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THE RED RUGS OF TARSUS
A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909
by
HELEN DAVENPORT GIBBONS
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
The Century Co.
Published, April, 1917
TO
The Memory of
C. H. M. DOUGHTY-WYLIE, V.C.
"THE MAJOR" OF THIS BOOK
Who was killed in action leading a
charge on Gallipoli Peninsula,
April 29, 1915
PREFACE
When I was a Freshman at Bryn Mawr I decided I should "write something."
My girlhood was uneventful and joyous--the girlhood of the lucky
American who has a wholesome good time. I knew I must wait for
experience. I was too sensitive about my youth to expose what I was
thinking, for fear "they" would know I was not grown up.
The experiences I was looking for came. They were so painful that seven
years passed before I put pen to paper. To-day, after the lapse of
years, I am not sure that my perspective is good. In looking back upon
those six weeks in Adana Province between April thirteenth and the end
of May, nineteen-nine, they seem longer than all the rest of my life.
The thought of publishing I rejected and rejected again. I avoided
dwelling on that time the way one puts off going back to a house one
has not entered since a loved one died. To this day we have lived up to
an agreement made back in those days, and my husband and I have never
told each other the worst we know about the atrocities committed by the
Turks.
But recent events in Armenia brought it all back again. My indignation,
and a sense of duty and of pity, transcended all personal feelings. I
lived again that night in Tarsus, when we--seven defenseless women, our
one foreign man a brave young Swiss teacher of French, and 4,800
Armenians waited our turn at the hands of the Kurds.
Massacres had begun again, a thousand times worse than before. Other
American women were in the same untold peril that I had been. The whole
Armenian people were marked for extermination. Now, as then, help had to
come. But from where? What could I do? I could not go out there. I had
my four babies. I had four hundred and fifty French soldiers' babies I
had been mothering since the war began.
I had no time to write a book, although the old Freshman ambition still
existed. I had been waiting ever since my marriage in nineteen-eight for
a quiet time to come when I could settle down and cultivate a literary
instinct, but the chance never came. Our honeymoon had never
finished--it hasn't yet. I had set up six homes in seven years. We had
lived in Tarsus (Armenia), Paris, Constantinople, Paris again, Princeton
(New Jersey), and then settled in Paris for the third time.
In Tarsus we went through the massacres of April, 1909, when thirty
thousand Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks in Adana Province
alone. My first baby was born on May 5th that year, under martial law,
in a little Armenian town that was only saved from similar experiences
by the protecting guns of the warships of seven nations. At the end of
that year we had settled in our first apartment in Paris, and Christmas
was no sooner past than we had the famous flood of 1910, when a quarter
of the city was under water.
There was nothing dull about our life of three years in Constantinople.
First came the cholera epidemic; the Effendi, my little son, was born in
a house where the neighbors on one side had cholera and those on the
other side small-pox. Then the war between Turkey and Italy; more
cholera; huge fires which destroyed whole quarters of the city; and
finally the First Balkan War, when ten thousand wounded men came into
the city in a single day, St. Sophia was filled with a mixture of
thousands of refugees and cholera stricken soldiers, and I sheltered
myself from a west wind on a hillside above my home and listened with
grim satisfaction to the Christian guns of the Balkan Allies thundering
at the gates of the city.
Then the Chellabi[1] sent me back to Paris, to find an apartment near
the Bibliothèque National. Kitty Giggles and the Effendi had ordered a
new sister, who was to be called Mignonne, and if she was not to be born
in Constantinople the sooner I got to Paris the better. Mignonne and I
were scarcely home from the Paris hospital than the Second Balkan War
broke out--and the Chellabi was down in Albania. He had to decide
whether he would stay there and follow the Serbian Army in the field, or
come back through the thick of it to me and the baby daughter he had
never seen and the musty old manuscripts in the Bibliothèque. It took
him a month to get through, while I waited in Paris without news of him.
October that year found us in Princeton, New Jersey. Friends at home
pleaded that we had been away five years, and it was time we came back
to them. At Princeton, which has the second purest water supply in the
world, Kitty Giggles and the Effendi in some mysterious way were struck
down with typhoid, and four months of anxiety taught us that war is
nothing compared to a sick baby. By a miracle both recovered, and May,
1914, found us all happily playing on the beach in Brittany.
In a few weeks our first real vacation was suddenly brought to an end by
the beginning of the great European War, and the Chellabi had to leave
hastily for Paris, alone, on Mobilization Day. All the babies in the
little Breton village, including my own three, were down with
whooping-cough. The following seven weeks down there were a circus. I
did everything, from mending the skull of a peasant woman who fell down
stairs in a fit of drunken grief to acting as unofficial _maire_ of the
commune and making out _permis de séjour_ and passports for the Maire's
_adjoint_ to stamp.
The journey back to Paris in the same month as the Battle of the Marne
was comparatively easy, as most of the traffic was in the opposite
direction. The two years since then, in this heroine city of Paris in
wartime have been an unforgettable experience, in which both fatigue and
leisure have alike been impossible. The "Ickle One" came into the world
last November, to find her mother deep in baby relief work. Her real
name is "Hope," because of my belief that the great hope of France and
of the world is in the new generation.
Now it is eight years that we have been inhabiting storm centers, and I
have come to believe that my function is to create a normal home
atmosphere in abnormal conditions.
The book I have dreamed of has never been written. The appeal on my
sympathies made by the sufferings of the Armenians of to-day, however,
required that something should be done. For this reason I have
resurrected the old and yellowed letters which I wrote to my mother
during that agonizing time in Tarsus. Portions of them have been
rewritten, and certain intimate details in which the public can have no
interest have been cut out, and I have occasionally added a few
explanatory details to make things clearer to the general reader. I now
send them out in the hope that the plain story of one American woman's
experiences will bring home to other American women and to American men
the reality and the awfulness of these massacres and the heroism of the
American missionaries, who, in many cases, have lain down their lives in
defense of their Armenian friends and fellow Christians.
Technically speaking, we were not missionaries. We went to Tarsus at the
invitation of Dr. Thomas Davidson Christie, the President of the College
there, to spend a year rendering what service we could to the regularly
appointed missionaries; therefore I am at liberty to express, as I did
above, my admiration for the American missionaries from a purely
impartial standpoint.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Chellabi"--Turkish for "master of the house."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I HALF WAY THROUGH THE FIRST YEAR 3
II THREE CHRISTMASES AND THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 13
III A VISIT TO ADANA 32
IV GREAT EXPECTATIONS 48
V ROUND ABOUT TARSUS 60
VI HAMLET AND THE GATHERING OF THE STORM CLOUDS 92
VII THE STORM APPROACHES 103
VIII THE STORM BREAKS 111
IX LIFE AND DEATH 132
X WHY? 147
XI ABDUL HAMID'S LAST DAY 156
XII THE YOUNG TURKS AND THE TOY FLEET 162
XIII A NEW LIFE 172
XIV OFF TO EGYPT 183
THE RED RUGS OF TARSUS
HALF WAY THROUGH THE FIRST YEAR
_Tarsus, Turkey-in-Asia,
December second,
Nineteen-Eight._
MOTHER DEAR:
My first married birthday! I am twenty-six years old. It is twenty-six
weeks since The Day. I have been counting up the different places at
which we stopped on the way from New York to Tarsus. This is the
twenty-sixth abode we have occupied in the twenty-six weeks. Isn't that
a coincidence? You are smiling and saying that it is just like
honeymooners to notice it at all.
Wish you could sit beside me near our big log fire in the bedroom. The
fireplace is made of solid stone, and in it we burn whole logs. When the
wind is blowing a certain direction, puffs come down the chimney and the
smoke nearly chokes me. It is good for us that this is only an
occasional happening. Herbert insists solemnly that the smoke of a wood
fire is good for the eyes. Even with his eyes smarting and half-shut, I
can see him twinkle and know that he is teasing.
I am training myself to look after every little detail in the care of
our rooms. In the morning I put all "ingoodorder." Chips are picked up
and thrown into the woodbox. Tumblers and mirror polished, every corner
dusted. No meals for me to think about: for the mission family eats in
the college dining-room.
Each of the three young couples in this house has what Mother Christie
calls a house boy. That means a student who is making his own way. Ours
is a Greek about sixteen years old, whose tuition we pay. He gives us
two hours' work each day. Socrates makes our fires, puts the saddles on
our horses, brings water, and goes to the market to fetch oranges (of
which I eat an inordinate number). A fire is made under a huge kettle,
like my grandmother's apple-butter boiler, and hot water is obtained in
this way for our baths. If we want a bath at night, Socrates starts the
fire at supper-time, and brings us the water during the little recess he
has between two evening study hours. He keeps my bottle of alcohol
filled with the pure grape spirits people make here. I get an _oke_ at a
time (a quart is about four cups, isn't it? Well, an _oke_ is about
five). I have a basket for big Jaffa oranges and another for mandarines.
Socrates interprets well when we go shopping. He is certainly a handy
boy. We help him with his lessons sometimes. When he cleaned our room
the first Saturday, he asked me "to arrange all those funny pretty
things," pointing to silver toilet articles, "just the way you want them
kept." When it was done, he spent a long time walking slowly around the
place. He memorized my arrangement, and has not slipped up a single
Saturday since. When we take a horseback ride Saturday morning, part of
the fun of that ride is the thought that when we get back to our rooms,
they will have been beautifully cleaned and everything will look just
right for Sunday.
On the outside wall of our bedroom, directly behind the head of our bed,
and covering the entire space between two windows, is a very large red
and blue _kileem_. On the floor are square blue rugs, just the shade to
make Herbert imagine my eyes are not green. On one side Mrs. Christie
has had two cedar wardrobes built in, and between them are a whole lot
of drawers, up to dressing-table height. Back of the door, leading from
the bedroom to the study, is a table where I have the First Aid outfit
Dr. Oliver Smith gave me for my wedding gift.
Socrates confided in me that he wants to be a doctor. He comes from a
Greek village in the heart of the silver mine district of the Taurus.
His father and mother died during an epidemic. He tells me that he knew,
young as he was, that if there had been a doctor in his village, his
parents might not have died; and that he had determined then to be a
doctor, so that other little boys might not lose their parents.
Doctor Christie told the boys in Chapel one morning that when they got
hurt they could come to me for bandaging. Herbert teases me about the
miles and miles of bandages in my professional-looking japanned tin box.
There is a wonderful case of medicine. Those I do not know how to use I
have put away up high on a shelf in case I might sometime lend them to
the doctor. The things I know how to use are kept in first-class order
by Socrates. I bought a little white enameled basin or two to be used
when I make dressings. For six weeks I have been taking care of an ugly
open sore on the leg of one of my students. It is a case of cotton
poisoning. These people get cotton poisoning by contact with the plant
at picking-time. I never heard of it before, but I used my head, cleaned
the sore with camphenol, and have dressed it with camphenol-soaked
bandages twice every day. I was rewarded after a week in seeing the
wound surrounded by a ring of nice clean flesh. The infected part has
been diminishing in size, and within the past few days is completely
covered with a layer of new skin. I am proud of this: for the boy could
not walk very well when he first came to me.
Last Sunday Melanchthon, a kid of fourteen, nearly amputated his finger
in the bread-cutter. I fixed it up with adhesive tape stitches placed
all around the cut, until the doctor could get back from some distant
village to sew it. Thank Heaven, Melanchthon can still wiggle his
finger joint. When Socrates took him back to the dormitory after I had
dressed his finger that first day, the little fellow asked if he could
go to see the lady again. Socrates explained that the lady had said he
must return on the morrow for another dressing. Melanchthon was pleased.
He did want to see the pretty room again. He wondered if Sultan Abdul
Hamid had anything so fine in Yildiz Kiosk.
Eflaton (Armenian for Plato), a nearsighted chap in my Sub-Freshman
class, was working with a bunch of boys at the corner of the yard, where
a wee bit of wall is being built. Some day there may be money to put the
wall all around the college property. It grows almost imperceptibly as
gifts for that purpose come in. They are few, alas! Just a tiny corner
is finished. The boys were piling stone, and Eflaton had the ill-luck to
get two fingers of his right hand badly crushed. Again the doctor was
far away, and I did my best. To-day, when I had finished Eflaton's
dressing, he looked up at me with those dreamy eyes of his and
announced, "Mrs. Gibbons, you are a angel!" When I protested that I was
not "a angel," he agreed with me. Because, said he, "You are better than
that: you are a angel mother." Oh, these honey-tongued Orientals! They
beat the Irish.
The trip planned by Henri Imer and Herbert to Namroun has not yet come
off. They intended to leave towards the end of the last week of October,
returning the following Tuesday. Wives were to take their classes.
Before the bad weather set in, we were anxious to have Henri take for us
a lot of photographs of the acropolis and castle there. All plans were
made to go. But political news prevented their leaving. The action of
Bulgaria and Austria has raised a ferment throughout Turkey, especially
in these parts, where there are many Armenian Christians. A reactionary
movement is feared. The Armenians fear that the Mohammedans distrust
their loyalty.
The fasting month of Ramazan ended on October twenty-fifth, and the
following Monday the great Bairam (feast) began. Lower-class Mohammedans
generally get gloriously drunk in towns on this day. Occidental
Turkophiles write of and praise Moslems as being the original White
Ribboners. Perhaps many are, but not town Turks, who consume quantities
of _raki_, the strongest fire-water man ever invented. During this
Bairam the Armenians were fearing a massacre. The Constitution has
lifted the prohibition of owning firearms. We hear the Armenians have
been buying in large quantities. We did not ourselves anticipate
trouble. But one never knows in this country. It was best for Henri and
Herbert not to go.
I am soon for bed. We must be up by six. At least I suppose it is six.
The way they tell time here makes me dizzy. So many hours since sunrise,
they say. Or, so many hours since sunset. The precise minute for doing
any given thing must be worked out the way they make a time-table at the
sea-shore, to show you when to take your swim. The mischief of it is, of
course, that the time-table varies each day. The night we arrived in
Tarsus, after our weeks of camping in the Taurus, we rode our tired
horses under the arch of the college gate at ten P.M. The silly clock in
a tower near by was striking four.
I am not sure whether the East or the West knows the philosophical way
to tell time. Perhaps Western reckoning tends to be too precise, and
Greenwich time is contrary to nature. Anyhow, the Eastern way would make
an efficiency expert's work-schedule look like a cinema film run by a
greenhorn. Perhaps these Eastern peoples who dream dreams and feed their
souls on starlight must map out their day by the going of the sun.
THREE CHRISTMASES AND THE SEVEN SLEEPERS
_Tarsus,
December twenty-fifth._
DEAREST MOTHER:
College classes going at full swing to-day. It is not Christmas for the
boys. Some of the early missionaries to Turkey had it in their noddle
that December twenty-fifth was really the day Christ was born, and they
were shocked to see the Greeks celebrating January sixth and the
Armenians January nineteenth. Missionaries were unimaginative, too,
wrapped up in their own narrow ideas, too sure they were right and all
the rest of mankind wrong (else why had they sacrificed everything to
come way out here?) to realize that the Eastern calendar is thirteen
days behind ours.
The missionaries couldn't call the Greek aberration a sin. They could
not logically hold out for a calendar made in Rome! But they did get
after their Armenian converts on the theological question, and for many
years insisted on an American celebration. Absurdities like that have
now happily passed in missionary work, and your missionary of to-day is
better able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials than
the old-fashioned Puritans, who were every bit as bigoted as medieval
Catholics.
But I am getting away from Christmas in Asia! Herbert and I taught our
classes this morning as usual. We are going to celebrate to-night. We
have a turkey roasting, and there is a jar of cranberry sauce that did
not arrive in time for Thanksgiving. I have just come from the kitchen,
flushed with the stove and the triumph of having really succeeded in
doing the trick I learned at Simmons College last year. My fruits and
nuts are genuinely _glacéd_.
If I haven't lived up to Simmons College cookery, Mother, I've made
some use of Bryn Mawr. Herbert's schedule is twenty-five hours a week.
What time was there left for private study? To take advantage of next
year in Paris, he simply must do some groundwork on his fellowship
thesis. So I have taken over ten of his hours--the two English courses:
preparatory boys learning the first rudiments of our language, and--joy
of joys!--his Sub-Freshman class. They know pretty well how to speak and
write English, so I am giving them rhetoric--and incidentally I am
getting myself more than I give. One has to teach to learn!
I have kidnapped that Sub-Freshman class, and Herbert will not get them
back. I may grow weary of beginners' English, and find some excuse for
putting the beginners again on Herbert's schedule. But the Sub-Freshmen
give me a splendid chance for letting loose my theories on helpless
beings, and I confess that I am vain--or is conceited the word?--enough
to like the sensation of handing out knowledge _ex cathedra_.
I am teaching the boys how to plan and construct an essay. Many of my
teachers thought they had finished their work when they had given us a
subject and corrected the essay. Not so Mrs. G. We began with words.
Then came the sentences. Then separate and related paragraphs. We keep
juggling with the principles of unity, clearness, and force. Once a week
we do a formal essay. I do not simply announce my subject and leave my
struggling boy to evolve an atrocious piece of writing. No. I write the
subject on the board. Then call for concisely stated facts about it.
These facts are numbered and copied by the boys. When we have about
twenty facts, we indicate roughly possible combinations. The boys have a
clear idea of the difference between a Subject and a Theme. We have
forged ahead a bit into the study of the figure of speech (_Mejaz_, as
it is called in Turkish). This appeals deeply, because Orientals see and
think and speak in figures. They are poets.
I had a whole week of lectures on figures, and now the boys are learning
the way to make and recognize the different ones. This has been done
entirely without a text-book. I found early in the game that the boys
could memorize rapidly. Put this with the fact that they think
excellence in scholarship consists in giving you back again what you
said. I reversed the old-fashioned way of clearing the decks for action
by lining up a lot of stupid and meaningless definitions. Absorb
information first, I say; handle it, get acquainted with it, digest
it--then, with a background of experience, classify your ideas and
concentrate them into definitions.
_Later_
You lost the chance of your lifetime, Mother. I broke off suddenly the
learned lecture on rhetoric. Henri Imer and Herbert were coming in from
their ride, and I had literally to jump down the stairs to get the
_glacé_ fruits out of the way in the kitchen before Herbert would burst
in and find them there, spread out all over the room on buttered paper.
We are a big family, and I made a lot.
I am thinking of my Christmases. This is the first I have ever spent
away from you.
_Tarsus, January eighth,
Nineteen-Nine._
It isn't because my husband is brand-new, or that we are living what is
supposed to be "that difficult first year" that I object to separations.
If this first year is difficult, come on the rest of the years, I say.
But I already know, from our engagement days, what separations mean.
Still, I saw quite distinctly, when Herbert's father sent him a check to
go to the Holy Land, that he ought not to miss the chance. We may not
get out this way again. I put it to myself: it will be a glorious thing
_to have done_! So I told him he must seize the day. I could not
accompany him for a reason that you may guess. I have not told you
before: one doesn't always know one's self.
Our holidays and examinations are arranged according to the Oriental
Christmases. So they come in January to take in the period from the
sixth to the nineteenth. It isn't a long time for a trip: but the Holy
Land is not far away. Herbert started off two days ago on the Greek
Christmas, and I took Socrates down to Mersina with me to see him off.
Being Socrates' Christmas, we could avoid our own lack of gaiety in the
last meal by blowing him to a big dinner at the hotel.
You ought to have seen Herbert embarking for Syria, with Mr. Gould, an
Englishman on our faculty, and half a dozen boys who live at
Alexandretta, the next port--near enough and cheap enough to go home for
the holidays. Mr. G. and Herbert took deck passage with the boys. It is
January, with snow on the Taurus and cold winds on the Plain, but the
Mediterranean blew hot on the day they left, and they could change to a
cabin the next day, if it was too cold to spend the second night to
Jaffa on deck. Herbert wore an old suit that we intended to throw away,
and a black fez. With the beard he has grown to make him look older in
the classroom, he is for all the world like a Russian pilgrim.
Herbert is to be gone two weeks. Work is an antidote for the "mopes." I
tell myself that he may be delayed in returning, and that I may have to
tide over the first few days of the new term. So I am working up
psychology lectures. I chew over a phrase like William James's "states
of consciousness as such" until I fall asleep. I have to begin all over
again the next morning, for I cannot remember what he means by "as
such."
Dr. Christie knows how to handle women to perfection. We are a small
circle, and he says that wives must share in the faculty meetings. He
declares that he wants our opinion and our advice, and that "the very
best example set to the Orientals is to show them how we respect and
defer to our women." But I know this is only half the truth. He takes us
in, so that we won't be able to criticize decisions in which we had no
part. I knit in faculty meetings. My college education never destroyed
the woman's instinct to have hands constantly occupied. Only, I
sometimes forget and go ahead at my knitting mechanically. The first
baby-band I made in faculty meeting was big enough to go around Herbert.
So I called it a cholera belt and gave it to him. Orientals love to talk
and talk and talk and talk. So do Occidentals. And in faculty meetings I
have discovered that men are not a bit less garrulous than women. Since
I committed matrimony I've found to my surprise that the other sex has
very much the same failings as mine. This comes out in faculty meetings.
I bet I'd find the same thing in corporation board meetings. Every one
loves to talk, listens impatiently to others when they talk, watches for
an opportunity to get another word, and gives in through weariness or
indifference rather than through conviction. The best talker has it over
the best thinker every time.
_Mersina, January eighteenth._
I have written you about the Doughty-Wylies, how they stopped for lunch
with us in Tarsus on their way from Konia, the summer British Consulate,
to the winter Consulate at Mersina, and what joy it was for us to meet
them. A few days later, a letter came with the inscription "For the
Youngest Bride at St. Paul's College." It was a week-end invitation for
Herbert and me. We went down to Mersina the very next Saturday. That was
in October. Since then, week-ends with the Doughty-Wylies have been in a
certain sense oases--you understand what I mean. The British Consulate
means that world of ours which seems far away, and is missed
occasionally in spite of the novelty of Tarsus life and the cordiality
of the missionaries. At the Dougthy-Wylies, I am able to dress in the
evening, and Herbert always looks best to me in his dinner-coat. We are
unconventional until we get back into convention: then we wonder how and
why we ever broke loose.
With tea served when you wake up, ten o'clock
help-yourself-when-you-want breakfasts, a morning canter, siesta after
lunch, and whiskey-and-soda and smokes in the evening--we are thirty
miles only from Tarsus, and yet three thousand. We are back in an
English country home. We can smell the box and feel the cold and fear
the rain--so strong is the influence of the interior--until we step
out-of-doors into the sunshine that makes us thankful, after all, that
"back in England" was only a dream.
The Major is still in his thirties but has had a whole lifetime of
adventure crowded into fifteen years of active service in India,
Somaliland, Egypt, and South Africa. He has not been robust of late, and
was given this consular post temporarily. Intends to return to active
army service. Mrs. Doughty-Wylie is a little woman full of life and
spirits. She loves nursing--has been after the bubonic plague in India
and followed the British army in the Boer War. Frank and outspoken, you
never know what she is going to say next. She is as vehement as the
Major is mild, as bubbling over as he is cool, as Scotch as he is
English. They are lovely to us, and as they have taken on with travel a
sense of humor, we have great sessions, sitting around a log-fire until
all hours of the night. The Major is keen on the Seljuk Turks. He is
going to wean Herbert away from French to Ottoman history, I think.
Plays up the possibilities of the field for research in glowing terms.
You can imagine how I whooped when Mrs. Doughty-Wylie wrote just after
Herbert left that I "really must spend the time your husband is away
with us." Socrates was brushing and cleaning Herbert's clothes, and an
iron was on to press the trousers. I left them hanging on the line, with
caution to Socrates to be sure to take them in that night. Suitcases
were quickly packed. I took the next train to Mersina. Wouldn't you have
done so to be able to wake the next morning at nine, and have a maid
push back the curtains while you sipped tea and munched thin toast?
Then, too, I hated everything about our quarters at Tarsus, cozy as they
were, with Herbert away.
After a week of a lazy, restful relaxing, just as I was beginning to
fell in the frame of mind to wonder how we ever happened to get out into
this country and to feel sure that we would never come back, and when I
was speculating on the mysterious phenomenon of the best of England's
blood content always to live away from home, Herbert returned. I woke
up one morning, and there he stood in the room, looking down at me. He
declared that ten days in the Holy Land--without me--was enough for him.
He had "done" Jerusalem and bathed in the Dead Sea--but Galilee could
wait for another time. There was a swift Italian steamer up the coast.
He saw it posted at Cook's in Jerusalem. Hurried down to Jaffa and
caught it. We have decided that separations are not a success. May there
be no more.
As we do not have to go back to Tarsus for two days, we are staying on
to pass Armenian Christmas with the Doughty-Wylies. They are going to
take us pig-sticking to-morrow.
_Tarsus,
January twenty-second._
To-day we rode across the Plain to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.
I enjoy "training the Turks." They let their wives walk while they ride.
Sometimes the poor woman will have a child or some other load on her
back. You can imagine they do not turn aside to give a woman the path,
not even a foreign lady. Sometimes I jar their sensibilities by standing
my horse sturdily in their path. It never enters their head that I do
not intend to turn out. When I rein up with the nose of my horse right
in their face (they are generally on little donkeys) they have an awful
shock. Reluctantly they give way to me, always looking injured and
surprised. Sometimes they express their feeling in language that I
fortunately cannot understand. I love to speak to them in English. I say
something like this: "You old unwashed villain, I am sure you haven't
used Pears' or any other soap this or any other morning. Hurry up, and
get out of my way."
We came across a donkey standing patiently by the roadside. His
halter-rope was tied around the leg of his rider, a boy who lay moaning
on the grass. We had Socrates ask him in Turkish what the matter was. He
responded that he had a fever and was too ill to go on. Herbert told
Socrates to set the boy on his donkey. He went several miles with us,
groaning all the way. We encouraged him, and fortunately soon met some
people from his village. The Turks are absolutely indifferent to human
suffering, and would have let him die there like a dog. Outside of large
centers of population, they have no physicians, no hospitals, no
medicines--it is only through the missionaries that such things are
known at all.
At last we reached our mountain-goal, and climbed up to the cave. The
Mullah received us cordially. Turks are polite and hospitable to
travelers. I will say that for them. The Mullah's servant stabled our
horses, brought us water, and allowed us to spread our lunch on the
front porch of the mosque. It is a pretty little mosque, and right
beside it is a home for the Mullah built of stone. Both are close to the
entrance of the cave. The group of buildings looked beautiful from the
bottom of the hill. But as is invariably the case in Turkey, close
inspection revealed the primitiveness and roughness.
After lunch, during which the servant and his little boy gravely sat and
watched us, we went into the cave. We took our shoes off against our
will, for the cave looked dirty and mussy. Down a long flight of stone
steps the beturbaned guardian led us into a sickening atmosphere of
incense and goatskin. We were told that the cave was large, but, as we
were in stocking feet and had noses, we elected not to explore it.
During the Decian persecutions, seven young men fled from Tarsus to this
cave to escape. Here they fell asleep. They were miraculously kept
asleep for one hundred years. Waking they thought it was the next day,
and went down to a nearby village. They were surprised to learn that the
whole world was Christian. This is the genesis, or at least the Oriental
version, of the Rip Van Winkle story. The Christians built a shrine at
the cave. The invading Mohammedan conquerors took it over and adapted
shrine and legend to their own religion, as they have done with most
Christian holy places.
We sketched the mosque in the afternoon. Then we sat looking out over
the plain to the sea. It is great to have a chance to talk to one's
husband. We are so busy during the week that we save up our talks for
Saturday and Sunday, and we are just getting to know each other. The
keeper told us through Socrates that his wife had died seven years
before and that he lived there all alone, except for the Mullah, with
his little five year old boy. The kid sang a song for us. We gave him
slices of bread thickly spread with jam, which he ate with gusto. It was
probably the first jam he had ever tasted--certainly the first Crosse &
Blackwell's strawberry jam. After the feast was over, he crept up slyly,
seized Herbert's hand, and imprinted on it a sticky kiss. We were
saddled and ready to start homeward immediately after tea, but not soon
enough to get away from the hail-storm that came up all of a sudden.
Before we were out of the stable, the storm broke, great big hailstones
that stung when they hit you. We rode hard for twenty minutes, enjoying
it keenly. It rained just long enough to make the sunset richer and the
air sweeter than usual. We do not mind a bit getting wet like that when
we are on horse. By riding fast, the wind soon dries our outer garments
and the rain does not penetrate. By the time we reached home, we were
dry and did not need to change our clothes before dinner. After our
exercise a good warm bath made us sleep like the pair of healthy
children we are.
A VISIT TO ADANA
_Adana,
February eighteenth._
Dearest Mother:
You know how I love week-end visits. I used to put Uncle John's
Christmas check into a hundred-trip ticket between Bryn Mawr and
Philadelphia: so that if my allowance ran low I could get away from
college over Sunday anyway.
Week-end visits here are really not had at all. There is no hotel in
this town. Characteristically, Daddy Christie has the office force at
the station pilot foreigners coming to Tarsus straight to St. Paul's
College, no matter what orders they gave. A variety of folks wash up on
our beach. A dignified professor with a little group of Oxford men
bound for the interior to prove on the ground that there are villages
back in the Taurus where ancient Greek persists unadulterated to this
day, came back a few weeks later, faces beaming with the grin research
scholars wear when they have it on the other authorities. Another group
of men said they were travelers. Americans of the Far West they
certainly were. We couldn't make out much else at first. Their leader
sat next to me at lunch, and was so extraordinarily reticent, when, in
trying to make conversation, I asked him about his family, that I
commented upon it afterwards to Herbert and Dr. Christie. Later we
learned that they were Mormon missionaries. Dear Dr. Deissmann, with
others from the University of Berlin, spent two days with us on their
journey in the footsteps of Saint Paul. He is gathering material for a
book that will make a stir in the world. He spoke before the boys, in
excellent English--what linguists Germans are!--and the college
orchestra responded with _Die Wacht am Rhein._ It was a _noble_ effort,
and the Herr Professor was good enough to beam and applaud.
Week-ends would indeed be dull were it not for visits exchanged up and
down the railway by missionaries in Mersina, Tarsus and Adana. A new
person at any of the three stations is very soon invited to make
week-end visits. Early in the autumn, Miss X arrived at Adana. When she
made her first visit to Tarsus, Herbert and I invited her to have coffee
in our study one Saturday evening. Kind of cosy, sitting in front of our
fire, and she loosened up and told us that there was just one thing that
troubled her in Adana. That was the Swiss teacher of French at the
Girls' Boarding School, who said she was much relieved to find that the
new-comer understood a little French, "Because, my dear, it is important
for me to safeguard my English. You see I cannot risk catching your
American accent."
Mother, I was mad as a hornet, and what I did proves that I am no good
as a missionary. We told Miss X that when this petty persecution was
being carried on, she was to be like B'rer Rabbit, and "jes' keep on
sayin' nothin'." When the Swiss teacher came for a week-end, we invited
her for coffee. As she settled herself before our fire, she said
engagingly: "Now you must speak French with me. Take every chance you
can for practice." "Thank you, Mademoiselle," I answered, "we should
rather speak English. We are going to live in Paris, you know, and don't
dare risk catching your Swiss accent." No, Mother dear, that wasn't like
a missionary, was it? I am not sorry I said it. When I went to Adana,
Miss X told me that the teasing had suddenly ceased after Mademoiselle's
Tarsus visit.
Mrs. Nesbit Chambers invited me to spend a whole week with her. Herbert
was to come over the following Sunday to bring me home. The train
conductor who speaks passable French gave up to me his own private
compartment. Some weeks since, I should have been aghast at the thought
of going off all alone in Turkey and in Asia on such a queer train, with
outlandish fellow travelers, to a place where I had never been. But
things become familiar to one in a very short time. It seemed almost as
natural as South Station, Broad Street, Grand Central, Trenton,
Princeton, New Haven, Annapolis or Bryn Mawr--a year ago my whole world.
After the train pulled out of Tarsus, I felt that I had my nerve with
me. But I was too interested in what I saw from the window to occupy my
mind regretting that I had not waited until Herbert could come with me.
The uncle of Krikor Effendi's bride (I mean the conductor) was most
polite, and left me alone in his reserved compartment. At the first
station an old brigand got off with a brilliant red tangled rug on his
shoulder. I recognized it as the Cretan rug we had been bargaining for.
Evidently he had not been able to get his price in Tarsus. A Turk on
horse came up to meet the train. The horse jumped around so that his
saddle turned. The man fell off safely, but his friends were still
struggling to turn the saddle straight when we tooted on. At another
station, a shiny tinned trunk, just like a big doll's trunk made in
Germany, was dumped off. Two husky Kurds picked it up, and carried it to
a turbaned Hodja on a tall white horse, who put the trunk in front of
him on the saddle, and started off at a run across the plain. After an
hour I became cold, and was glad I had my steamer rug.
At Adana, a polite individual asked me whether he could find a carriage
for me. I told him Mrs. Chambers would come. He said to wait right
there. I stood on the platform in the midst of the most variegated crowd
I had ever seen--even in the Tarsus bazaars. The whole town was either
getting off the train or had come to meet friends. Some day the Bagdad
Railway will go on from here. But now this is the terminus of the line
from Mersina, and there is none yet across the Taurus to Konia.
I was glad to see Mrs. Chambers coming. We rode up to her house in an
open carriage. I did not want the top up, in spite of the cold. It was
all so new and strange to me. The _arabadjis_ (drivers) in Turkey are
sons of Jehu. Carriages are the only things I have found yet that move
fast. You cannot help being nervous about running people down. It never
happens, though.
When I was once indoors I had no desire to take off my sweater or my
long coat. My nose and ears were as numb as fingers and toes. Mrs.
Chambers gave me two cups of hot tea and I felt better. She took me into
her guest room, and cautioned me to be careful about the bedspread. "I
keep it for special people," she explained, "like the British Consul's
wife and you. But that is no reason why either of you should fail to be
careful of it, for it is the best thing I have." The crockery washstand
took my eye. It was dark green from basin to tooth-mug.
During the few minutes before supper we climbed up on the roof for the
red winter sunset. The Chamberses live in the heart of the Armenian
quarter on the top of the hill. Quite a change after flat Tarsus. The
Armenians have to go to the river to get their water. What a
back-breaking job for the women! They carry tall jars on their
shoulders. We could see the mountains behind Alexandretta in Syria very
plainly. There was snow on the summits.
_Adana,
February twenty-second._
The Girls' School of the Mission is run by women-folks. I went over
there for a meal, and had a look at the teachers and the pupils. When I
saw the girls all collected in the schoolroom, they seemed to me
infinitely pathetic. They are mostly Armenians. In spite of the curves
and glow and bloom of their youth, they look like little women. Perhaps
it is because of the sadness that lurks in their eyes. What chance have
girls in this country anyway? Ought we not to wait until the country is
changed politically before we bring them up to live in our sort of a
world?
In Tarsus the houses are mostly of stone, because the moderns have used
the remains right at hand for successive rebuilding through centuries.
The ancient city, in Roman Imperial days, was so large that it is an
inexhaustible quarry. Modern Adana, on the other hand, is much larger
than the ancient city, and Roman stone gave out long ago. You never hear
of the Turks going to the trouble of stone-cutting. Where they are not
able to utilize the labor of past ages, they build for the day.
Consequently, Adana is a city of wood, totally unlike Tarsus. This, with
the hill, and the big river right in the town, makes Adana more
picturesque. The background of mountains and rich plain is the same,
however. Turkish wooden houses are built haphazard, with no idea of
architecture, and they are never repaired. All except the new ones look
as if they were just about to fall down. Many are falling down. Holes
are patched with new boards or more frequently with flattened-out
petroleum tins. Balconies are stayed with props. When the inevitable day
of collapse arrives, the Turks thank Allah that the catastrophe did not
happen sooner, and praise Allah's mercy in giving them firewood for next
winter. A mass of wooden houses in Turkey makes an _ensemble_ of brown,
of different shades, depending upon the age of the house. The Turks do
not paint: for they calculate that a house will last at least as long as
the man who built it. The next generation can look after itself.
Oriental houses are reticent, like the women who live in them. They are
meant for animals and women, the animals on the ground floor and the
women upstairs--both created and kept in captivity to work for man. You
can tell a Christian from a Moslem house from the fact that the Moslems
put lattice-work over the windows. Otherwise they are the same. While
Christians do not seclude their women, they have nearly the same ideas
about making them work.
Miss Hallie Wallis has her home and dispensary near the Girls' School,
in a house built with a blind wall toward the street, and windows
opening only on the court. Within the court an outside stairway,
mounting to the balcony, leads to the living part of the house. When I
went to call, I got into the hospital side. Miss Wallis popped out of
her office to receive me and led me into a waiting-room which, although
furnished only with a few carpets and divans sporting wide-meshed native
crochet tidies, was cozy. At the door were the patients' wooden clogs.
In one corner a soft-voiced Armenian Bible woman was talking with an
elderly blind woman and a little blind boy. These people were in their
stocking feet, and although I knew it was the native custom, I felt that
they had left their clogs at the door out of respect to Miss Hallie's
spotless rooms. Miss Wallis gently divined fatigue that I didn't know
was there. In a few minutes, although it was mid-morning, there was a
steaming cup of tea and the paper-thin slices of bread and butter that
can be made only by an Englishwoman.
The Armenian doctor asked me to take a look at the work. He gave me a
high stool near his operating table. The hours of the morning flew as I
watched the tender skilful handling of the cases, one after another.
This is the only real medical care the people of Adana receive--and it
is a city of sixty thousand! I saw eighty-seven people come and go. Of
these fifty-eight were eye cases. Miss Wallis has books for the blind,
and a Bible woman who does nothing else but read to them. She is a
thorough-going saint, this Miss Wallis, a gentle, tireless saint. How
many women there are in the world, women of means, of brains and
position, who, in unawakened stolidity, live wasted lives! They belong
to the army of the unemployed just as much as bums and hoboes. Some
unmarried women, middle-aged ones, feel a little bitter as they look
upon their married sisters' lives. That is because they are not working.
Here is a woman who, by self-abnegation and glad assumption of
responsibility, has the richness of life and the wide full satisfaction
a mother feels in doing for her brood of children. Mothers haven't
really a corner on contentment and blessedness. The most common examples
of unselfishness and happiness that we see about us are the mothers. But
there is opportunity for all women to become happy through service, and
thus taste the joy of motherhood. Think of the many unmothered people in
the world, both kids and grown-ups, that cry out for woman-souls to
shelter and minister to them.
When we finished the morning's work in the clinic, Miss Wallis went with
me to lunch at Mrs. Chambers'. As we walked along the street, a haggard
old woman stopped us, clutching at a fold of Miss Wallis's coat. "Please
tell me," came the rapid question, "why you are so happy? I have seen
people who looked as happy as you do, but never before two women each
one happier than the other. Can you tell me why? Are you sisters?" "Yes,
yes," said Miss Wallis, "we are sisters. God is love, Madama and you and
I are his children, and so we are sisters." Miss Wallis stopped right
there to explain further. Before we went on our way the old woman heard
the Good News the missionaries come here to tell, and she hobbled away
happy because she was a sister to somebody who was happy.
I fell in love with the green pitcher and basin in my bedroom. Mrs.
Chambers took me to the pottery. In a cellar, without much light, the
potter was working at his wheel. He was making an amphora of the common
kind women and donkeys carry to the fountains. His right arm was inside
the jar. He worked the wheel with his foot, and with his left hand
guided the rude uneven course of the paddle-like affair which was
molding a lump of clay into shape. With the very slightest pressure, the
potter was able to change radically the contour of the clay. It was the
first time I had ever seen the Potter and the Wheel. I understood.
In the courtyard was a scrap heap piled high with all sorts of broken
and rain-soaked bits of discarded vessels. I spotted a little squat
vase, just my color of green. You know the soft shade the under side of
apple leaves take on when you lie in a hammock under the apple-tree and
half close your eyes as you look up at the sky on a cloudy day in
spring. Kicking aside the debris with my foot, I pulled out the vase by
its uncovered handle. The other handle was safe. Rough lines, grooved by
the potter's will, had dried into the lovely thing before it was
polished, and the glaze added by the fire must have been weather-worn in
this old courtyard for more years than I am old. There was a slight
depression, left by the potter's thumb, on the bottom of the vase. A
police magistrate could have made a thumb-print from it. I bought the
vase for two cents. It is my most precious possession.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
_Tarsus, March fifteenth,
Nineteen-Nine._
Dearest Mother: