“Ah!” I smiled, “you have stolen our English credo.”
CHAPTER XXVI
LAST DAYS IN ANGORA: EXCURSIONS, CONVERSATIONS, PICNICS—HAÏDAR BEY’S PARTY
Angora, certainly, carries one back to the centuries before Christ; although we now realise that life was by no means without its luxury in those bygone days. As the houses of Pompeii were warmed by hot air behind the walls, and the baths were not only hygienic but luxurious, it would puzzle one to find what now remains in Angora from the comfortable period of Augustus. There is also a prehistoric atmosphere about Smyrna, or as it was once wittily expressed: “Since its deliverance from Greeks and Armenians, it has the charm of Sodom and Gomorrah after the fire.”
But every day I am more at a loss to imagine where the thirty thousand inhabitants of Angora are living to-day. I have seen some of them in their charmingly improvised houses, made homelike by the marvellous carpets of the East; but, as one always goes back to one’s first love, I give up the problem, and return to talk with the “élite” at the Assembly.
One day I found the Director of the Angora Press, Aga Aglou Ahmed Bey, in his tasteful little ante-room, and learnt that he, too, found it hard to forgive the recent policy of Great Britain. He repeated, also, the note of despair I hear so often: “Whatever we do is wrong.”
“Yet,” he added, “had our movement originated in America, we should have had the whole world at our feet. All growing nations have been allowed to separate Church and State. We have, indeed, troubles within and without, but they have only strengthened the spirit of Nationalism, which the Pasha himself could not now destroy.
“Alas, poor Turkey! Abdul Hamid disposed of Turks with amazing dexterity: he lost them, killed them, or forgot them; and who cared? They were not Christians!
“Look what it cost us to depose the ‘Red’ Sultan, and then we had the ‘Black’ Sultan. When we got rid of him, Europe was not pleased. See how the English are defending him; though one of your charming countrymen told me they would not give him ‘house-room’ in your own country.”