Despite haste and discretion, however, I experienced an unusual sense of being dressed and clean, as I eventually stepped out into the daylight to make the acquaintance of Eski-Chéir.
I found the colonel on the platform talking with animation to a nice-looking Turkish general, who also, it appeared, had a saloon, to which we all three soon adjourned for coffee and talk. He, too, will scarcely believe that I am English.... “I did not think Englishwomen could laugh so heartily,” was his excuse for scepticism.
“My dear sir,” I replied, “I was born laughing, and shall keep it up to the bitter end. God has given me a few gifts—not many—and that for which I give most thanks is a keen sense of humour.”
So I trotted out all the experiences of my journey one by one, not forgetting the Greek I had to “shake” at Athens, and the Frenchman in the “Caracole.” Convulsed with laughter, they one and all shouted: “She is not English!”
This strange impression of our race prevails, I know, also in France and America. They forget Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the supreme “good fellowship of English laughter.” French wit, no doubt, reveals the swift play of a keener and more subtle intellect; ours is a “midsummer madness” of warm hearts in the Forests of Arden.
For my part, when the “literature” mistress challenged her class to “hunt for humour” in “Julius Cæsar,” I put my finger upon the Stage Direction—“Enter Cæsar in his nightgown!” I could not then, nor can I now, agree that Brutus’s wife’s distracted hurrying away, and then recalling, the page for news of his master is anything but tragic pathos.
Few nations, again, will enjoy as we do a joke against themselves. When I published a “Turkish Woman’s Impressions of Europe,” about ten years ago, in which she so happily hit off the weakness of our Western civilisations, the Continent was up in arms. It was an English critic who gaily expressed his “most sincere thanks” for so “thorough a dressing-down.” No publisher in the States would take the following book, with Americans as “victims,” for fear of his “sensitive” and “patriotic” (!) readers.
At a half-ruined restaurant near the station, over the most excellent meal I ever tasted in such miserable surroundings, we had a long talk with General Mouedine Pasha and his two sons about politics and some curious stories they had heard somewhere about England. It is natural that these men should not be interested in any other subject. The general, he told us, had been in and out of prison for the last fifteen years—exiled by Abdul Hamid, escaping, and caught again. After the Armistice he left Constantinople, at great personal risk, to join M. Kemal Pasha; was, for a time, Governor of Adana, and is now taking up his post as Ambassador at Teheran. Most of the leading soldier Nationalists—M. Kemal Pasha and Fethi Bey among the rest—seem to have been his grateful pupils, and, naturally, he is a proud man to-day.
If only the authorities at Lausanne had known or could imagine anything about life in Angora during the last three years! All the best men exiled, persecuted, and imprisoned. What wonder that Nationalism had grown into a religion!