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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:

Do you remember the day I was talking to you about the mother-in-law
problem and I said I was put to it to know what to call her? You said,
"Don't worry, it won't be long before you have somebody to whom she will
be grandma, and you can get out of it gracefully by calling her grandma,
too." Isn't it queer to think that I through my motherhood shall place
you in the grandmother generation? As I look back to Cloverton days and
my grandmother, I envy this baby of mine. There is something about a
grandmother that is pretty fine. They thought I was a great kid at
grandma's house--partly because of my unshakable belief that my
grandmother was beautiful. How I used to stand beside her chair stroking
her cheek, telling her, "You are beautiful." She used to smile with her
eyes while her lips protested, saying, "How can I be beautiful with all
my wrinkles?" I suppose it was the Irish coming out in me: for I
remember distinctly telling her that she had no wrinkles, except pretty
laugh wrinkles on both sides of her eyes.

Don't hug secret reflections about growing old. When you and I and the
grandbaby meet IT will be Helen's responsibility. You will be free to
play with the baby. That has not happened to you since you were a little
girl and had dolls. I shall say: "Oh, Mother is there, so baby is safe."
The meeting of the three generations will eliminate worry. Nature means
young fathers and mothers and babies to have grandmother near. You must
come to Paris next winter.

You have made a jolly start in grandmotherhood. It was better than
Christmas, when Daddy Christie and Herbert opened your box. I have my
small steamer trunk right beside our wardrobe, and am playing it is the
baby hamper. The trunk is nearly brand new, and will do very well when
we leave here in June, for it will hold all the baby things.

       *       *       *       *       *

A perfume can whisk your mind five thousand miles from your body. I am
sitting beside our white iron bed, sniffing. There is the faint
unfamiliar odor given out by my cedar woodwork, the smell of fresh
whitewash on new walls, the warm breath of a log fire. Dominating it all
is the clean clover sachet you sprinkled among the baby clothes. The
sachet carried my memory straight back to home, for it smells like your
upper bureau drawer.

The baby things came this morning, and I have arranged them on the bed,
so that when Herbert comes back from teaching his Greek class, he will
get the full benefit. Dresses and petticoats, silk-and-wool shirts and
bands, didies--all six months size. Do you fear that I will not be able
to nurse your grandbaby, that you sent all the condensed and malted
milk?

Next time you have to go to Doctor Smith's office, give him my thanks
for his kind message. I can hear him gravely telling you to advise me
"by all means to go to the nearest hospital." Take with you my old
geography, and put your pretty forefinger on the right-hand upper corner
of the Mediterranean. Show him that we are where the map begins to turn
around that right-hand upper corner down towards the Holy Land. Then
tell him the nearest hospital is a two days' sea voyage away. Do you
suppose Herbert's salary could send me to Beirut? And could I take the
journey alone?

You are quite justified, however, in your wish that I make plans now for
baby's coming. The only trained nurse in Cilicia is Miss Hallie Wallis.
She is forty miles away. She receives at her house at least one hundred
natives a day and has more work than her limited strength can
accomplish. Moreover, she has such a mixed crowd that it might not be
wise for her to handle a baby case.

If we had taken the little church in Squeedunkville we used to talk
about in Princeton days, instead of setting out to see the world like a
couple of fellows in a Grimm's fairy tale, you would now be forwarding
the bassinette Grandma gave me when I was born. Some nosey old
parishioner would be trimming it up for me. I am a Presbyterian, turned
Congregationalist on account of geography, but "conformity unto" would
give me fits when it came to parishioners' notions. I am much too hasty
and human to suit anybody.

Your grandbaby will open its eyes five thousand miles from its
grandmother. The family heirlooms must wait for the second grandbaby.

Some weeks ago I had the school steward (name, when spoken, sounds like
Asturah) go to a Fellahin village near Tarsus and have a basket made
for me. A Fellahin village itself looks like a dusty unfinished basket
turned upside down. The houses are made of a crude reed matting, and the
side walls have the reeds untrimmed and upright at the place where you
expect to see eaves.

I figured out the size for my cradle basket, then cut strings of the
right length for the various dimensions. Through an interpreter I
explained that the basket must be oval. As wide at the top as my blue
string, as wide at the bottom as my red string and as deep as my white
string. A week later the basket was brought to our balcony. Herbert and
I climbed into the thing. It was big enough for us to sit down in it
Turkish fashion, both at the same time.

I got my cradle finally "by some ingenious method." (One of the students
is always saying that.) Funny how the boys here pick out bookish
expressions and use them for everything. I collected my strings again,
suspecting that they had not been out of Asturah's belt pocket since
the day I gave them to him. You ought to see those belts! The natives
take a square of wool material with a striped blue and brown and red
Persian design, fold it corner-wise, and attach one end to their
potato-sack trousers. Then they wind this affair around and around their
middle and fasten it on the other side. The shawl is pretty big to begin
with. They keep an amazing number and variety of things in the fold of
this belt; dagger, package of bread and cheese and olives for lunch, and
a little brass contrivance for holding pen and ink. There is really some
sense to this kind of a belt in a blow-cold, blow-hot country, for it
keeps tummies warm and protects from intestinal troubles. No wonder
natives get along without expensive Jaeger cholera belts.

This time I sent Socrates with my strings to the tinsmith in the bazaar.
He made me a tin affair according to my measurements. Baby's bathtub.
Next I sent the bathtub to the Fellahin with orders to make a basket
covering for it, the same shape as the "tin dish" to protect it during a
long journey we expected soon to take. The weaver then had in his mind's
eye just how tub and basket would be strapped on one side of a
pack-saddle. For these people, a journey means going somewhere on
horseback. When we sail for Marseilles in June, I will put the tub into
the basket, pillows, didies and mattress into the tub, cover the whole
with a Turkish cradle shawl we bought yesterday, and fasten it with a
big strap. The cradle shawl is two yards square, made of coarse woolen
material. If you please, it is dyed brilliant red and green, with
alternating checks. How is that for something dainty for a baby? In the
middle of the shawl, about a yard apart, are round buttonholes. One is
worked in green and the other red. A native mother would hitch these
buttonholes to little pegs that stand up at either end of the box-like
affair she uses for a cradle to protect the baby inside from fresh air.
Germs are carefully tucked into the cradle with the baby. Never mind, I
am going to give my cradle shawl a good cleaning, and I expect it will
serve me well as outer covering for the package I shall make of the tub
and bed and bedding. I must plan thoughtfully for that journey. It will
be worth while to do this because we have to go to Egypt in order to get
a good boat for Marseilles and that makes a twelve-day voyage.

Cotton crops are coming in. I bought a pile, and had a man fluff it up
with a stringed instrument that looks for all the world like a giant's
violin bow. On the first windless day I put it on a sheet, spread out in
the tennis court, for a day's sunshine. The sunshine here reminds me of
Nice at its best.

In the bazaar I bought white material, something like _piqué_. When I
washed and ironed it, I cut out two oval pieces a little larger than
the bottom of the basket, joined the two ovals with a band five inches
wide, stuffed this with the cotton,--and behold a jolly little mattress!
Lucky thing I am so attached to those two wee pillows I had at college.
Lucky, too, that I bought a new set of pillow cases for them before I
left home. After I find suitable material and make a pair of blankets,
my cradle will be ready. When the Queen of Holland's baby comes, it
won't find a better bed.

We have been laughing at Daddy and Mother Christie. One night there was
chicken for dinner, and by accident not quite enough to go around. Daddy
fussed and made jokes, and we soon forgot all about it. Not so Daddy. He
went to the bazaar, and came home with the announcement that he had
bought one hundred chickens. Boys were hastily put to work to make a
pen, and fenced off a run! The chickens arrived that same afternoon, and
Daddy laid down the law to the two chaps who were to take care of them.
He said his chickens would cost the school nothing. He was paying for
them out of his Civil War pension. The chickens were photographed. Dr.
Christie had a lot of prints made and sent to America. On the back of
each photograph he wrote: "The lay workers of Tarsus." Now he has the
laugh on all of us. The photographs and Daddy's inscription have already
brought in much more money in gifts to the college than the chickens and
photographs and postage cost. Typical! Such a darling he is. He looks
like Carnegie. If he had Carnegie's fortune, we should have to call him
Daddy Christmas.

This is a great life. We may have evil-tasting fat made of melted-down
sheep-tails, and no butter for our bread, but there are bowls of
thirst-quenching bonny-clabber and rolled pats of buffalo cream. The
rice may be half-cooked, and the bread may taste sour, but almost any
day I can send to the kitchen where the students' food is prepared and
get a plate of _bulgur_ made of coarse ground wheat. We have fresh figs
stewed or raw and honeysweet, and oh, the oranges. I am guilty of one
"notion." I eat quantities of these golden oranges, about fourteen a
day. I may feel the limitations of life in Turkey in many ways, but
until I outgrow them, I can put on my khaki riding things, swing into my
Mexican saddle and at sunset ride like the wind across the Cilician
Plain with the crying of jackals and the chant of the _muezzins_ in my
ears. The law of compensation is a fact, my dear, and let me tell you
this--don't feel sorry for missionaries.




ROUND ABOUT TARSUS


_April fourth, Nineteen-Nine._

Dearest Mother:

I haven't written since I told you the biggest news a girl can give her
mother, and then I was so full of it that I did not answer the questions
your letters have been re-iterating for many months. What is Tarsus
like? What sort are the people, and your school boys? What do you and
Herbert do with yourselves out there in that God-forsaken country? It is
precisely because we have been trying to find out all about Tarsus and
get to know the people and the boys that I have neglected writing. That
is part of the reason. The biggest part has to do with horses. You know
how we love to ride--and here we have learned what it really means to
ride. It isn't a genteel afternoon tea parade through a park where
every one you meet is as sick of seeing you and the park as you are sick
of seeing them and the park. When conventional city folk look at a bird
or an animal in a cage, and are sorry for the poor thing, it is only
another sign of lack of realization as well as of imagination. With my
teas and balls and clothes I was blissfully happy at home: but so was
our canary. Neither of us knew any better, for we knew only our prison.

We have been round about Tarsus everywhere, and every day, rain or
shine. There is very little of the former. From the moment of our
arrival in Mersina last August, aside from an hour or so in the morning
of tennis, and an occasional visit to the bazaars, all our out-of-doors
has been on horse. We have explored the city and the neighborhood, and
have tried the roads on the Plain in every direction. Herbert's
sky-piloting in Idaho gave him a taste for restless stallion mounts, and
I encourage it. Mastering horses is training for mastering men. There
is nothing in the world better for the teacher than to ride
high-spirited horses. The other day we took out a new horse Henri Imer
is thinking of buying. We had him from a villager, who declared the
horse was in a town for the first time. It was true! For he shied at
every little thing. I tried him first, and had great fun making him go
through crowded streets and the bazaars. The noise in the copper and tin
bazaar drove him wild. But I had him in hand: for Turkish bits give you
the hold. He did not like the butcher stalls. Such a time. It cost me
ten piastres to the indignant butcher to get the better of the horse.
But I did it by making him go straight up and rub his nose in
freshly-cut pot-roasts. There was no danger for pedestrians. In Turkey
the people are used to camels and horses and buffaloes "acting
regardless." Pedestrians know how to get out of the way.

Coming home, Herbert was trying the fractious beast. We took him around
by a water-wheel which we call the "third degree." It is our final stunt
in town-breaking a village horse. The water-wheel stands almost at
right-angles with the road. Its little buckets dip up the water and
empty some ten feet above into an irrigation trench. The hub of the
wheel screeches and the buckets keep up a clank-clank, accompanied by a
thud as they go into the water and a sucking sound as they come out. The
road is narrow--brook on one side and wall on the other. Over the wall
protrude branches of a tree, wrapped round by hanging vines. It is low
bridge for fair. Herbert, leaning over the neck of the frightened beast,
had all kinds of trouble. We knew the animal had no intention of falling
into the stream. Horses don't. The horse, however, refused to pass the
wheel. Each time he backed Pony and me some yards down the road. Finally
Herbert lost his whip. It fell into the stream. Herbert looked
relieved. But you know, Mother, the elemental in me would not allow me
to see a horse get the better of my man. I gave Herbert my whip. He
tried again, and got by. Pony, who had long ago received "the third
degree" when we first discovered that wheel, followed easily.

Alas, the days of horseback have passed for me until next summer.

The other day we made a second trip to the sea, this time in a carriage.
Socrates was on the box, and Herbert was gallant enough to forego his
mount and ride with me.

Halfway we stopped at a _tchiflik_ (farm-house) to water the horses and
try to buy eggs. Every farmer has half a dozen dogs--ugly fellows that
give low growls. They hate you the way their Mohammedan masters hate
you. After the tenant of the farm-house had driven back his dogs, he
surprised us by showing unusual friendliness. We asked for eggs. He said
he had none. This we knew was cheerful mendacity: so we pressed him
further. Finally he brought us a whole basket of eggs, saying that he
ought not to sell them, because he was supposed to send them all to the
town to Pasha Somebody or Other. As we were leaving, we put a coin into
his hand. He would not take it! Socrates gave it to a little girl who
was apparently the child of the tenant. Some superstition made the
father hesitate to take the money directly from us.

Farther along, a lone dead tree twisted itself above the masonry of a
typical oriental well of ancient origin. As we stopped our carriage a
moment, we saw a solitary owl sitting motionless on a loosened stone.
When we drove on, the owl turned his head slowly following us, like a
spirit of a forgotten century resenting with superb unconcern the
investigating energy of modern times. A flock, no, I ought to call it a
whole nation, of wild geese was quietly standing, undisturbed by our
approach and arranged in little groups as if according to tribes,
although all were facing the same way. They looked like the men of
different counties in the same state--drawn up in military line and
waiting for orders. Herbert and Socrates growled because they had no
guns with them. I was glad that such perfect unity did not have to be
broken up just to amuse us.

When we reached the sea the old gray horse wanted to have another roll
in the sand. The last time he had seen the sand was the day he tried to
roll with me on his back. Socrates unhitched the horses, and soon it was
time for luncheon. We settled ourselves on steamer rugs and unpacked our
provisions. We had tea made in my tea-basket and cold turkey, the
remains of Sunday dinner. When lunch was finished, Herbert and I took a
long walk on the beach. It was a blustery day when sunshine alternates
with low swiftly-moving clouds. Ahead of us was the town of Mersina, a
curved line of mingled flat roofs and slender minarets. A mile out to
sea lay half a dozen ships, and we knew that there must be mail for us
in Mersina.

After we turned back towards the place where our camp was, we could see
beyond it a ramshackle structure, lonely and abandoned now--since the
New Constitution. Here used to be stationed a guard--not a Life Saving
Guard, such as we should have in a similar place--a guard whose whole
duty it was to watch for Armenians, who chose this part of the seashore
to escape in small boats. From here it was comparatively easy to get a
ship and go away from Turkey forever. There was romance, as well as
adventure, in these escapes. A young Armenian found means to go to
America, and there made plenty of money. Back here on this Cilician
Plain a girl was waiting. The man saved up enough to come back and get
the girl. His friends smuggled her out to the ship, a missionary was
pressed into service, and a wedding at sea took place. The bride and
groom sailed away, returning to New York or Chicago, to live happily
ever afterwards. You see the young man had become an American citizen.
If he landed on Turkish soil, the new citizenship would have been lost.
That is why his bride had to go out to the ship to be married. The
guard-house must have frequently intercepted such weddings: for it is
built where it commands the coast Mersina-wards.

On the way home we saw a great deal of black smoke. This meant some
people were having fun driving wild boar out of the swamps. You get
natives for "beaters," build fires through the canebrake, and then you
wait patiently. There is sure to be a reward if your "beaters" don't
take the stick or the shot before you get your spear or your gun ready.
The last time we were visiting the British Consul in Mersina, the
Doughty-Wylies took us pig-sticking. After making elaborate
arrangements, with any number of native "beaters" in tow, the best shot
of the day was lost just this way. The "beaters" did not remember that
their job was to beat--not to steal shots they were paid to let slip.

It began to rain. But we didn't care. It was a slanting rain and
fortunately dashed against the back of the carriage. We had rugs and
coats: so the rain was an addition to the fun. We were careful to
protect our driftwood, of which we had gathered enough to make two or
three glorious fires. That evening we burned the driftwood, only to be
disappointed. Of wonderful colors we got not one flicker. Is this
another superstition disproved?

When Herbert writes the letter about Tarsus that he has long been
talking about, but never gets down to, he will probably say much about
the bazaars. But I am now going to anticipate him. Why not? I have only
the typewriter to console me for having to give up my horse. Anyway, we
may get away from here and into other things before Herbert tackles
Tarsus. I am still waiting to see his letter on the trip he took to the
Holy Land.[2]

There are very few women in the bazaars. None at all are engaged in
selling. Turkish ladies never go. Rarely one sees Armenian and Fellahin
women buying. When the time came to get Christmas gifts for Herbert, I
did the markets with one of the Seniors. It is perfectly proper for me
to go to the bazaars. Foreign women are a different order of beings,
absolutely beyond the comprehension of the natives. They look at me as
if I had dropped from Mars. I suppose they consider me a sexless being,
resembling their women only in the lack of a soul. Menfolks in Turkey,
you know, have a corner on souls. Herbert and I have a great deal of fun
as we walk about Tarsus.

But I was telling you about my Christmas shopping. I took Harutun, my
Senior, to the markets half a dozen times. You cannot go to a shop and
select the thing you want, then ask the price and have it sent home. Oh,
no! You go, and appear to be looking at something else, and let your
attention be attracted to the thing you really want--by merest chance.
Even then you do not mention this to the merchant. You simply say to
your English-speaking boy: "See that little brass bowl in the opposite
corner of the shop? I will give him eight piastres for it." Boy says:
"Yes, Mrs. Gibbons," and you turn up your nose a little higher as the
merchant urges upon you the purchase of some other thing you do not
intend to buy. You draw yourself up to your full majestic height,
incline your head backward the least little bit, raise your hand in a
queenly waving aside, give a little click with your tongue, perhaps
emphasizing it by exclaiming in good Turkish: "Yok" (which being
interpreted means "nothing doing, old man"), and then you indifferently
withdraw, followed by your boy. Next day Harutun sends _another boy_,
who gets your brass bowl for about one-quarter the price you'd paid if
you had insisted on buying it yourself. That is how shopping is done in
the Orient. In this way I got Herbert a fine old copper tray and a queer
pitcher-like thing to go with it. I found two coins whose owner did not
appreciate them, and these I had made into a pair of cuff-links. A tiny
silver cup, about an inch and a half in diameter, with the dearest
little carved handle, was the best thing of all. We use it on our desk
as a place to keep pens. I pursued a camel-train, and after a great deal
of intrigue came into possession of several camel-bells. These are
especially interesting to us because they were bought right off the
camel. It reminded me of pig-tail days in the Engadine, when I followed
a pretty cow home to her owner's chalet, and bought the bell on her
neck.

Tarsus markets are cosmopolitan. You can find a dozen races rubbing
elbows there. The predominating four are Turks, Arab Fellahin, Armenians
and Greeks. There is a babel of these four tongues. One hears also
Russian, Persian, Hindustani and Italian. We manage with French in
Mersina, but it is little spoken in Tarsus. The Turkish language rules
in inter-racial transactions. Armenians must use this language. Educated
Armenians struggle valiantly to maintain the two surviving elements of
national identity: the church and the language. But oddly enough the
mother-tongue of the average Armenian is Turkish. Greek has a strong
hold upon the Greeks here. It is something like the tenacious hold of
the French language in Canada. The Fellahin speak a form of Arabic, but
are too ignorant to care whether they make themselves understood or not.
Some weeks ago Jeanne Imer and I were being carefully escorted through a
Fellahin village by one of the students. Suddenly a little boy ran into
the road. He took hold of my bridle, looked up at me with a winning
smile, and said: "From where you come? From America?" Imagine my
surprise. I was delighted to hear my own language away off here in the
outskirts of the town. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out an
orange, and gave it to the little fellow. He said "Thank you" most
politely. I found afterwards that there is a mission school in the
quarter of Tarsus nearest where these people live. The child was
evidently a pupil. But wasn't it cute of him to spot me for an American!

To-day my rooms are getting an extra house-cleaning, and I have two boys
hard at work. One is washing three of my rugs. He has, as little Cousin
Myers used to say, "his bare feet on." He jumps up and down on the wet,
soapy rugs; then pounds them with a big flat stick that looks like a
cricket-bat. They are certainly getting clean--though I doubt whether
you and I should adopt that method if we had the job. The boys are
trying to talk Armenian to each other. They try hard. But they cannot
help falling into Turkish. For in this part of Turkey their
mother-tongue is the language of their oppressors--the badge of
servitude.

Armenians of breeding and education foster their language with all their
heart and soul. There is a desperate attempt to preserve the national
unity, always with the opposition of the terrible Turks! The Armenians
have natural ability along the line of enterprise and making money, but
this has been so curbed by the oppressor that even stout hearts have
given up and lapsed into a paralysis of the will that would be
contemptible if one did not understand it. Under favorable
circumstances, when the Armenian has been given a square deal, he is
successful. He is a born merchant. This is proved when he goes to
another country where his enterprise can have its own way.

We met a fine young fellow in Adana not long ago. He had come home to
see about the education of a little sister in the mission school in
Adana. He was in America only six years, but has come back thoroughly
Americanized, with a lot of money earned as a candy drummer. He is a
good example of our young American hustler who is almost blatantly
successful. It was refreshing to meet him, for he sounded like home. The
appearance of such a man among his old associates causes considerable
dissatisfaction, for he has made more money in this short time than his
cousins and brothers can make in a lifetime. The educators of Armenian
boys have a problem before them. Are they going to educate the boys in
order to encourage them to go to America? Isn't the reason for having
the schools to help these people to a better life in their own country?
Why educate the bright boys at all, if it is not to equip them to spend
their lives for the good of their countrymen? Yet, what can you answer
to the pathetic and conclusive argument that the educated Armenian has
no chance for advancement, so long as Armenia is under Turkish rule?
They really have no chance, the boys with a diploma. They are educated
for unhappiness and for danger. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that
after they have been years in our schools, American education fits them
for American opportunities, and unfits them for Turkish opportunities.
More than this, after we have given them the vision of another kind of
national as well as another kind of individual life, they are marked men
among the Turks, and are the first to be sought out when a massacre
comes. Herbert and I have our misgivings about all this work here. In
spite of the heralded liberty of the Constitution, it requires more
optimism than we have to believe that Armenians are safer under Young
Turks than they were under old Turks.

_Bairam_ means feast. After every religious fast, a _bairam_. It is an
occasion for eating immoderately, and for giving a little pleasure and
break in the dull monotony of woman and child life. During the last
_bairam_, in the field of the camel market there was a funny little
"merry-go-round" and a crude Ferris wheel, which had hanging wooden
cages each big enough to hold four children--if they were small. A
beaming brown-faced peasant was taking in the money and bossing the two
men who turned the wheel and the merry-go-round. He came up to us, and
with real pride in his voice, asked: "Have you anything like this in
America?"

On Sunday morning, the classes have their lesson taught in their
class-rooms, and then they come together in the assembly-room for the
concluding exercises. As these are given in Turkish, Herbert and I do
not feel called upon to go. So we commit the heresy of slipping out for
a walk. It is a heresy, Mother, to these dear good people. The
missionaries have puritanical notions of Sabbath-keeping that are
different from anything Herbert and I have ever run across. Of course,
we say nothing to the boys. But we often wonder if they think that
American life is run on missionary principles. The boys are taught that
smoking is a sin. That is only one instance. On Sundays, they are not
allowed to leave the college grounds except to go over to the Armenian
Protestant Church for the afternoon service. Taking walks is taboo. What
do you think of that? We easily forego the smoking. It is a question of
example to boys: and we see the reasonableness of the point of view. But
we simply cannot stay indoors on these glorious days.

We always take the same Sunday morning walk: for it never fails to
interest us. We circle the college grounds, and climb up on a mound,
under which Cleopatra's castle or Sardanapalus's tomb is supposed to be.
There we hear the boys singing. They are wonderful singers, and we love
to listen to the familiar hymn tunes. Last Sunday a Moslem wedding was
being celebrated at the same time. Men in gay-colored jackets and
sashes were moving toward the house where the wedding was taking place:
others were already around the door. A native orchestra was playing. The
instruments were squeaking reed whistles, two-stringed guitars and
drums. You can imagine the music they give forth, when I add that they
never get off the minor key. On the flat roof a group of women, veiled
and silent, huddled pathetically together. The blending of heathenish
music with a Moody and Sankey hymn was indescribable.

Crossing the open space from the mound to the Mersina road, we see
ill-kept cattle trying to get grass to keep them from starvation.
Sometimes there is a sick or aged horse brought here to die. With all
the frightful cruelty to animals everywhere evident, Orientals strangely
enough will not kill animals. They do not put out of misery beasts
suffering from their neglect and cruelty. This distorted kindness comes
to cap the climax of misery for patient burden-bearers broken with
toil. When an animal falls by the roadside, and the owner cannot whip or
kick it into going farther, he just leaves it there. In riding we see
frequently the remains of a camel or a horse. In spite of wanting to
avoid the offense to nostrils as well as the struggle with a mount
shying for good reason, we have to pass by. For the carcass is generally
right alongside the road, and we cannot always make a detour through the
fields. Filthy jackals skulk away at our approach, howling in savage
protest and yet trembling with fear of us.

We pass out of the town to the Mersina road under an interesting arch,
called St. Paul's gate. It is one of the gates of the old walled city,
but whether it is of Roman, Byzantine or Arabic origin it is impossible
to tell. In Tarsus and all around Tarsus there are numerous
archeological remains. But they have been so defaced and mutilated and
built over that it is hard to get any idea at all of the original
construction. The natives declare that the Mersina gate was built by
Harun-al-Rashid, hero of the _Arabian Nights_. Harun's walls did pass at
this point, and the city has never gone beyond. A few yards outside the
gate, we are in a Fellahin village. Between two of the reed huts is a
mud oven, patted into oval form, baked outside by the sun and inside by
a fire of grass. When we pass, the women are always making bread. The
whole operation is before your eyes. The wheat is threshed out of its
stalks and winnowed, and ground in a stone basin with a huge pestle of
iron or copper. The coarse flour is mixed with water, and kneaded in
pats about as big as my hand. These are passed to an old hag, who
quickly flattens them out on a board, using her forearm as rolling-pin.
They are put in the oven with sticks. Two or three minutes--and you have
your bread. It is not in loaves. Think of a griddle-cake nine inches in
diameter, or something even thinner than a griddle-cake, and you have
the Fellahin bread. It is splendid wrapping paper. When there are no
fig-leaves at hand, the peasants give you butter and cheese done up in
bread.

The Cydnus River runs through and around Tarsus in a dozen branches, all
of which do the quadruple service of mill races, drinking troughs for
man and beast, washing places for man and beast and carriage and
clothes, and irrigation ditches. There is plenty of water and it runs so
fast that there is always time for it to get clean for the user below.
Tarsus is full of mills: cotton, sesame, flour and sawmills. One of the
largest cotton-mills--for ginning and weaving both--is on the Mersina
road. Here we stop to watch and tease the turtles in the mill-race. They
are lined up on the bank, generation after generation of them--like a
family group for a photograph in New England (of the old days only,
alas!). The timid ones flop into the water at our approach. Most of
them, however, are insolently indifferent. Our idea is to make them all
"vamoose." We throw pieces of sugar-cane at them, and Herbert,
everlasting kid, is not satisfied until only ungraceful claws, wildly
waving above the surface of the water, reveal where the sprawling
creatures have taken refuge. Not a head dares appear: for Herbert is
near baseball days, and sugar-cane is heavy enough to carry straight. In
the wider water beyond the mill, we frequently see long shapeless ridges
of brown-black shifting lazily about, moving just enough to show that
they are not mud-banks. A rude cart stands on the edge of the stream and
on its pole is fastened a double-yoke. Those ridges are the buffaloes
that belong to the cart. The lumbering beasts sway back and forth
through the streets dragging incredibly high and heavy loads of
cotton-bales to the railroad. Occasionally they are unhitched and
allowed to get into the water for a rest and a bath. There they lie in
the gray mud, absolutely relaxed, languidly flapping their ears to
splash water on their heads.

Our walk ends at the bridge half a mile beyond the cotton factory. West
of the bridge the Adana-Mersina road enters the great Cilician Plain
once more after the long break of Tarsus and its suburbs. Half a dozen
broken places in this bridge are a constant menace to horse and camel.
It keeps getting worse and worse. An enormous traffic passes over it:
but does any one think of mending it? They will wait until it falls
down. The motto of this country is every man for himself. There is no
public spirit--no idea of the common weal. One is moved only by what
affects him directly, and acts only for what he believes is his
interest. But none sees farther than _immediate interest_. To-morrow is
in God's hands. The Young Turk régime, on which we see the American
newspapers and magazines publishing extravagant eulogies--how will it
succeed? The governing classes in Islam cannot be regenerated until
Islam is imbued with a different spirit--self-sacrifice, initiative,
thought of the future.

Every day we look out of our window to see what there is to see. This is
no idle curiosity or idle waste of time--there is always some sight to
be memorized, visualized, and tucked away in your mind for future
reference. A little group of haggard, prematurely old women, with veils
over their heads, and tall green or terra-cotta water-bottles on their
bent shoulders, passes by. The women of the poor wear shabby black
bloomers, shoes without stockings, gay-colored blouses open at the
throat, and on their heads veils made of cheesecloth. One corner of the
veil they hold in their teeth, so that but half of their hopelessly
tired, haunting, unhappy faces can be seen. Only the children and the
men look happy at all. Very early the lines of care and cruelty are
indelibly penciled upon girl-faces. Half a dozen horses bravely struggle
along under the weight of an odd-looking burden: the bakeries here burn
in their ovens green branches of a kind of resinous bush that grows in
the foot-hills and mountains. The bush is gathered and bound into rough
bundles, and put in bulging loads on the groaning pack-saddles of
uncomplaining horses. The horse is hidden in his leafy burden. A passing
train looks like a moving forest. One could believe Shakespeare had been
here to get the idea of the Burnham beeches moving to Dunsinane!

Childish voices call up hopefully: "Madama." I see sometimes as many as
a dozen children holding out their hands. Some girls have tiny babies
strapped to their backs. I go to the window armed with savory
ammunition, and before I know it these fascinating young ones have
charmed away all my store of dates and figs and candies from the last
day in Mersina.

If you look higher than the street you see a sky-line that leads from
flat grass-topped roofs, through the town, up to the foot-hills. Domes
mean mosques, when flanked by minarets. The minarets are tall, slender
and pointed at the top. Where the cone begins, a door opens to a small
iron-railed ledge, and here it is that the muezzin walks when he sings
the chant that calls the faithful to prayer. You know as you look at
these minarets at the hour of prayer that men are lying prostrate before
each of the mosques, and more men are grouped around the city fountains
washing their feet in preparation for prayer. It is not pleasant to
think of the curse against "infidels" in the call to prayer--even if the
muezzin has a sweet voice that rings out over the houses and comes to
you mingled with the sweeter voice of the muezzin in a more distant
minaret.

Away to the left are the beloved Taurus mountains. They are
never-failing--and we look at them with new eyes every day. As we go
down to breakfast, we stop just a minute to see the color and outline of
these old friends. We can distinguish the pass that leads to
Namrun--and often in the moonlight we think of the lovely night last
autumn when we rode into Tarsus while the deep rich bell of the
clock-tower was ringing. The clock strikes the hour, then after a pause
of two minutes repeats it. Splendid idea: for you can check up on your
first count.

A whole letter could be written about what we see from the windows.
Whatever I write, the culmination, the climax, must be the camels. They
are the best of all "sights" to me. The first I saw were in Smyrna, or
rather just outside of Smyrna, taking refuge under a clump of trees from
the noon-day sun. It was a group of at least thirty, the most camels I
had ever seen together in my life. I wanted then to stop, but we were en
route for Polycarp's tomb, and had only a few hours ashore. Now I have
camels to my heart's delight and satisfaction. But never enough! Our
street is one of the roads to the market-place. During the autumn, when
much wood and cotton was being transported, camels passed under my
window every morning. About six o'clock they began. Train after train
wound slowly along. The camels travel single file, fastened from saddle
to saddle.

Until I came to Turkey, I had seen few camels outside of a Zoo. The only
loose one I remember is the camel ridden in Paris by the beggar that
used to haunt the Place Saint-Michel. No two camels are alike. In a
hundred that pass, each is different from the one ahead, very different.
Camels are just as different as people. They are dark brown, tawny
brown, on and on through the various shades up to the palest tan. The
colors run from that one gets from polishing russet shoes with the black
shoe brush to that produced by whitewashing a dust-covered wall. The
shades are the echoes of the blending shifting tones of desert sand. The
wide cushioned foot speaks fervently of the silence and patience of the
camel's journeyings to and fro. The camel's eye is sorrowful. His air
is supercilious, as if his claim to aristocracy among animals was
forever settled by the fact that he was the favorite of Mohammed.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] More than seven years have passed, and neither the Tarsus letter nor
the Holy Land letter has yet been written. Our life moves so fast, in
the midst of a great and changing drama, that the event at hand demands
all there is of time and energy.




HAMLET AND THE GATHERING OF THE STORM CLOUDS


_April seventh, Nineteen-Nine._

Dear Mother:

     There's an awful lot of knowledge,
     That you never get at college.

But I tell you, my dear, I am glad that Anna Bess put me on the scenery
committee the first time 1906 had a play. Ever since I left Bryn Mawr I
have been looking for the things I learned that were "going to prove
useful in after years." For the first time I've hit something. When the
boys wanted to get up a play I showed them how to put squares of canvas
together, tacked on poles at the platform end of the big schoolroom. I
marked out a court scene with charcoal, and painted it in. One
advantage of making scenery here is that paint dries quicker than it did
in the cellar of our dormitory.

I economized time by sewing costumes while the boys rehearsed. It was
the most unimaginable sort of rehearsing. For the play was to be given
in Turkish, of which Jeanne and I understood not a word. All the same
with my little red leather-bound English Shakespeare stuck in the corner
of the divan near my lapful of sewing, I was supposed to criticize the
acting. I kept looking from needle to book to actor. Jeanne, on the
other side of the divan, was following in a French translation. Hamlet
and Ophelia dashed around while I put ermine on the king's coat. The
boys would not listen to cutting. They were game for the whole play--not
quailing before scenes that Irving and Terry could not swing. They have
prodigious memories. We found that out when one of them memorized
Herbert's entire lecture on the Rise of the Papacy, and gave it
afterwards as answer to a question in term examination. Their patience
and endurance are limitless. They never get bored.

Jeanne and I were back of the scenes on the great night to start the
play with everybody dressed and bewigged, painted and securely hitched
together. Clothes had to be sewed on the ladies. The boys entered so
fully into the spirit of the thing that when the show was actually on,
they hadn't time to think about their clothes. My red Cretan rug, firmly
strapped to the shoulders of Hamlet's mother, made a real court train.
(The actors had practised not to walk on it. Luckily they learned this
early in the rehearsals, when Ophelia, passing his future mother-in-law,
stepped on the Cretan rug and "sat down too much" on the hard schoolroom
floor.) Crowns and wigs had to be anchored with adhesive tape. Ophelia,
young and rather slender for his age, was capable of the martyrdom of
forcing his feet into my satin dancing slippers. It was possible only
when I made him wear my silk stockings. His own knitted socks were much
too thick for stage purposes as well as for slippers. A schoolroom
bench, assisted by the boxes of two croquet games and covered by rugs,
made a passable throne. The stage manager was dismayed when he realized
that Doctor Christie's pulpit was screwed fast to the platform. I
discovered that the top of the pulpit could be removed, and comforted
the boys by pointing out to them that those in the audience who had ever
seen a real theater would certainly think the pulpit was a prompter's
box.

The audience of students and teachers was increased by the parents of
boys living in Tarsus and local Moslem dignitaries, the Kaïmakam, the
Feriq and the Mufti.[3] They were delighted to come, and praised our
school and its hospitality. At the end of each scene they applauded
conspicuously. The Mufti's parchment-like cheeks wrinkled to expose his
yellow gumless teeth in an appreciative grin, while the Kaïmakam shook
hands with the asthmatic Feriq Pasha until his Hamidian decorations
jingled on his breast.

Our efforts to persuade the boys to cut out a part here and there were
in vain. They insisted on giving the whole blessed thing. Candied
almonds and glasses of water passed around in the audience helped to
keep them awake. The atmosphere was hot and close, and the petroleum was
getting low in the lamps. Between the first and second acts the school
band--all individualists--did their favorite piece, the very march that
the old German orchestra leader in Philadelphia used to play at the
Country Club dances just after the last waltz before supper. The boys
put the vigor of their youth and the enthusiasm of the occasion into
their playing. I was glad the venerable Mufti had cotton in his ears.
The place was already so full of people and talk and lamp-baked air that
I thought the floor of the dormitory above would spill down on us when
the band thundered a climax of horns, trombones, drums and cymbals.

As the play went on, the audience did not need candied almonds or music
to keep them awake. Things began to go badly for Hamlet's mother's
husband. People stopped fanning. The dignitaries moved uneasily in their
places. With heads hunched down in their shoulders, they kept their eyes
glued on the stage. They are not familiar with our great William, and
believe, no doubt, that we invented the play as well as the actors'
costumes. Horror of horrors! We had forgotten what they might read into
the most realistic scene. An Armenian warning for Abdul Hamid? The
assassins mastered the struggling king. He lay there with his red hair
sticking out from his crown, and the muscles of his neck stiffened as
he gasped for breath while his throat was cut with a shiny white
letter-opener.

As I fell asleep last night, I saw the three dignitaries leaning forward
frowning. The Mufti had clinched the sides of the bench with his thin
hands. Could they be seriously disapproving of our show, because we
killed a king in it? I went to sleep laughing over Doctor Christie's
story of the way the authorities would not permit him to teach physics
in the early days because he was obliged to use the word "revolution."


_April ninth._

Last night Herbert and I drove on the Mersina road. We love this drive
in the late afternoon. It leads in the direction of home--straight to
the sunset. Camels came towards us. From the head the line was double.
As they parted to the sides of the road, I said to Herbert, "Let's count
the beasts. You take your side and I'll take this." They numbered more
than two hundred, all laden with petroleum tins.

       *       *       *       *       *

We drove again this evening. Even walking is proscribed for me now. I
can go out of the college grounds only in a carriage, and then not far.
In a Moslem quarter, on a road between vegetable gardens, boys threw
stones--the first time it has happened to us. As Charlemagne was nervous
and reared from being hit several times, Herbert did not dare to get out
and leave me alone. There was nothing to do but drive on, and accept the
stoning. I was hit on the left shoulder--a big stone it was. The bruise
is painful.

       *       *       *       *       *

_April thirteenth._

Could not finish for Thursday's post. We have had Easter to think
about--examinations, and the boys going off for their ten days.

Miss Talbot has come to stand by me. Isn't she a dear? Imagine a
soft-voiced Englishwoman of the upper class being a trained nurse, and
_my_ nurse--when there is none in the world for me to turn to. It seems
as if she has been dropped from Heaven at my door. Miss Talbot is a
woman of independent means, who studied nursing to equip herself for
doing good. She came out here to Turkey to find work at her own expense.
She is going into mission dispensary nursing, but thinks just now that I
am "the duty at hand." Lucky for me!

The annual meeting of the American Mission is being held in Adana this
week. It opens to-morrow. Dr. Christie and Miner, of course, had to go,
and they persuaded Herbert to go with them. It was a chance for him to
meet the missionaries from the interior, and get an idea of mission
problems. Herbert was very anxious to meet the missionaries of whom we
have been hearing so much. They are to reach Adana overland on horse
from Marash, Hadjin, Aintab and other stations. It is the jubilee
year--the fiftieth annual meeting. The native Protestant pastors of
this whole field are to hold a reunion at the same time. An important
question is coming before the Mission--what to do with the orphanages
that were established after the massacres of 1894-96. The orphans are
practically all grown up now.

I urged Herbert to go. It is only forty miles, and he can return
to-morrow if we have news to telegraph him. Miss Talbot thinks it is all
right, and her being here reassures him. He needs only to be gone one
night. At the last minute he hesitated, but I pushed him out with the
others.

As we said good-by, Herbert stood below me in the school grounds, and I
was on the steps a few feet above, leaning over and talking to him. Just
for fun, I took his fez off--a black velvet fez. My giggle and smile
died away as I idly twirled that fez around my finger. Sometimes in the
sunshine one sees the shadow of Islam. After all, wouldn't he be safer
in a hat? I put this into words. Herbert scoffed at the idea, but he
humored me and went to find his gray felt hat.

Must go to marking examination papers of my rhetoric class. Can you
imagine me an English Reader like Miss Marsh? You were afraid three
lectures a week and two rhetoric lessons would be a lot for me to
manage, but Mother dear, these boys are hungry for an education. I long
for a copy of one of the rhetorics we used at college. Have improvised a
text book. Coaxed it out of my memory. I averaged two hours a day,
typewriting the material on our Hammond. The boys drink in my stupid
lectures the way the Cilician Plain drinks in the first autumn rains. I
gave a stiff quiz just after the Easter vacation. I am continuing the
daily themes and the critical papers. I have learned a lot from the boys
about the fable in Turkish literature. Also about habits of camels, and
the real Abraham Lincoln. Can't you see me rehashing Bryn Mawr English
and adapting it to the Tarsians?

FOOTNOTE:

[3] The Kaïmakam is at the head of the civil administration of the
municipality, the Feriq of the military administration, and the Mufti of
the religious administration. Civil and military government and religion
are all closely connected--essential factors in Turkish society.
Constantinople has its hold directly on every community in Turkey.




THE STORM APPROACHES


_Wednesday, April fourteenth._

Mother:

This afternoon I sent Socrates to the station with the buggy (the word
is not misused--we have a real American one). Herbert was to return by
the afternoon train. An hour later, Socrates came back alone and told me
that "bad things" were happening in Adana. There was a massacre
starting. Yesterday four Armenian women were killed. This morning there
was killing begun in vineyards just outside of the town. While he was
telling me this news, a telegram mercifully arrived from Herbert. It
read: "_Reviendrai demain. Aujourd'hui tout bien._" Herbert's French is
far from what it might be. But telegrams in English are not accurately
transmitted in Turkey.

When I went over to Mrs. Christie's sitting-room for afternoon tea, I
found several Armenian women there, among them the mothers of two of our
teachers. One mother was begging for permission for her son to sleep at
the college. He came later, bringing his precious violin, which he asked
me to hide for him. I put it back of our bathtub. The other mother was
in tears. Her son is in Adana for the holidays with his bride. This poor
woman has a right to fear. She lost two children in the 1895-96
massacres. One little girl was trampled to death by a squad of Turkish
soldiers. The son, our Armenian professor,--the one in Adana--was saved
with the greatest difficulty, having been hidden for several days in the
dark corner of a mill.

Excitement grew this afternoon. Patrols are going through the streets.
We are told that this is done to calm people. The unrest is showing
itself. I asked Socrates not to repeat what he had seen and heard. Panic
is contagious. He was unmoved by my caution. He shook his head, saying,
"It is going to be very terrible, very terrible."

I wish it were not Easter vacation. So many of our boys have gone to
their villages. They would be safer here. Dr. Christie and Herbert and
Miner would not be in Adana. If this had to occur, why not when college
was going, and we were all together? The regular routine would do much
to keep minds occupied. When you are busy, you are normal, no matter
what may be going on around you.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Thursday, April fifteenth._

Mother dear:

I wasn't afraid last night. I slept the whole night through. This
morning there was quite a crowd of Armenians in the school dining-room.
They look to us for protection and food and shelter. They are
terror-stricken, and have reason to be. How would you like to live in a
country where you knew your Government not only would not protect you,
but would periodically incite your neighbors to rob and kill you _with
the help of the army_?

Socrates asked to be allowed to go to the station again to see if
Herbert came by the morning train. Off he trotted, leaving me to my
sewing. He came back in the greatest excitement. At the station all was
confusion. People jumped off the train, and shouted madly that the whole
of Adana was burning. Immediately a mob formed, and some of these men
seized the buggy and made off with it, leaving Socrates to get home as
best he could. Henri Imer had gone over on horseback, and he had a bad
time too. His horse was struck by a Turk, but he succeeded in getting
away. He went right to the barracks and found the buggy there. Henri
secured permission for Socrates to bring it home.

Another telegram has come from Herbert saying, "_Tout bien. Retournerai
Tarsous aussitôt que possible, peut-être pas avant demain._"

The afternoon train failed to appear.

Just before dark, the boys of the Sub-Freshman class who were spending
the Easter vacation at the college came and told me they wanted to be my
bodyguard. They are to sleep to-night on my balcony--the balcony on the
inside of the building just outside my bedroom. Their beds, mattresses
and blankets have been given to refugee women for the little children.
It is April--but still cold at night. I have taken from the walls and
floors all our Turkish rugs--every single one of our treasures--and
spread them on the boards for the boys to sleep on--or under. They mean
absolutely nothing to me. I do not care if they are lost in the
confusion.

Johnny tells me there is not much oil in my lamp. I cannot be without
light. It may be needed badly in the night. It may be vital for me to
have light. To get candles and petroleum from the large school-building
was impossible for the boys. The precious things might be taken from
them in the crowd. For our compound is filling: and many of the refugees
we do not know at all. I must go with the boys. I shall take Kevork and
Samsun as well as Socrates. To be without Herbert at a time like this!
These blessed boys of mine are splendid. They are thoughtful, devoted,
courageous, and most delicate in their attention. I could not be in
better hands. The best in people comes out at a crisis. If I live
through these days, I shall never cease to cry out against the
supercilious, superficial travelers, who, enjoying a sheltered life for
themselves and their loved ones, say mean things about Armenians--even
that they deserve to be massacred--that massacres are their own fault.
All I can say is this: May God Almighty forgive them their judgments,
for they know not what they say. My Armenian boys and my Greek Socrates
are every bit as fine, every bit as thoroughbred, as Anglo-Saxon boys of
the best blood and training.

I am back safely--with oil and candles, too. Now I am ready for what may
come in the night.

In the assembly-room of the big school-building, some of the refugees
had gathered around the pastor of the Protestant Church. It was an
impromptu prayer-meeting. They were singing hymns. I do not understand
Turkish, but, as they use our tunes, I knew the hymns. It was a comfort
to steal in, and sit down for a while among my fellow-sufferers. Only
eight months ago, when we first came to Cilicia, and went to church up
in the Taurus Mountains summer place, I remember how queer these people
looked to me. They belonged to another world. I was an outsider. I had
difficulty in understanding some traits of their character. I was hasty
in my judgment of them--hasty through ignorance. I was impatient with
their constant fear of what "might happen any time" to Christians living
under Moslem rule. I had no conception of what "might happen any
time"--that was why. During the singing, I looked up to the ceiling. The
trap-door brought back vividly the day when Daddy Christie had showed it
to me, saying, "We have that for use in time of massacre." I had
laughed. The constitutional era was here. Those were things of the past.
Probably it is a mercy that youth and inexperience make one refuse to
believe that bad things--horrible things--which have happened to others
may come in one's own life.

We sang softly (for the sound must not get outside) "Lead, Kindly
Light." The hymn had never meant so much to me. For, until now, there
never had been "encircling gloom." I understand now. Because I need the
Light, I ask for it.




THE STORM BREAKS


_Tarsus,
Friday, April sixteenth,
Nineteen-Nine._

Mother dear:

Men came here to tell Mrs. Christie trouble was coming. Offered to send
a guard for our gate. They knew that Dr. Christie and Miner Rogers and
Herbert--three of the four men of the mission family--had gone away to
Adana. The fellows were Kurds. They looked like brigands. Mrs. Christie
put them off, saying we were not afraid. This with a calm little air as
if she didn't quite realize. When I asked her about it, she replied:
"Didn't you see? They wanted to get hold of the college gate." What a
woman she is! To-day with Armenians coming to us in greater numbers
every hour, I say to myself: What if the Kurds had possession of our
broad gate?

From our study window I can see the Cilician Plain stretching on and on
to the Taurus. The Plain to-day looks like a monstrous Turkish rug. It
is a riot of color, quantities of poppies and irises and other spring
flowers. _Did you ever think of this: red predominates in Turkish rugs?_

       *       *       *       *       *

Last night we learned that the train going through towards Adana had
turned back at Yenidje. By this time one hundred refugees had come to
us. Massacre seemed imminent. Socrates barricaded all my shutters, and
watched outside my door.

This morning another telegram came from Herbert saying that he was
detained, and would get back when he could. There were no trains in
either direction, so we knew the whole country was upset. Rumors began
to leak through about the terrible times in Adana and I knew why Herbert
had not returned. This morning there were more than five hundred
refugees with us.

In the course of the morning we heard that Armenians had been killed at
the Tarsus station and that the station master and other employees had
fled. Then there was the whistle of a train from Adana. It brought a
wild mob of Bashi-bazouks. For concentrated hatred, a Bashi-bazouk is a
small-pox germ. I saw the train vomiting forth its filthy burden. The
men wore no uniforms. They were dressed in dirty white bloomer-things,
with bits of carpet fastened up their legs with crisscross ropes, in
place of shoes. They looked like worn out rag dolls. I saw them gather
in a mud colored fan-shaped crowd at the flimsy entrance to the Konak,
where the authorities could not be quick enough in passing out guns and
ammunition and other instruments of the Devil to every one. Then Hell
broke loose. The townspeople joined themselves to this mob. Along the
road that crosses the space between us and the railway they went in
groups of fifty, going at an easy run and brandishing their arms,
uttering low weird howls that grew in a crescendo of rage. They made for
the Armenian quarter, the last houses of which are only one hundred and
fifty yards from us.

Shooting started and continued all day. Along with the sound of the
shots we could hear the screams of the dying.

All day there has been a procession of refugees. They seem to have
gathered in little groups first, for they came in a few hundred at a
time in pulsation. In the afternoon they came steadily. Mother! the
sound of the feet of the multitude. Some poor things were wounded, some
were looking for husbands or children that could not be found. They
brought nothing with them. Sick women were carried on the backs of their
husbands. Little children struggled to keep up with panic-stricken
elders. Children, feeble old people, chronic invalids, the desperately
ill, were possessed with supernatural strength. When they reached the
goal, our gate, they were like the Durando we described in the Marathon
race last summer. A big fellow in the meager guard at our gate was a
host in himself. He had a hearty voice, and kept waving his arms and
shouting, "Come in, everybody. Inside this gate is safety for you all!
Courage, little children." Occasionally he would pick up a crying baby
or a sick woman, and help them inside. It was the one cheerful kindly
sight of the day--to see that soldier.

About noon from Jeanne and Henri's study I saw an attack on a house very
near us. There was a low hum in the distance: then a roar, and on the
second-story balcony twenty-five Bashi-bazouks climbed, bursting in the
door to the house of the richest man in Tarsus. There was shooting and
screaming: then flying bits of burning paper came out of the windows,
followed by blue and red flames. By opening our shutters cautiously we
could hear the cruel hiss of the flames and smell kerosene in the
smoke. Then the rending and crashing of the floors made a deafening
noise, and the sparks began to alight on our property.

This is the regular order of things,--kill, loot, burn. The Armenian
quarter is the most substantial part of the city. Most of the people
store cotton on the ground floor, and this, together with liberal
applications of kerosene, served to make a holocaust. Now at
evening-time we realize our own imminent danger.

I have made tea about twenty times during the day. What a blessing you
sent those provisions. Good thing we chose from among our wedding gifts
the chafing-dish and the tea-basket to bring along on our journey. I
have given away everything I could spare. Things to drink out of are a
vital necessity. I gave away my tooth-mug to a thirsty old woman, and
reserved as my drinking cup the little china affair one keeps
tooth-brushes in on a washstand. It stands unabashed beside the smart
little silver tea-kettle and spirit lamp. How I miss my oranges. Mother
Christie found a stray one this morning and sent it in to me. The boys
brought some charcoal and made a fire in a _mangal_ in my fireplace. I
have tried my hand at a _pilaf_. Kevork brought some sheep-tail grease
in a bit of paper and I held my nose while I melted it and poured it
into the _pilaf_. I do not see why these people do not cook with wagon
grease and be done with it.

Your tins of condensed milk I have given to Mary Rogers for her baby. A
mother brought her two-year-old boy to me. The poor little thing had had
nothing to eat since yesterday. The whole Armenian question sums itself
up for me in those big brown eyes and their kindling with sudden light
as I held a bowl of warm milk to that baby's trembling mouth. I couldn't
make him smile, though, for all my coaxing.

The meals of our immediate family are served in my bedroom. Mrs.
Christie's house, the big dining-room, the school buildings are
overflowing with refugees. It is only the most strenuous efforts of the
college boys that prevent them from over-running us too. I have just my
bedroom, Mary the other bedroom for herself and the baby, and Miss
Talbot is in our study. Jeanne's extra bedroom eighteen women have
managed to get into. Henri's study is crowded too. I am working on baby
clothes to keep my mind occupied. I am making flannel nighties: there
are hundreds of babies out under our trees and on the hard asphalt of
the tennis court without one change of clothing.

Dear, dear, here is a woman who has been in terrible suffering all day
long. Her husband and brother were with her and several times tried to
flee with her. They picked her up a bit ago and started with her through
the red and black streets. Overpowered, she stopped in ----'s garden and
had her baby. Wrapping the baby in something and putting it in the
mother's arms, the men picked her up and made the final dash for safety.
We have pulled the buggy out of the carriage-house and made a place for
her in the corner. She is resting nicely now.

       *       *       *       *       *

Socrates came to me and said that friends of his, Greeks like himself,
have invited him to join them in an attempt to escape to Mersina. They
have a dead Greek's passport for him. He asked my advice. I told him I
could not take the responsibility. Danger? There is little
choice--staying here or trying to get away. I told him to go off by
himself to think it over. He came back to tell me this: "You are alone.
If you have to run away, you have nobody to go with you. Professor
Gibbons--no one knows where he is. I will stay with you."[4]

       *       *       *       *       *

Have been sitting on the steps leading up to the rooms of the Imers,
looking out over the pathetic throng in the garden. Kevork in his snug
little coat and long gingham student-apron has been sitting beside me.
"You are hungry," said he. "Your future may be five minutes long. Your
husband is missing. Maybe he is dead. Those telegrams were dated
yesterday, you know. Your baby is not born. You cannot defend yourself
or run away. _You are just like an Armenian woman._ Tell me what you
think about revenge?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Dostumian hunted wildly and fruitlessly for his mother and little
sister among the crowd. Harutun urged that he, on account of his red
hair, would not be taken for an Armenian. He could find them. When he
got to the house, he put the mother on his back and ran to us before the
Bashi-bazouks knew what he was up to. When he took the mother, he hid
the little girl in a corner by piling sticks of wood on her. Told her to
keep quiet, and wait for him to come back.

By the time he returned to excavate the youngster, and had put her on
his back, and climbed to the roof of the house, the Bashi-bazouks were
after him. Oh, the flat Oriental roofs! Harutun skipped from one to the
other, taking amazing distances, with the child on his back. Danger is a
prod. He got to a place on some roof beside which a foreign construction
company had set up a pole in anticipation of the electric lighting
system. Down that pole slipped Harutun. He ran like mad, and restored
the youngster to her mother and her brother.

But electric lighting companies do not sandpaper their poles. Harutun's
hands were cruelly torn. His first thought when he began to think of
himself again was to come to me to get his hands dressed. He sat down on
Herbert's steamer trunk and I picked out the splinters. I washed the
wounds and bound them up with gauze and camphenol, also the palms of the
hands and the wrists. He begged me to leave the fingers out so he could
work. The boy was as happy as a bird: for it flooded into his brain what
he had done. While his hands were still trembling from the pain and
excitement, he said, "Meeses Geebons, I am not afraid to die. Dying is
as natural as borning. But before I die I want to kill a Turk--just one
Turk!" If his hands had not been so wrapped up in bandages, I could have
shaken his right one.

After I fixed up Harutun's hands I was kept quite busy for a space with
that sort of thing. A woman came and asked for some clothes for her baby
and showed us the only dress she had for him. It was covered with
blood--the blood of his murdered father. One dear little fellow, a
favorite of Herbert's, came to me with a gash in his head. His father
has been burned to death in their house and his little sister is wounded
also. I prepared the bandages for a man with a gun shot wound in his
neck. He was lying just outside my door. Herbert used to joke me about
my emergency outfit, saying that there were enough bandages in it to do
for an army, and asking how I ever expected to use sterilized catgut.
Every bit of that outfit is useful now. It has saved lives!


_Friday night._

Sky red with fire. Half the horizon is in flames, the whole Armenian
quarter is burning. Our native teachers and boys under the direction of
Henri Imer are fighting the flames valiantly. The sparks are flying
toward us, driven by a heavy wind, and eternal vigilance is required to
note every spark the moment it falls, to quench it in time. The blaze is
so brilliant that we can read by it. A telegram came from Herbert about
eleven o'clock. I signed the receipt by the light of the flames. I
cannot read it. It is a mixture of Turkish and French. What I can make
out is the hour of sending--this means that twenty-one hours ago he was
still alive.

Our condition is becoming desperate. The fire threatens us. The fury of
the mob may lead them to attack us. We are sheltering more than four
thousand refugees, a wailing, terror-stricken mass, all trying to get
out of bullet range.

We have not been able to get any word to the outside world: we realize
now that Adana is cut off and we feel sure that our husbands are in as
desperate a plight as are we. Word must go to Mersina. We have a Turkish
hand-writing teacher, a Moslem, who is faithful to us. We have sent him
to-night by horse with Harutun, the senior whose courage was thoroughly
tested this afternoon. They rode into the jaws of death perhaps, but
there is nothing else to do. Not only our lives but those of the
refugees are at stake.


_Nearly midnight._

We have prepared a few things in case we have to leave the place
suddenly. Run? Where? Somebody or other remarked grimly enough: "Fix
only what you can carry by yourself."

I came into the bedroom, and here I sit on Herbert's steamer chair. The
wood fire has gone out. The room is chilly and looks so very large. One
candle gives such a little light. The big blue rugs have been carried
off for bedding. How bare the place seems. Oh, how lonely! The
chafing-dish stands there unwashed and tilted crooked in its stand. I
have torn the bed to pieces to get a blanket for my bundle. The baby
basket all dainty and waiting is on the steamer trunk beside our bed.
Will it cradle my little one? If it is born out in the open, at least it
won't be cold, for I have taken from the basket the knitted blanket you
sent me and the package of fragrant clothing inside the tiny sheet. For
some time I have had clothes ready there for after the first bath. I
tied up the bundle with our double blanket, but it was too heavy for me.
I have rearranged it with a small blanket, tied corner-wise. In it are
diapers, a piece of tape sterilized and a pair of surgical scissors
wrapped in gauze, a length of uncut flannel, and that is all. This will
be heavy enough: for I must save Herbert's thesis, and that in its
filing case is a pretty solid weight. Precious thesis--it won him his
fellowship, and if there is any future, that thesis must go to Paris.
Poor little Mariam out there in the carriage house--how I pitied her
this evening. Was it only a few hours ago they brought her in? I envy
her now. Her baby is born.

My reason tells me that this bundle beside me is necessary: but it seems
futile. Everything has gone. One support after another has been removed.
Humanly speaking, the fact of safety is gone. Am I cold-blooded, that
the sense of it remains? Sufficiency of food? Gone. Human ties? Gone. No
sister, no brothers, no mother, no husband. Railway communications?
Gone. There is no Consul at Mersina. No protection from my own
Government. Did you ever wonder which end of your life you are living?
Kevork was right a bit ago about the future looking five minutes long.
My religion has suddenly become like a solid rock, and I have planted my
back right against it. Religion is simple, and it works.

Tell Herbert I have not cried once, that I am not afraid. Tell him
possessions mean nothing. What good can things do? There are hundreds of
gold liras in the safe. What good are they? I see where life stretches
beyond the place money can signify.

All this time I have boosted myself up by saying, "Don't break down yet,
wait for something worse." If you wait for real trouble--then you are so
busy, you have no time to worry. My religion has in one night become
vitally subjective. I know--because when I reason about it, I marvel at
my own calm. Shall it be with me as it was with Elsie Hodge, the Bryn
Mawr girl who was killed in the Boxer uprising? All day I have been
thinking about her. I am writing this and shall leave it here--in case.
I cannot write the words needed to describe the fate of women in my
condition at the hands of these fiends. Maybe some day I can tell you.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sitting on the floor in Mary Roger's room, writing with my paper on my
knee. When I left our room, I went to Herbert's wardrobe and put his
overcoat on. In one pocket I stuffed Educator crackers out of the box
you sent. Some fell on the floor and I left them there. A wee knitted
hug-me-tight went into another, and into a third pocket I put the silk
American flag Clement gave me when I was married. Miss Talbot is lying
down on a cot in our study. Being a Britisher, she is able to sleep.
Before I left her in the study, I got out the filing case containing
Herbert's thesis. I put it down by the door here in Mary's room, right
close to my feet. Then I lay down on the floor with my bundle as a
pillow.

       *       *       *       *       *

We, from our darkened room where that blessed baby Rogers is sleeping
quietly, have been looking out of the window. Two or three Turks pushed
a pump affair up in front of a house near by. "Humanity is not dead
yet!" I thought, "they are going to try to limit the fire." The water
streamed from the hose and it was kerosene. They soaked the roof. Little
fingers of flame began waving in the wind. Heavy black smoke is hanging
over the town. We can feel the hot air and smell the oil--like a
gigantic smoking lamp. Sparks fell on the windowsill just now as I stood
there. I patted them with my hands and put them out, but not before they
burned little holes in the wood.

We closed the blinds and sat down cross-legged on the floor and talked
quietly. About being widows. The boys must soon come back to us--either
that, or they are dead. We wondered which one of us was a widow. Perhaps
both.

Once Mary asked me: "Brownie, what are you praying for?" "Goodness,
Mary, I don't know what I am praying for. Guess I have just got to live
with my soul opened toward Heaven." A little later Mary spoke again,
this time cheerfully, for she had thought of something: "I know, let's
pray for the wind to change."

Sure enough, it was blowing in our direction. We went to the window
again, never thinking of danger. _You cannot consistently keep your mind
on danger to yourself._ As we looked, the flames were lying low, blue
tipped with yellow, and reaching towards us. We concentrated on a change
of the wind, and there was a change. The flames instead of lying low
were vertical, licking and swaying. Then they lay low again, this time
back on the ruined buildings. This may have been coincidence. You may
think so if you like. But I believe I saw the hand of the Lord come down
and forbid those flames to move farther. Never again will I have to be
reasoned with to believe in miracles.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] As a result of his heroism, Socrates (that is not his real name, but
never mind) has been our ward ever since. With what aid we could give
ourselves, and the help of friends to whom we have told this story,
Socrates finished his college course at Tarsus, took a year in medicine
at Beirut, and has since been studying at the Turkish Medical School in
Constantinople. Despite the difficulty of communications between Paris
and Constantinople, we have been able to follow him and help him without
interruption during the years of the war in Europe. Socrates will have
his medical degree in the spring of 1917. He is a loyal Turkish subject,
and has done splendid work in ministering to the wounded in the Balkan
War and in the present war. When the Bulgarians were attacking the
defenses of Constantinople, we loaned him to Major Doughty-Wylie, who
was at that time in charge of the British field ambulance work. Major
Doughty-Wylie recommended him for the British Red Cross medal.




LIFE AND DEATH


_Tarsus,
Saturday,
April seventeenth,
Sometime in the morning._

Mother dear:

Once that wind changed, we slept. Mary and I slept from one to three.
Baby Rogers is a good little chap. Yes, my dear, "I laid me down and
slept. I awaked, for the Lord sustained me." This is the way to learn a
text--live it.

When we got awake, it was daylight. Shouting again at the gate. I ran to
my study window that looks down into the street outside of the gate.
Excited men were pushing and struggling. Their cries were shrill. My
heart sank. Was the killing to be renewed under our eyes? Then Mary
said, "They are selling bread, and want six _metallics_ a loaf." The
business of life goes on in spite of cataclysms. Selling bread! In the
midst of life we are in death. Yes, but in the midst of death we are in
life. The family goes home to dinner after the funeral. When you are
living the cataclysm, however, your vision is not adjusted to the small
events. The matter-of-fact things are happening because they always
happen and must happen.

       *       *       *       *       *

A door outside slammed. Then the door into Mary's room opened. In came
Mother Christie, looking as though she hadn't slept. The steel-rimmed
spectacles used indifferently by herself and Daddy Christie, were pushed
away up on her forehead. She said briskly: "Another baby! a dear little
boy, and not a rag to put on him!" I went to my steamer trunk to fetch
three little flannel petticoats and two kimonos. Down jumped the
spectacles without her putting her hand on them. "No, no, my child, I
cannot take them." Before I had pressed them into her arms, she had
finished her protesting. Away she went, murmuring: "Give and spend and
the Lord will send. That's what you think." Well, there may be time for
me to make more petticoats.

They say that eight hundred houses have been burned. Many people were
still in the houses. If they showed themselves, or tried to get out by
windows or roofs, they were shot. It was death either way. We fear that
few Armenians are alive in Tarsus outside of our compound and in the
Catholic Mission nearby. The whole Armenian quarter, right up to my
windows, is burning. The bright blaze persists in many places where
there is yet much to feed upon.


_Saturday afternoon._

We did not think of breakfast. Mary had fallen asleep again after
nursing the baby. I munched biscuits in my bedroom, and then I undid on
the bed the bundle I had made up in the night. The piece of flannel
might be needed sooner than I could use it. So I stretched it out on the
mattress, and cut four flannel petticoats. With the blinds barricaded,
my only light was what filtered through the slits in the shutter of the
side window. I had to keep doing something, and I did not want to go out
to talk to any one. So I found my thread and thimble, and began to make
up the petticoats.

It may have been minutes or hours. I shall never know, for I had not
looked at the clock when I woke. Suddenly I heard cries outside, that
were taken up by the thousands in the college yard. In the mingling of
voices I caught my husband's name. "Steady now," I thought. "Is this
life or death?" Then Jeanne's golden head appeared at my door.

"Herbert's here," said Jeanne.

I hurried out into the study, and ran to the window with Mary and
Jeanne. Daddy Christie and Herbert were at the gate, surrounded by
regular soldiers. But we did not see the tall figure of Miner Rogers.
Joy and apprehension were strangely mingled. I ran first to the door
leading to the balcony. Up the steps came Daddy Christie. Herbert and
Henri were behind, evidently trying to keep people from following them.
Daddy Christie said, "Thank God, you're safe: where is Mary?" I led him
to our study. People seemed to rise up from nowhere, crowding about us.
Jeanne had instinctively taken Mary into her own room, and Daddy
Christie followed.

It may have been minutes or hours. I shall not know. After the lapse of
a few hours, it seems to me that I am writing fiction. Perhaps I make it
up as I go along. Never again shall I believe in the accuracy of
testimony given on the witness-stand about what happened in moments of
stress.

Turning so that I looked towards the double-doors, I saw Herbert
standing there. Surging thoughts went through me. One was that I must
not let these emotions reach the baby. I clinched will and muscles to
safeguard the little thing. The other thought was to get over beside
Herbert. As I made my way through the crowd toward the door, I thought:
have I died and Herbert too? What was that I suffered last night? How
can I know? Then the brain in my head told me: touch him, and if he is
warm, it is not death. I took his left hand in my right and with my
other hand touched his face. It was warm.

"Where is Miner Rogers?" "He is dead," came the answer. Herbert's free
hand reached back of him for the door-knob. He went slowly out on the
balcony, closing the door behind him, as if he did not know what he was
doing.

Herbert has no recollection of this meeting. We figure out that it is
because he had already been reassured about me, for he distinctly
remembers seeing me at the study window as he came through the street
below. The second his anxiety was relieved about me, his mind
concentrated on the terrible news he and Dr. Christie were bringing to
Mary.

I turned back toward the room to realize that Dr. Christie was telling
Mary. This was too much for me and I went into our bedroom beyond. One
sees on the stage, and reads in novels, meetings like this. Ours was not
dramatic. It was natural and human. Herbert was entering the bedroom
from the other door at the same moment, and when he saw me he asked:
"Can you make some tea? I am hungry."

I investigated my washstand to see what I could find in the way of food.
Two Turkish officers had followed Herbert into the bedroom. They were
hungry, too. I took the lid off the chafing-dish. Inside were bits of
bacon. The officers must have wondered why I laughed--Herbert, too.
Pent-up feelings were expressed in that laugh. I realized that I had
presence of mind enough not to give bacon to Moslems. The pig is an
unclean beast to non-Christians. Typewriters have been smuggled into
Turkey with perfect ease when packed in the middle of a box of hams.

One officer was the _Mutesarif_ of Namrun, where we spent a honeymoon
month last summer. He came, I suppose, to assure us of his friendliness.
You ought to see how he drank tea. Just like a Russian! And he stopped
eating Uneeda biscuits only when the tin was empty. The other officer
was an Albanian who spoke French. Herbert had picked him out in Adana to
bring the bodyguard of soldiers that he had compelled the Vali to give
him. Herbert says we can trust him. He is under Herbert's orders, with
the soldiers, as long as we need him. Herbert had no time to give me
details of these days. He went out with the officers as soon as he had
eaten, after telling me to stay in my rooms. Miss Talbot came in. Then
Jeanne and Mary. I could give them no word of what had happened in
Adana. They told me about Miner.

       *       *       *       *       *

Herbert came back soon with Daddy Christie. They had been arranging
about posting the soldiers of Herbert's guard. But they said that the
massacre was over, and no attack against us was to be anticipated. What
they had feared was the fire. If that had driven us out in the mob----
But why talk of what might have happened? What did happen was terrible
enough. Miner gone, and with him Mr. Maurer, a Hadjin missionary, shot
dead. Herbert and Lawson Chambers, a Y.M.C.A. traveling secretary, were
down in the town when the massacre started. They did not get back to the
Armenian quarter at all. They telegraphed Major Doughty-Wylie. He and
Mrs. Doughty-Wylie took the last train that went through to Adana. The
Major was shot in the street. His arm held up in front of him saved
him. Herbert says he left him this morning in bed, and with a fever.
Daddy Christie told us what had happened at the Mission and in the
Armenian quarter. Then Herbert began his story. He had just started when
there was a knock at the door. Someone wanted Dr. Christie. He went out.
In a moment he came back and called Herbert. We waited. That is woman's
sphere--waiting.

Young Miner cried in the next room. Mary went to him. What a blessing
she had that baby! I told Jeanne she had better go and stand by her.
Herbert returned--alone. He had a bit of paper in his hand. He gave it
to me, saying that it had just been brought through from Mersina. It
read: "No ships yet--massacre expected any minute. Cannot rely on
authorities." It had been brought by an Armenian who reported the
country full of Kurds. We seemed safe for the moment in Tarsus. Herbert
put it right up to me. The Albanian officer and the soldiers were under
his command. The train he had seized in Adana was still at the station.
He could try to get down the line to Mersina. His coming--with the
soldiers--might stave off the massacre for a few hours. The ships were
bound to reach Mersina soon.

I had no choice, Mother. It all seemed so simple--the only thing to do.
It is still life or death, and we don't know which. But we do know each
step as we go along. I put my hands on Herbert's shoulders to hold
myself up. For I only pretend to strength and courage. I really have
neither. And I said to him: "You are all the world to me, but I must
remember that you are only one man to the world." He answered: "Of
course. That's the way it is. I shall try my best to get back to-night."
He kissed me and went out. We would both have lost our nerve if we had
talked longer. I'm glad he hurried. I threw myself on the bed and
cried. Then I remembered Mary, and was ashamed of myself.

Just for something to do I have tried to go back over the day and put it
down for you. People have come in. When they saw I was writing they went
away. Now Mother Christie arrives to tell me that I simply must come and
eat. They have managed to get a real meal together--the first in two
days. It is way after six o'clock.


_April eighteenth._

Herbert did not go to Mersina. He came back last night--or rather I
brought him back. At supper--a meal of sorrow--Daddy Christie received a
telegram. The lines are working. That has been a mystery these past few
days. They stopped the railway, but why didn't they cut the telegraph?
And, in the midst of killing and looting and burning, we have received
telegrams delivered coolly by an employé who stepped over the dead to
get to us. The telegram was from Adana, stating that the British cruiser
_Swiftsure_ had arrived at Mersina.

I felt like a condemned man reprieved at the gallows. But had Herbert
started? A little while before he had sent a soldier up from the station
with a message saying that he found his locomotive gone, and had been
trying to get another out from Mersina by using the railway's private
wire. He might still be there. He need not undertake the trip now.
Broken viaducts in the dark--rails torn up--Kurds wildly prancing around
and shooting from their horses. I said nothing to the others at the
table. I slipped quietly out of the room, hurried up to our apartment,
put on my riding-boots and Herbert's raincoat (I am glad I am pretty
tall--only the sleeves needed a tuck), and made my way to the gate. I
had the barn lantern we use in the stable. I did not want to risk
Socrates or any of the Armenian boys. They were still killing stray
ones--especially at night. The four soldiers left remonstrated. They
could not understand me any more than I could understand them. They
tried to bar the way. But they did not dare touch me. So they decided to
resign themselves to the inevitable. Two of them came along with me.

It was a weird mile with only the lantern to light us. One soldier went
in front, finding the path, and the other was beside me. From occasional
zigzags I suspected what we were avoiding. Mercifully I could not see.
Finally we reached the station. Herbert and his officer and the
telegraph operator were in the little ticket office. Herbert was at the
end of his patience--he just couldn't get up a locomotive. When he heard
my news, he was very happy. The Albanian officer was not. He was for the
adventure. Doubted if the news was true. Why hadn't the Mersina operator
mentioned it? Just then a message went through for Adana about a special
train for the British Government. The operator told us. We knew then
that it was true.

Back we went, all of us. I did not ask Herbert any more about his
interrupted story of the days in Adana. I did not want to hear. He did
not want to tell. We found a funny story that had been sent to us for
Christmas, and of which we had read only a few chapters. We reread
those--and the rest of the book, laughing ourselves to sleep to save our
sanity.




WHY?


_Tarsus, April twenty-second._

Dearest Mother:

I have been sewing and helping care for the wounded.

Mrs. Christie gave me the first Relief money that came, a Turkish
gold-piece, worth four dollars and forty cents. With it I bought a roll
of flannel. On Jeanne's balcony I fixed a hand-run sewing machine. There
I basked in the sunshine as I worked on baby night-gowns all day Sunday.
When I tell you that I made twelve nighties in a day you know the
machine did speed-work. Our caldrons are all in use heating water so
that mothers can wash their children and their children's clothes, and
take advantage of the sunshine to dry things. Every time I finish a
nightie, it means another baby can have a bath. We have contrived
sanitary arrangements, and small trenches have been dug for drainage.
Queer the Turks never thought of turning off our water. It could have
been done easily through the surface pipes.

Dr. Peeples of the Covenanter Mission was the first doctor to come
through. He got here before his supplies. I shall never forget his face
when I showed him my table with the Red Cross kit. He appropriated the
medicine-case and some bandages and marched off with them. Dr. Peeples
and I dressed wounds. But Mother Christie stopped that on account of "my
condition." Afterwards we compromised. I installed a table inside my
door and worked away preparing medicines and dressings. I handed these
out to the doctor on a tray, curving my wrist around the door-jamb and
so was spared the pain of seeing the patients. I do not take stock in
the popular notion that I might "mark the child." Only the pleasant
things that happen to me can touch that child.

The arrival of the British battleship _Swiftsure_ has saved Mersina.
Yesterday the commander went to Adana by special train. On his return he
stopped at Tarsus and invited Dr. Christie and Herbert to accompany him
to Mersina. They accepted with alacrity. Early this morning Herbert
boarded the _Swiftsure_ and had a chat with the captain. As a result,
the captain allowed six officers to come to Tarsus with Herbert by
special train to-day. We had them for lunch and took them all over the
city, showing them the work of the mob. When the refugee children saw
these officers arrive, the poor kiddies were terrified. Many ran and
hid, and the wee ones found their mothers as quickly as possible. The
officers' uniforms were the cause, according to the kiddies' own words.
How is that for proof that Turkish soldiery helped in the massacring!

We believe that one hundred were killed in Tarsus and four hundred in
villages nearby. Adana's murders are in the thousands. The killing of
Miner brings the tragedy right into our mission family. Mary is
supernaturally calm and brave. Not only does she do everything for her
baby, but she is in the midst of all the relief work.

While Herbert was in Mersina, Mrs. Dodds of the Covenanter Mission urged
him to take me there so as to get me away from the danger of contracting
some disease. She also urged that the discomfort of our now crowded
quarters at Tarsus was not good for me. We have nearly five thousand
refugees on the college grounds. If railroad communication is
reestablished before my baby comes, we are going to accept the
invitation of Mrs. Dodds. I do not know from day to day and cannot plan.

Mother, if I am not ready for the skeptics, and for those who smile and
jeer, yes, jeer is the word, at missionaries! The stick-in-the-muds who
thought we came all this long way because we wanted adventure must be
wagging their narrow little heads and wagering that we are getting more
than we bargained for. I am a great believer in letting every one have
his point of view. But generally one finds that the people who boast
that they are liberal and broad-minded are the most bigoted people on
earth. They assert their point of view, but are unwilling to admit
another's right to his. One does not have to believe in missions or want
to be a missionary. But one does not have to ridicule missionary effort
and missionaries, either. Among the missionaries here, women as well as
men, not a single one has shown the white feather. Quite the contrary, I
doubt if any other score of Americans in the United States would have
upheld better the glorious traditions of our race for coolness,
resourcefulness, and ability to grapple suddenly with a crisis. The
American women here are made of the same stuff as my several times
great-grandmother in Lebanon Valley, who carried the gun around the
room together with the broom as she did her sweeping.

I can never think of the Armenians without a stirring of the heart in
affection and admiration. How can Americans resist the call to help
people who have the courage to die for their faith? One has to be
brought to their level of suffering, to be put into the situation in
which they have lived during centuries of Turkish oppression, to
understand them. Mother, they are heroes--these Armenians, children and
grand-children of heroes. It is nothing spectacular that they have done,
except in periods of massacre like this. But all along _they have kept
the faith_, they have preserved their distinct nationality, when an easy
path lay before them, were they willing to turn from Christ to Mohammed.
I see now so vividly what they have been born to, what they grow up from
early childhood fearing. Is not the greatest heroism in the world the
silent endurance of oppression that cannot be remedied, the bending of
the neck to the yoke when there is no other way, the living along
normally under the shadow of a constant and justified fear of death and
worse?

What saved the Tarsians the other night? Any dread of international
complications? Any respect for our Government? What do the Kurds know
about us? Nothing. Last summer when we were camping far up in the Taurus
mountains above the timber-line, a fellow of the type who has been doing
the dirty work for the party in power at Stambul, came along to talk
with us. We had chopped down a scrub pine-tree to build a fire and were
sitting around the fire after supper. We were eating walnuts. I offered
him some. With them I gave salt. He took both walnuts and salt, touched
them to his forehead by way of thanks, and began to eat. Socrates
expressed satisfaction that the man had done this--said we could be
surer now that he would not turn fierce dogs loose the next day, when we
broke camp. In talking to the man, I asked him what he knew about my
country. He was a shepherd, and had never seen a town bigger than
Tarsus. He replied, "There are a great many Americans in America, at
least five thousand, all very rich and all very kind."

What saved the Tarsians? St. Paul's College. Those people have had the
vision held up before them, and some of its light must have got into
their dark hearts. I keep thinking of the way Jesus forgave people
because they just didn't know what they were doing. I do not believe for
a minute that it was the American flag that saved the Christian
population of this town. The Stars and Stripes mean nothing to them. It
is the way Daddy and Mother Christie have lived before these Turks all
these years that did it.

Listen to this, and you will see what I mean. Three hundred refugees owe
their lives directly to one act of thoughtful kindness. Sometime before
the massacre, Dr. Christie heard that the only son of a village Sheik
had died. He got on his horse and went straight out to comfort the old
father. The news came late in the day, so that Daddy Christie was
obliged to make the trip in the night. I have seen the Sheik several
times myself. He came one day and invited Herbert and me to go hunting
with him. He is a superb specimen. In the midst of the heat and hatred
of last Friday, the Sheik appeared with some three hundred Armenians.
The order to massacre had come, "and a massacre is good hunting, you
know," he blandly remarked. "As I was about to go forth, I reflected
that the people here were Dr. Christie's friends. Cannot see why you
like them," he added, "but seeing you do, here they are." The old man,
of course, is a Moslem. He told us he found some of those he brought in
hiding in the swamps, not far from his home, "lying in the water, with
just their noses sticking out to breathe," he laughingly explained.




ABDUL HAMID'S LAST DAY


_Mersina,
April twenty-fifth._

Mother dear:

I wish you knew right now that we are at the Dodds in Mersina. It would
relieve your mind of anxiety that must be weighing on you. But we cannot
send an optimistic, reassuring cablegram. In the first place it would
not be true. Then no message must go out whose chance publication in the
newspapers would tend to make the world believe that danger here is
passed. The Powers might relax what diplomatic pressure they are
exercising at Constantinople--might even recall warships or stop others
that we hear are coming. Herbert is getting out the news by smuggling to
Cyprus. He feels the responsibility of every word that is telegraphed.
So we send you no message at all. There is still fear of a second and a
worse outbreak. The massacre is not over yet.

Early yesterday morning we learned that a train would go down the line
to Mersina at the usual hour. I packed what baby things I had left, and
a steamer trunk with a few of our clothes. Miss Talbot said she was
ready. My Armenian physician saw that the chance was excellent to get to
the coast in our company. He had a valid reason for accompanying me. We
took his whole family under our wing. His brother, a boy just turning
into the twenties, has lost his mind--we hope only temporarily--as a
result of the strain we have been under. The boy got it in his head that
I alone could save him. He has been camping outside our door, and
fumbling with our shutters at night. My Sub-Freshmen kept an eye on him,
but I have had to humor him. As he is my physician's brother, and there
has been no way of secluding him, I have had to do this. The boy
insisted on sitting in my compartment on the journey yesterday. He kept
me in sight. Once arrived in Mersina, they were able to take him away to
a friend's house.

We reached Mersina in time for lunch, where Mrs. Dodds--the soul of
kindness and solicitude--had kept rooms for us in her apartment. Mrs.
Dodds' little daughter, Mary, is a wonderful child--just like her mother
in wanting to be constantly doing things for other people. The
atmosphere of this home is so sweet and wholesome that it makes me proud
of my Covenanter ancestry and wonder if certain religious beliefs I have
always thought were narrow and absurd have not their place and their
reason. I asked Herbert about Covenanters last night, and found that he
knew less than I did. For a parson just out of Princeton Seminary, my
husband is astonishingly ignorant of theology. He doesn't seem to know
or care any more about doctrines than I do. Until last night, we had
never talked about theology, and then the conversation languished after
a few sentences.

Just after lunch two Turkish transports appeared off Mersina. They came
inside the line of warships, and began to disembark troops in the barges
that went out immediately to greet them. From the windows of the Dodds'
living-room we could see the barges returning laden with soldiers. My
eyes would not shut tight enough to dim the flash of the sunshine on the
waves and on the blood-red fezzes. Herbert declared that he must go down
to the _scala_ to see them land. I did not want to prevent him, for I
felt just as he did. Why couldn't I go too? It didn't seem to be "just
the thing for one in my condition," but you know, Mother, that I can't
live without exercise, and I have been impressing now for nearly a year
upon Herbert two things: that I need out-of-doors as much as a fish
needs water; and that I can go anywhere and do anything he does. I
shall never let him get the idea into his head that I am barred from
phases of his life just because I am a woman! Not a bit of it! Herbert
had to take his wife along.

A disreputable looking lot they were, wretchedly clad and shod, and
topped off with mussy, faded fezzes. We were told that they had come
from Beirut to restore order in Cilicia. They had taken part in the
Macedonian movement last summer, and were regiments whose officers
adhered to the "Young Turk" movement, and could be relied upon to check
any attempt to renew the massacres. There was much effervescence in the
town. Groups were talking excitedly. Herbert and I were crazy for news.
The last we heard was that Mahmud Shevket Pasha's army was moving on
Constantinople. The regiments lined the main street on the way to the
railway station. Something was going on--we could not tell what.
Suddenly they cheered--all together. The cheering was taken up by the
crowd. The band began to play. The regiments wheeled from attention,
and continued their march.

We went into a Greek shop. "What does all this mean?" we asked. The
proprietor eyed us in astonishment. "Don't you understand?" he answered.
"Abdul Hamid has been deposed, and his imprisoned brother proclaimed
sultan. The soldiers are cheering for Mohammed V. The authorities here
kept back the news. They didn't want to make the announcement until the
troops unquestionably loyal to the New Régime were landed."

There was much anxiety during the rest of the afternoon. The Christians
were nervous, Greeks and Syrians as well as Armenians. The British have
landed a few marines, and established a wig-wag station on top of a
house near us. People began to come for refuge to the American mission
at nightfall.

We have rumors of a second massacre at Adana this morning.




THE YOUNG TURKS AND THE TOY FLEET


_Mersina,
April twenty-ninth._

Dear Mother:

I suppose that baby doesn't come because I'm too busy and the time is
not propitious. There are more important things to think about and to
do. Sounds unmaternal and abnormal, doesn't it? But just like other
girls I had my dreams of how these days of waiting would be. And up to
several weeks ago I plied the needle vigorously, and thought a lot about
how many of each wee garment would be necessary, and what sort of
blanket would wash best. I hesitated a long time before deciding which
dress was the prettiest for IT to be baptized in. Now I don't know how
many garments I have. I haven't even made a complete inventory of what
we brought from Tarsus. We are too engrossed in the duties and problems
that each day brings forth to think at all about the morrow. Honestly,
Mother, during the four days we have been in Mersina, maternity hasn't
had much of a place in my mind--I mean, of course, my own maternity.
Heaven knows we have the babies coming in abundance all the time around
us, and there is everything to be done for them.

I wrote you of the landing of the Turkish regiments from Beirut on the
day we learned of Abdul Hamid's deposition. They went to Adana the same
day, and started that night a second massacre more terrible than the
first. The Armenians had given up their arms. On the advice of the
foreign naval officers--trusting in the warships here at Mersina--they
accepted the assurance of the Government that the "rioting" was over. So
they were defenseless when the Young Turk regiments came. The butchery
was easier. I spare you details. I wish to God I could have spared them
to myself. Most of our Adana friends who escaped the first massacre must
have been killed since last Saturday. The few who have reached Mersina
are like the messengers that came to Job. Adana is still hell. The
soldiers set fire to the French Mission buildings, and are going each
night after other foreign property. The American Girls' Boarding School
was evacuated. The teachers and some girls who were saved arrived
yesterday, and are with us. One of our American teachers has typhoid,
and reached us on a stretcher.

Herbert brought me here from Tarsus to get away from the contagion that
might come from the crowding of refugees in our compound. It is now
worse here than it was in Tarsus. And this morning word came to us that
we must be ready at any moment to move to the French Consulate. The
captains of the warships had a meeting last night, and decided to
defend the French and German consulates in case of trouble. They
notified the local authorities that if killing began in Mersina three
hundred German, French and British sailors would be landed with
machine-guns to _protect foreigners_. The idea is to gather the
foreigners together, and let the Armenians and other native Christians
shift for themselves. Of course we could not enter into any such scheme
as that. The Dodds would under no circumstances desert those who have
taken refuge with them. Anyway, we Americans are invited only by
courtesy. Ships of the other Great Powers are here. American ships are
supposed to be en route. But we have not seen them yet. We wonder if the
new Administration is going to continue the supine policy of Mr.
Roosevelt, who always refused to do anything for Americans and American
interests in this part of the world. I used to think that missionaries
looked to Washington for help and protection. Now I know that the
United States is known in Turkey only by the missionaries. If our flag
has any prestige or honor, it is due to men like Daddy Christie, and not
to the Embassy in Constantinople or the few Consuls scattered here and
there.

At the station, soldiers are turning back the Armenians who have managed
to slip into trains at Adana and Tarsus. From a long distance one can
see, when riding in the train, the warships in the harbor, flying the
flags of the "protecting" Powers, whose obligation to make secure life
and liberty for Armenians was solemnly entered into by the Treaty of
Berlin. One does not expect much of Russia: the treaty was imposed upon
her. But England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy--they all have
warships at Mersina. Armenian refugees, fleeing from the massacre at
Adana, which occurred right under the nose of the English, French,
Germans, Austrians and Italians, see these warships as the train draws
into Mersina station. Turkish soldiers, of the same regiments who
massacred them three days ago, bar the way. Back they must go to death.

Herbert and I meet the trains. We look for the chance to smuggle friends
through. We got H---- B---- through yesterday. The Swiss stationmaster,
Monsieur B----, remonstrated hotly with Herbert about allowing me to
come to the station. "It is no place for your wife," he declared. "There
might be bloodshed any minute, if a refugee resists." But I held my
ground. I knew H---- B---- was going to try to get on this train. He had
money to bribe with, and could travel first-class. Mother, I managed to
slip into the first-class coach just as the train stopped, and came out
the other end leaning heavily on H---- B----'s arm. We left the station
through the waiting-room, and none said a word or stopped us. H----
B---- was safe. Herbert couldn't have done it. The Turks, for all their
cruelty, have a curious chivalry upon which I banked. I was not
mistaken. H---- B---- kept my arm all the way to the Dodds. The poor boy
is in agony. He has just heard that his father, a wealthy merchant of
Alexandretta, was killed, and his mother and sister--well, I'll leave it
to you to guess.

But this adventure is nothing to one I had late in the afternoon of the
twenty-seventh. Herbert had gone for news to the wigwagging station the
British have established on a villa just in front of Major
Doughty-Wylie's. I thought there might still be some oranges in the
bazaar. It was an excuse to walk. I cannot stay indoors--no matter what
happens. It wasn't far, anyhow. Just a little way down our street. As I
was returning, I heard "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey," coming from
somewhere. It struck me as curious. I stopped. The whistling continued
staccato and insistent. It came from a narrow side street. I waited
until the patrol had passed along, and then whistled in turn, "Every
night the papers say," and stopped. Immediately it was taken up:
"There's a robbery in the park." I decided to investigate. Several
houses along, I heard a whisper, "Mrs. Gibbons." Under the stoop was an
American Armenian, whom I had met during the winter in Adana. He had
been waiting for some one he knew to pass on the main street. He was in
rags--had worked his way overland somehow from Adana. He would be
arrested if he tried to make the Mission. Patrols were passing
constantly. I told him to wait where he was. I went back to the Dodds,
put on Herbert's raincoat, stuffed a cap in the pocket, and returned to
the side street. The Armenian refugee could cover himself completely in
the coat. I told him to pull the cap well down over his ears. He walked
back with me. It was no trouble at all. The young man has money, and an
American passport. The latter is no good to him. As he can pay, we think
it possible to smuggle him somehow aboard a ship.[5]

Almost all who have reached Mersina, however, are women and children.
For the men are killed on sight. The refugees in the Dodds' compound are
of my sex. They are husbandless, fatherless, sonless. Now we know that
the only difference between Young and Old Turks is that the Young Turks
are more energetic and thorough in their massacring. None would succeed
in escaping the dragnet were it not for the fact that Armenians look and
dress--and many of them speak--just like Turks. Refugees are not easily
detected.

My doctor has gone. The day after we reached Mersina, he had a chance to
get passage with his family to Cyprus. I urged him to go. I had Miss
Talbot, and I could not have on my mind the responsibility of his
remaining just to take care of me. I am glad he left when the going was
good. Now it is practically impossible. The _scala_, from which the
little boats go out to the ships, is carefully guarded. The Young Turks
are taking "strict measures" to put down "the rebellion"! Armenians who
try to escape from the Adana butcher's pen are hauled before the
court-martial. According to the Turkish reasoning, attempting to avoid
death is proof of an Armenian's guilt.

As I write these awful things--a few weeks ago I should have called them
incredible things--I see from my window the half-moon of warships a mile
out to sea. They ride quietly at anchor. Launches are all the time
plying to and fro between ships and shore. That is the extent of their
activity.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] This was afterwards done, but I was unfortunately unable to have a
part in it. I think I know one Armenian who believes the U.S.A. is the
place to stay forever!




A NEW LIFE


_Mersina,
May twelfth._

Grandmother dear:

I think it was old Thales (I'm nearer the Greek philosophers out here
than I ever was at college) who held that the earth was nothing but
certain elements in a state of constant change. Everything is changing
all the time. And the inhabitants of the earth have the same chance and
luck as the earth, and follow the same law. It is well expressed from
the standpoint of the moment of time in which one is placed by the
favorite Turkish proverb: "This also shall pass!" Typically Turkish,
that proverb: for the Turk never interprets any event, never tackles the
solution of any problem, except in terms of himself and the present.
Yesterday is like to-morrow. It is a waste of time to worry over either.
In crises Turkish philosophy is excellent. It helps a lot to create
nerve and maintain fortitude if only you can keep saying to yourself
with conviction: "This also shall pass!"

Scrappie is beside me as I write, in the reed basket we bought from the
Fellahin. I am propped just high enough on the pillows to keep my eye on
her. I watch her all the time to see if she is really breathing. I have
heard of wives making husbands get up in the night to see if baby was
breathing, and scoffed at the folly of it. But I'm going to confess to
you that I've had two panics. Each time I assured Herbert that this
happens only with first babies, but that doesn't seem to mollify him.
There never was such a fellow for sleeping as Herbert. However, wouldn't
it be awful if the baby's covers got up over her head? You understand
how I feel, don't you?

_Miette_, "bread-crumb," is the name Jeanne Imer gave Christine in
prospect. It also means a little scrap of anything: so Herbert and I
translated it into Scrappie. The name had the advantage of being
non-committal on sex. So Scrappie she is to us. Perhaps you will give
her another pet name in Paris. But we rather like ours--I never heard of
another kiddie having it.

The birth of your grandchild was not a whit less dramatic than the
events preceding. There was a "situation" right up to the last. I wrote
you about the plan to gather foreigners in two defended consulates if
there was a new massacre at Mersina. The massacre didn't come off. We
shouldn't have gone anyway. Miss Talbot was as game as we were to stay
on with the Dodds. The improvised hospitals in Adana called for all
available medical men. The ship surgeons, with their pharmacists, all
went to Adana. The Mersina mission doctor was working among our Tarsus
wounded. I was altogether doctorless. At daybreak of Scrappie's
birthday, Mr. Dodds swept the horizon of the sea with his telescope. We
were expecting every day relief ships, with Red Cross units, from
Beirut. A speck developed into a steamer. Without waiting to ascertain
more, Mr. Dodds threw himself into his rowboat. Two husky servants of
the mission were at the oars.

It was lucky Mr. Dodds did not hesitate longer. But he is not that sort.
It was a ship from Beirut, and there was an American surgeon aboard.
Doctor Dorman walked into my room just in time.

Everybody in the Mission feels that the placid little baby, with her
great blue eyes, is the symbol of hope. Scrappie knows nothing of what
the wicked world is doing and how all around her are dying and
suffering. She is unadulterated joy. Miss Talbot tried her best, but
there were no drawn blinds and pale wan mother. Folks came in to offer
congratulations, and make a fuss. I was glad they did. The refugees in
the compound celebrated by gathering on a roof below and singing. Some
were sorry for us, because it was not a boy, but, after all, if Madama
wanted a girl--how queer of Americans to be glad to have daughters!

No one around the Mission had time to celebrate with Herbert, and there
was nothing anyway to drink the baby's health in. Herbert went out to
send telegrams to the Doughty-Wylies and the Christies, and the
cablegram to the Estes. He says he kept saying to himself as he went
down the street, "I'm a father!" It's like men to be proud and take all
the credit, which just now I think belongs to me. Herbert went to the
British wigwag station, but the sailors couldn't leave their post. So he
had to order a bottle of beer at Flutey's all alone. Just then a German
lieutenant drifted in. Herbert told him the good news, although he had
never seen him before, and he drank the toast as sympathetically as a
young bachelor could.[6]

On the morning of Scrappie's advent, after a hurried breakfast, my
doctor rushed for the Adana train. I haven't seen him since. Nor any
other doctor. Miss Talbot is superb. I couldn't have better care. Mrs.
Dodds cooks for me herself, and serves my meals. She thinks Miss Talbot
is over-careful in prescribing my diet. When Mrs. Dodds brings
soft-boiled eggs, she whispers: "Eat half of this quickly. Miss Talbot
thinks there is only one, but I'd like to see any one go hungry in Belle
Dodds' house!" Until to-day, when I am first able to write you, they
kept pillows out of my reach--books, too. Herbert is too busy to be with
me. He has had to go to Tarsus and twice to Adana. Two days after
Scrappie came, the Major telegraphed for him to come to take the
witness-stand before the court-martial. Lawson Chambers had gone on
relief work in the interior, and Herbert was the only other foreigner
who saw the beginning of the massacre. It was a risky business, but I
have got used to letting him go. The tragedy is too great for
individuals to count--or to think of themselves.

With Herbert away, and Scrappie sleeping most of the time, and no books,
all I could do was to sing. I've gone over all my favorite songs--and
many that weren't favorites have been hummed through to the end. I
refused to be deterred by the fact that I am under a roof where singing
is mostly confined to the metrical version of the Psalms. Mr. Dodds,
however, gets away bravely from psalms when he comes to sit beside me of
an evening. He loves to hold Scrappie, and sing to her, "Shut Down the
Curtains of Your Sweet Blue Eyes." Herbert delights her with
"Macnamara's Band."

I have had other visitors in this first week. Most welcome was the
chaplain of the British cruiser _Swiftsure_, of whom we had seen
something before Scrappie arrived. (Note how I date everything by
Scrappie?) Scrappie was about fifty hours old when he turned up with a
bottle of old brandy under his arm. I was glad to have his call--and the
bottle--just as Herbert was going off once more. And with my door
open--it could not be shut all the time--I could hear those dreadful
telegrams being read that kept coming from Kessab, Dortyol, Hadjin and
other towns of our _vilayet_ and of Northern Syria. Everywhere it was
the same story.

Yesterday a second American battle cruiser arrived. It was the
_Montana_. The _North Carolina_ came in several days ago. The first
officer to land from the _Montana_ was Lieutenant-Commander Beach. When
he came to the Mission to call, I asked Miss Talbot to bring him in. He
stayed some time, and would have cheered me up a lot had he not
mentioned that Lili Neumann was dead. He did not know, of course, what
Lili was to me, and I managed to say nothing. Under other circumstances
it would have been a bad shock, but just now nothing seems to go too
deep. However, my face must have told him I was suffering, for he looked
down so kindly, and asked if there was anything I wanted. "Because, by
Jove! you can have the ship," he declared. I told him I hadn't seen ice
for ten months. "Just the thing," he exclaimed. A few hours later,
sailors brought a huge rectangle of the most delicious thing in the
world. There was also a bottle of Bols curaçao, and a sweet note. People
are good.

Mr. Dodds and Mr. Wilson and Herbert got to work on the ice with
hatchets. Mrs. Dodds made ice-cream last night and again for lunch
to-day.

I must stop this letter, which has been written largely on the
inspiration of that ice-cream. Miss Talbot has scolded me twice, and
she hasn't seen other times that I got the paper and pencil under the
mattress too soon for her.

I cannot leave it, though, without telling you of another invaluable
helper. The very day of Scrappie's arrival, a wee, sawed-off Armenian
woman came in. I heard somebody say "Sh," but she started in her
toothless Jabberwocky. Miss Talbot tried the effect of cool, insistent
English, but she couldn't put Dudu Hanum out. For Dudu Hanum squatted
down on the floor, and I snickered. Miss T. thought I was asleep. She
went to get Mrs. Dodds to interpret. In the meantime, Dudu Hanum
addressed me. She rolled up her sleeves and held her arms out and then
up over her head the way you do when you want to stop hiccoughs. All the
while she talked volubly. It wasn't Turkish. I had learned some of that.
As it didn't sound like a gang of wreckers pulling down a house, it
wasn't Arabic. Must be Armenian. I recognized Dudu Hanum as the sister
of the agent who gets our things out of the custom-house. Finally we
learned what it was all about. Dudu Hanum was saying: "I have no gift to
give you, but I have these two hands. Let me do your washing. I shall
wash all your things and all of the baby's." The blessed old thing comes
early every morning. What garments Mrs. Dodds allows to escape from her
own capable hands, Dudu Hanum washes, and hangs them to dry upon the
sun-baked roof.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] A year later I told this story in a Berlin salon. One of the guests
at tea, Countess ----, exclaimed, "Why that boy was my son. He wrote me
about it at the time."




OFF TO EGYPT


_May twenty-seventh._

Granny Dear:

"The force of example" was a dry old phrase to me not longer than
twenty-one days ago. But since Scrappie's coming has moved the
generations in our family back one whole cog, I have been thinking about
that phrase as something vital. If I continue to call you "Mother,"
Scrappie will call you that. Must I also begin now to call Herbert
"father"--move him back a generation, too?

I feel as if I had _always_ had Scrappie. We are not yet at the end of
May. But April seems ages ago. The mail from America is just coming with
stories of the massacres, and what I read seems unreal. Most of it is.
The stories about us are absurd. We never "fled to the coast." We sent
but one cablegram to Philadelphia, and none at all to Hartford. That
cablegram contained only the single word "safe" to relieve your anxiety.
I see now what that anxiety must have been. So you read that Tarsus was
wiped off the map? It would have been--had not the wind changed that
night.

Since I have been quietly resting, stretched out on my back, I have
decided to put April, 1909, out of my life. Herbert and I do not want to
share each other's memories. We have not told each other all we have
seen--nor even all we felt and all we did. I cannot get Herbert's full
story from him. He does not ask for mine.

Of course, we cannot escape the result of the events we have lived. Just
as Herbert's hair has become so white, there must be something inside of
us changed, too. Time alone will tell that. Only one thing we do realize
right now,--our responsibility to the Armenians. We must work in Egypt,
in France, in Germany, in England--and, perhaps later, in America--to
let the world know how the Armenians have suffered and what their lot
must always be under Turkish rule. We see too--oh, so clearly--how
heartless and cynical the diplomats of Europe are. They are the cause,
as much as the Turks, of the massacres. Not the foreign policy of Russia
or Germany alone. As far as the Near East goes, the Great Powers are
equally guilty. No distinction can be drawn between them. In England, in
Germany and in France, people do not care--because these horrible things
are done so far away. They are indifferent to their own solemn treaty
obligations. They are ignorant of the cruelty and wickedness of the
selfish policy pursued by the men to whom they entrust their foreign
affairs. I see blood when I think of what is called "European
diplomacy"--for blood is there, blood shed before your eyes.

We are looking forward eagerly to having you join us in France next
month. We shall not talk of the massacres, to you or to any one, except
so much as is necessary to help the Armenian Relief Fund and to show the
wickedness and faithlessness of the diplomacy of the Powers in Turkey.
Herbert and I have been saved, and we have our blessed baby. Our life is
ahead of us--we are glad to have it ahead--and we want to spend our time
and energy in meeting new duties, in solving new problems. Perhaps that
is the spirit of youth. But then we are young, and what interests us is
our baby's generation. The new life dates from May 5th, when she came to
us.

Dear, dear, you would never guess from this long letter I am writing
what is going to happen this afternoon. I am able to write only because
of the stern orders I got from the boss this morning. He has immobilized
me. I am lazily resting in bed just as if I hadn't been up yet at all.
My bed is an island, entirely surrounded by luggage. Suitcases are
nearest me. Trunks and steamer bundle are by the door. A Russian steamer
is due to leave this evening. Herbert has taken passage on her as far as
Beirut. There we shall catch the Italian leaving Saturday, or perhaps
the Messageries _Portugal_, scheduled for Monday. Fancy going to Egypt
to get cool in summer! Most people go there to get warm in winter.

Our year is finished. We meant to go early in June, anyway. It is a good
thing I am feeling so well, and got my strength back so quickly. The
heat is coming on, and we fear quarantine at Beirut and Port Said, if an
epidemic breaks out here. This is an urgent reason for our going
immediately. Herbert turned over night from a college professor to a
newspaper man. He has managed to send dispatches by little boats to
Cyprus and they have gone uncensored to Paris. But now he has done all
that needs to be done here in the way of getting news out. Much good has
been accomplished by publicity. If you didn't have me here to think
about when you opened your newspaper at the breakfast table, you would
just read headlines, and say, "the Armenians are in trouble again." By
"you" I mean the average person at home. Now what Herbert and I must do
is to tell our story and give our testimony as convincingly as we can,
and then put it where the most people can see it. We detest the
advertisement from a personal standpoint, but cannot consider that now.


_S.S. "Assouan"
Off the Cilician Coast,
Friday night,
May twenty-seventh._

It wasn't a Russian steamer after all, but an old tub of a Khedivial. It
is a palace to us, however, and the British flag looks good to
Americans.

The last thing that happened to us in Turkey was to have Scrappie
christened. Dr. Christie and Mother Christie came down to say good-by,
and Socrates with them. The new American Consul had just arrived from
Patras. (He turned out to be a college classmate of Herbert's!) A
christening party was improvised for our farewell. So Scrappie got her
name, Christine Este, and the Consul gave a combination birth and
baptismal certificate, with the Eagle stamped upon it. I wore my blue
dimity dress. Herbert put a big rocking-chair behind me, so that I could
flop down in it the first minute I felt tired. Scrappie wore the
prettiest of her long dresses, and under her chin was tucked an Indian
embroidered handkerchief that Mrs. Doughty-Wylie had long ago given me
against the christening day.

It was an odd gathering, missionaries, English and American naval
officers, sailors from the warships, Armenian friends, some of our boys,
including Socrates, and others I did not know who came to help eat the
cake and drink the sherbet. In the Orient, one's door is open to all
the world at a feast. I got nervous only when they wanted to kiss the
baby. Scrappie howled, and I was glad of the excuse to withdraw her.

When I went downstairs to the carriage, one of the officers of the
_North Carolina_ carried my bag, and drove me to the _scala_. Mother
Christie held Scrappie. The _North Carolina's_ launch was waiting. Out
we went to the great ship, where I was to spend the afternoon. The
Christies and others were coming later to say good-by. Herbert was to
spend the afternoon rounding up the baggage with the help of Socrates,
and row it out to the _Assouan_. A London war correspondent had just
arrived, too--the first of the newspaper men--and Herbert had to pilot
him around.

The sky-line of Mersina, broken by the minarets, gleamed white in the
sunshine. I did not dare to think too hard about what I was leaving. My
mind flew back to the day I left Tarsus, how the Armenian women pressed
my hands, touched my dress as I passed, and made me promise to come
back. I cheered up by looking at the American flag waving from the stern
of the launch. Only a year ago, and that was the _natural_ sight. I did
not know that Tarsus and Mersina existed. Turkey was something I thought
would forever be vague. And now--it has become a part of my life. All
right to talk about banishing memories. But could we? The sunshine of
the East they say casts its spell forever over those who have lived in
it. Would we ever come back?

We steamed for a mile straight out to sea. The officers told me I was in
command, and jollied along as if I were not a matron with a baby. One
ensign, a Southerner, of course, called me "Miss" with that inimitable
drawl. He was just the kind who would have made it "sweetheart" in an
hour. I felt a bit shaky when the launch drew up beside the gleaming
white cruiser. As we reached the ladder and then fell away, I imagined
my baby falling into the water. First touch of maternal worry,
which I suppose I shall now have for the rest of my life. The
lieutenant-commander took the baby. Two ensigns carried me up. Once on
that ship I was at home.

The captain was waiting to greet the youngest girl who had ever been
entertained on the _North Carolina_. Scrappie was fixed up in an
officer's bunk, where I knew she would sleep just as placidly as ashore
until it was time for her next meal. I was invited into the wardroom. A
leather arm-chair and--I ought to write a cup of tea, but it
wasn't--awaited me. The officers, of course, knew lots of my friends. My
mind went waltzing back to dancing days in the Armory and to my birthday
dinners at the old Bellevue after Army-Navy games. I was living in the
anti-Herbert period, when parsons and missionaries and Turkey and babies
did not claim me.

There was a soft knock at the steel door that stood ajar. A big negro
put in his head, and announced: "Missus, dat chile am cryin'."

I hurried to my responsibility. Beside the bunk, looking down at the
tiny mite, stood a coon in white linen. "Missus," he said, "de cap'n
tole me to keep mah eye on dis li'l baby, an' not even let a fly walk
'cross dat chile's face. I wants yoh t' know, lady, dem's de bes' awdahs
dis coon's had sence he lef' home. But I couldn't stop it cryin' jes'
now."

As I picked up Scrappie, whose great blue eyes shelter no shadow of the
hell that came so near, I realized, with a wave of happiness
overwhelming me, that I alone could quiet her.

Late in the afternoon Herbert came with Miss Talbot and the Dodds and
Christies. They accompanied us to the _Assouan_ in the launch. It was
hard to say good-by to the women who had been nearest during the days of
danger and suffering. Mother Christie held Scrappie to the last moment.
Miss Talbot, my faithful nurse, who had stuck by me for seven weeks
with unwavering devotion when there was so much larger and so much more
tempting a field in nursing the wounded--what could I say to her? Jeanne
Imer and Mary Rogers had been with me constantly. I expected to see them
soon again in Europe. But Mrs. Dodds, who had taken me in and done for
me as if I were one of her own family--was I just to say "Thank you!"? I
said to Mrs. Dodds: "What can I ever do for you to--to--" She gently
interrupted. "You don't know life, dear, if you think you can do
anything for me. You will probably never see me again. If you ever meet
a woman having a baby under difficult circumstances--just help her!"

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41861 ***