The Red Rugs of Tarsus Part 1

The Red Rugs of Tarsus.

by Helen Davenport Gibbons.

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 pa.s.sed 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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.

Ma.s.sacres 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 ma.s.sacres 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 wars.h.i.+ps 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 Ch.e.l.labi[1] sent me back to Paris, to find an apartment near the Bibliotheque 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 Ch.e.l.labi 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 ma.n.u.scripts in the Bibliotheque. 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 Ch.e.l.labi 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 sejour_ and pa.s.sports 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 ma.s.sacres 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] "Ch.e.l.labi"--Turkish for "master of the house."

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-b.u.t.ter 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 Sat.u.r.day since. When we take a horseback ride Sat.u.r.day 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 s.p.a.ce 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 j.a.panned 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-cla.s.s 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 st.i.tches 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses.

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-cla.s.s Mohammedans generally get gloriously drunk in towns on this day. Occidental Turkophiles write of and praise Moslems as being the original White Ribb.o.n.e.rs. Perhaps many are, but not town Turks, who consume quant.i.ties of _raki_, the strongest fire-water man ever invented. During this Bairam the Armenians were fearing a ma.s.sacre. The Const.i.tution has lifted the prohibition of owning firearms. We hear the Armenians have been buying in large quant.i.ties. We did not ourselves antic.i.p.ate 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-sh.o.r.e, 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 cla.s.ses 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.