Abruptly he stopped in his walk before me, his tall, thin figure erect, his eyes aflame.
“Go away from here?” he cried. “Go away from here, and be a traitor? Yes, that is what so many thousands did in 1453. They abandoned their hearths and the graves of their ancestors. They abandoned their lands and their schools, and above all they abandoned St Sophia. To go away from here is to forsake our country—for ever to relinquish it to the conqueror. We must stay here!” he thundered, “and bear with our patrida the yoke of slavery, till the day shall come, when again strong, we shall rise to break that yoke, and hear again a Christian priest in St Sophia!”
I was seven years old when he died; yet I felt almost as old as he. Having never seen other children, and therefore having never shared in childish frolics, my world consisted of the woes of Greece.
His death was a terrible shock to me, and yet I cannot say that I quite understood what death meant. For days and days I pondered as to where he was, and whether he were comfortable or not. I saw his body, wrapped in a huge Greek flag, the icon of his patron saint clasped in his cold hands, lowered to rest beside the men of his family, who, like him, had lived and died under the Turkish yoke.
CHAPTER III
OTHER FACES, OTHER PHASES
MY uncle was now gone—gone, let us hope, to where he was to find rest from racial hatred, rest from national ambition.
Gone though he was, his influence over my life was never to go entirely—in spite of radical modifications. He had enriched my childhood with things beyond my age, yet things which I would not give up for the most normal and sweetest of childhoods. He had taught me the Greek Revolution as no book could ever have done; and he had given me an idea of the big things expected of men. He had given me a worship for my race amounting to superstition, and bequeathed to me a hatred for the Turks which would have warped my intelligence, had I not been blessed almost from my infancy with a power of observing for myself, and also had not good fortune given me little Turkish Kiamelé as a constant companion.
In the abstract, the Turks, from the deeds they had done, had taken their place in my mind as the cruellest of races; yet in the concrete that race was represented by dark-eyed, pretty little Kiamelé, the sweetest and brightest memory of an otherwise bleak infancy.
Alongside the deeds of the Greeks, and the bloodshed of the Greek Revolution, I had from her “The Arabian Nights.” She told them to me in her picturesque, dramatic way, becoming a horse when a horse had to come into the tale, and any other animal when that animal appeared; and she imitated them with so great an ingenuity that she suggested the very presence of the animal, with little tax on my imagination. She talked with a thick voice, when a fat man spoke, and a terribly funny piping voice when a thin one spoke. She draped herself exquisitely with her veil, when a princess came into the tale; and her face assumed the queerest look when the ev-sahibs, or supernatural sprites, appeared. Had it not been for her and her “Arabian Nights,” I should never have laughed, or known there was a funny side to life; for I had little enough occasion for laughter with my uncle. Even to this day, when I am amused, I laugh in the oriental way of my little Kiamelé.