded, was called firmness, and when he failed, obstinacy. Yet the charge so often brought against him, that he allowed himself to be misled by evil counsellors, shows that this persistence in his own opinion did not spring from egoism nor was incompatible with deference to the opinions of others. It arose from a deep sense of responsibility: he stubbornly refused to deviate from his course when he believed that his duty to his country forbade deviation, and he readily laid down his crown when duty to his country dictated renunciation. For the rest, a man who never posed to his contemporaries may confidently leave his character to the judgment of posterity.