At the end of the year I returned to the school, and willingly placed myself again in harness. During this year I made the acquaintance of John Fisk’s books, and discovered the error of my preconceived notions about the American people and their origin. He taught me who the early settlers really were, whence, and why they had come. I read of their privations and struggles, and of their ultimate success. For the first time I looked upon this continent as peopled by the white race, and the shame I felt for my past ignorance was only mitigated by my desire to atone for it. I mapped out a thorough course of reading, and all the spare time of that year and the next was devoted to systematic study of American history, literature and poetry.
And, as I read American history, it came over me how different the beginning of this race was from the beginning of all the other civilized nations of the world. Whereas the others all started by a strong barbaric race descending upon a weaker people and seizing their cattle and their lands by brute force, America alone started with the great middle classes of all civilized races, who came to the new world, not with brute force as their weapon, but with the desire to carry out in a wild and virgin country the spiritual and social development they craved. What a marvellous, unprecedented beginning! What a heritage for their sons! I am afraid many of them do not appreciate the greatness of that beginning, otherwise why should they try to go beyond those early settlers and seek to establish their descent from William the Conqueror, or some little sprig of nobility, and make themselves ridiculous where they ought to be sublime?
By temperament I am afraid I am something of an extremist. My barely tolerant attitude toward my new country changed into a wholly reverential one. I desired to become an American myself, considering it a great honour, as in the olden days people came from all over the world to Greece, to become that country’s citizens. I started my Americanism by adopting its brusqueness—it is an unfortunate fact that one is as likely to imitate the faults of those one admires as the virtues—but brusqueness which is so characteristic of America is mitigated by its young blood and by its buoyancy, and we of the old bloods can very little afford that trait. It must have made a poor combination in me, and many people must have found it hard to tolerate. The principal of the school told me, during my third year with her, that I had so completely changed in manners as to be hardly recognizable. When I first came to live with her, she said, I had had exquisite and charming manners; now, I had become as brusque as any raw western girl. She little understood that she was attacking my new garb of Americanism.
The school year began in October and ended in May, leaving me four months to my own devices. Two vacations I spent in a fashionable summer resort, not far from New York, where I not only had pupils enough to pay my expenses but ample time to read English and American books, and also opportunity to study the attitude of rich Americans toward a girl earning her own living—an attitude not very different from ours in the Old World. One summer I spent in a working girl’s vacation home, where all the girls were shop girls, and where I met the proletariat of the New World on an equal footing. And once I spent the entire four months visiting in the mountains of North Carolina, where I learned how much more American money is needed for schools there than in Constantinople, where it goes, not to civilize the Turks but to educate at the least possible expense to themselves the children of well-to-do Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians—especially the first. And the recent actions of the Bulgarians have proved eloquently how little American education helps them; for American civilization must be sought—it cannot be imposed from without.
My third year at school, the head French teacher left it, and the principal offered me her place; and so, four years after I landed in the new world I was at the head of the French department of one of the best private schools in New York City. I had many good friends, was making considerable money outside the school, and was studying at the University of New York. To all appearance I had succeeded; yet truth compels me to confess that, so far as my inner self was concerned, I was a total failure.
I had thought that if I were to join the great army of the world’s workers, and lead my life as seemed to me worthy; if I were to cut loose from the conventions and traditions which hampered my development in the old world, happiness would come to me. Far from it! I realized then that I was only one of the victims of that terrible disease, Restlessness, which has taken hold of women the world over. We are dissatisfied with the lines of development and action imposed by our sex, and the causes of our dissatisfaction are so many that I shall not even try to enumerate them. The terrible fact remains that in our discontent we rush from this to that remedy, hoping vainly that each new one will lead to peace. We have even come to believe that political equality is the remedy for our disease. Very soon, let us hope, we shall possess that nostrum, too. When we find ourselves politically equal with men, and on a par with them in the arena of economics, we may discover that these extraneous changes are not what we need. We may then, by looking deep down into our own hearts see whether, as women, we have really done the best we could by ourselves. We may then find out the real cause for our discontent, and deliberately and with our own hands draw the line of demarcation again between men and women, and devote ourselves to developing that greater efficiency in ourselves along our own lines, which is the only remedy for our present restlessness.
I believe that only then shall we find contentment and a better equality than the one for which to-day some of us are even committing lawlessness.
CHAPTER XXII
BACK TO TURKEY
YET after I had come to believe that these conclusions of mine were the right ones—and at the present moment I still believe them to be so—I did not rise, pack my trunk and return to my home. On the contrary, disillusioned though I was, I meant to stay in America. My little self felt pledged to the onward fight, into which evolution has plunged us. My generation belongs to that advance guard which will live to see the fight ended in America, and I must be present, after the great victory is won, to see how we shall face the reconstruction period. This was the reason why, when my mother, about to undergo a serious operation, sent for me to be with her, I bought my return ticket before leaving America, and kept it always with me—ready for use at a moment’s notice.