The Red Rugs of Tarsus Part 2

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 ma.s.s 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.ms 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 a.s.sumption 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. G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.p 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 cla.s.s, 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 ba.s.sinette Grandma gave me when I was born. Some nosey old parishioner would be tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 bra.s.s 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 coa.r.s.e 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 b.u.t.tonholes. One is worked in green and the other red. A native mother would hitch these b.u.t.tonholes 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 _pique_. 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 b.u.t.ter 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 coa.r.s.e ground wheat. We have fresh figs stewed or raw and honeysweet, and oh, the oranges. I am guilty of one "notion." I eat quant.i.ties 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._