"Warbling still amidst the others,
Wandering with them where they roam,
And yet hallowing remembrance,
With low gushes about home."
No doubt some subtle form of nervous weakness, the relic of his long and terrible illness, still held young John Grayson in its grasp. Moreover the loss of his father, so intensely loved, had entered like iron into his soul. His mother's death was still, when he left home, a recent bereavement, and he was an only child. He had no near relatives except in his uncle's family, and even amongst them there was only one he cared for much, his father's godson, a cousin five years his senior, whose fag he had been at school.
What had he, after all, to go back to in England? He excused his torpor with thoughts like these, whenever it occurred to him to ask himself if he meant to spend his life tending vines, teaching English, and studying Armenian, in a little out-of-the-way town on the banks of the Euphrates.
He spent many months there without taking much note of time. The Meneshians were his family; the whole Armenian community his friends. He entered more and more into their life, shared more and more their interests. He was especially interested in the culture of the vineyard, wanting to know the how and the why of everything. Once—but this was in early days—he proposed taking Kevork and a couple of other lads with him, and going to stay there long before the regular vintage time. "We could guard it a great deal better," he said, "than that lazy Turk, who does nothing but lie all day on his perch smoking cigarettes, and is always wanting backsheesh."[1]
"You could not do it at all," answered Boghos, the eldest son of Hohannes, and the husband of Mariam Hanum, "just because you are not a Turk. Backsheesh is very well spent in setting the Turk to watch the Kourd, instead of both of them preying upon us. Do you not know that yet, Yon Effendi?"
They all continued to give him that name, which he had taught in the first instance to Kevork and his brothers. To them all he was a cross between a pet and plaything to be taken care of, and a superior person to be honoured. In both capacities he had every attention, and all his wants were liberally supplied. But he insisted that Hohannes should expend for that purpose some of his father's gold, and should give from time to time a small sum by way of compensation to Boghos and Mariam Hanum, with whom he lived. Money was so scarce in that region that a very small sum sufficed.