A half-hour later, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I told him I had formed the highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said: “This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we forsake our country when it needs us?”

I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into Papa Eftim’s head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.

The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great role. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that he was one of Papa Eftim’s assistants in the Turkish Orthodox Church. I looked him over slowly from his huge feet all the way up to his uncut Orthodox beard and the Turkish kalpak stuck on top of it, while he watched me with the black ox-like eyes of a people whom no man has ever long succeeded in budging unless they were willing to be budged. Then I thanked him and told him he would do quite nicely. He turned slowly and the stairs creaked beneath his tread as he went ponderously away.

XVI

THE TREATY OF SEVRES

RAUF BEY TAKES THE NATIONALIST DEPUTIES FROM ANGORA TO CONSTANTINOPLE—​INDIA COMPELS MR. LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAVE CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE TURK AND GENERAL MILNE BREAKS UP THE PARLIAMENT, DEPORTING RAUF AND MANY OF HIS COLLEAGUES TO MALTA—​THE SEVRES TREATY AND HOW DAMAD FERID PASHA SECURED AUTHORITY TO SIGN IT.

The elections which the Ali Riza Government held, resulted in a clean sweep for the Nationalists and a situation of considerable delicacy was now precipitated. It was hardly possible for the new Parliament, charged with the execution of the Erzerum program, to function freely under the enemy occupation in the capital. On the other hand, it was the country’s legally elected Parliament and it was highly desirable that it should be recognized as such. Pending decision as to its course, its deputies assembled at Angora where the Party’s standing council was in session in the gray granite building which had once been the provincial headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress. Here an intimation reached the deputies that the Allies were prepared to recognize the new Parliament if its session was held in the capital and was opened in a legal fashion by the Sultan’s speech, but that it would not be recognized if it met in Angora. Accordingly a large proportion of the deputies, headed by Rauf Bey, the Parliamentary leader of the Party, left Angora for Constantinople and on Jan. 11, 1920, the new Ottoman Parliament opened its session. Despite the conditions of military occupation under which it met, Rauf Bey discharged his duties with inflexible courage and on January 28, the Erzerum program, now known as the Turkish National Pact, was legally adopted by the legal Parliament sitting in its legal capital.

Trouble was now plainly in the air. Only the day before the adoption of the Pact, the re-mobilizing Nationalist forces in Asia Minor had raided a dump of surrendered munitions on the Gallipoli peninsula. Behind its Asiatic suburbs, their forces had crept into the very outskirts of Constantinople. The Allied occupation was becoming a touch-and-go matter.

Other developments contributed to the gravity of the situation. Mr. Lloyd George who had been striding up and down the Rubicon, had made a dismaying discovery. It seemed that there was a place called India. The British Foreign Office was also having its troubles. Pilgrimage to Mecca had ceased and Islam was not displaying that gratitude at the payment of British subsidies to King Hussein of the Hejaz, which Lord Curzon expected of it. Mr. Lloyd George accordingly ceased striding up and down the Rubicon and seated himself in a waiting posture on its bank. On February 26, he told the House of Commons in London that his statement of Jan. 5, 1918, respecting Constantinople as the Turkish capital, “was specific. It was unqualified and it was very deliberate. It was made with the consent of all parties in the community. It was not opposed by the Labor Party.” Preparations were accordingly made to leave Constantinople to the Turk in the peace settlement, and London editors (who as a rule are not Moslems) began turning over projects for the “Vaticanization” of the Caliphate of Islam.