Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

If we found the nomenclature of Mistress Hyacinth and her family a source of perplexity, she in turn was not a little confounded by our system of tickets. We had one for bread. We had another for charcoal. We had a third for groceries. We had a fourth and a fifth for fodder. We had a sixth, the most important of all, since it entitled the bearer to the others, which must be tied tight in a painted handkerchief and never be lost. “By God!” cried Mistress Hyacinth in her honoured idiom, “I know not what these papers mean!” And sometimes it was well-nigh impossible to explain it to her. A good part of her confusion, I suspect, should be put down to our strange accent and grammar, and to our unfamiliarity with the Thracian point of view. Still, I think the ladies of that peninsula share the general hesitation of their race to concern themselves with mathematical accuracy. Asked how many children they had, they rarely knew until they had counted up on their fingers two or three times. It is evidently no habit with them to have the precise number in mind. So when they made an obvious mistake we did not necessarily suspect them of an attempt to overestimate. As a matter of fact, they were more likely to underestimate. Other failures of memory were more surprising, as that of a dowager in ebony who was unable to tell her husband’s name. “How should I know?” she protested. “He died so long ago!” When questioned with regard to their own needs they were equally vague. “I am naked,” was their commonest reply. “Whatever your eye picks out, I will take.” But if our eye failed to pick out the right thing, they would in the end give us a hint.

Altogether it is evident that the indirections of Mistress Hyacinth follow a compass different from our own. I remember a girl not more than sixteen or seventeen who told us she had three children. Two of them were with her: where was the third, we asked? “Here,” she answered, patting herself with the simplicity of which the Anglo-Saxons have lost the secret. Yet she was most scrupulous to keep her nose and mouth hidden from an indiscriminate world. Another woman, asked about a child we knew, replied non-committally: “We have sent him away.” “Where?” we demanded in alarm, for we had known of refugees giving away or even selling their children. “Eh—he went,” returned the mother gravely. “Have you news of him?” one of us pursued. “Yes,” she said. And it was finally some one else who had to enlighten our obtuseness by explaining that it was to the other world the child had gone. But none of them hesitated to give the rest of us an opportunity to go there too. Many women came into our coffee-shop carrying in their arms a baby who had smallpox, and were a little hurt because we got rid of them as quickly as possible.

With great discreetness would Mistress Hyacinth enter our presence, rarely so far forgetting herself as to lean on our table or to throw her arms in gratitude about a benefactress’s neck. For in gratitude she abounds, and in such expressions of it as “God give you lives” and “May you never have less.” With a benefactor she is, I am happy to report, more reserved. Him she addresses, according to her age, as “my child,” “my brother,” “my uncle,” or haply “my mother and my father.” I grew so accustomed to occupying the maternal relation to ladies of all ages and colours that I felt slighted when they coldly addressed me as their lord. Imagine, then, my pleasure when one of them called me her creamy boy! In the matter of discretion, however, Mistress Hyacinth is not always impeccable—so far, at least, as concerns the concealment of her charms. Sometimes, indeed, she will scarcely be persuaded to raise her veil even for a lady to recognise her; but at others she appears not to shrink from the masculine eye. One day a Turk, passing our coffee-shop, was attracted by the commotion at the door. He came to the door himself, looked in, and cried out “Shame!” at the disreputable spectacle of a mild male unbeliever and a doorkeeper of his own faith within the same four walls as some of Lady Lowther’s fairer helpers and a motley collection of refugee women, many of them unveiled. But the latter retorted with such promptness that the shame was rather upon him, for leaving the gyaour to supply their wants, that he was happy to let the matter drop. On this and other occasions I gathered a very distinct impression that if Mistress Hyacinth should ever take it into her head to turn suffragette she would not wait long to gain her end.

The nails of Mistress Hyacinth—speaking of suffragettes—are almost always reddened with henna, I notice, and very clean. The henna often extends to her fingers as well, to the palms of her hands, and to her hair. If she happen to be advancing in years, the effect is sometimes very strange to a Western eye. There is no attempt to simulate a youthful glow. The dye is plentifully applied to make a rich coral red. In other points of fashion Mistress Hyacinth is more independent than her sisters of the West. What the ladies of Paris wear must be worn by the ladies of Melbourne, New York, or St. Petersburg. But no such spirit of imitation prevails in Thrace, where every village seems to have modes of its own. We had great difficulty in getting rid of a quantity of clothing sent out by charitable but unimaginative persons in England, who could hardly be expected to know the fashions of Thrace. Articles intended to be worn out of sight were accepted without a murmur when nothing better was to be had, such as a quilted coat of many colours that we bought by the hundred in the Bazaars, called like the Prophet’s mantle a hîrka. But when it came to some very good and long golf capes, the men were more willing to take them than the women—until they thought of cutting them up into children’s coats. Mistress Hyacinth herself scorned to put on even so much of the colour of an unbeliever, preferring the shapeless black mantle of her country, worn over her head if need be, and not quite hiding a pair of full print trousers.

The village whose taste I most admire is that of Vizeh, the ladies of which weave with their own hands a black woolen crash for their mantles, with patches of red-and-blue embroidery where they button, and with trousers of the same dark blue as the sailor collar of a good many of them. I wish I might have gone to Vizeh before the Bulgarians did. There must have been very nice things to pick up—in the way, for instance, of such “napkins” as Lady Mary Montagu described to her sister on the 10th of March, 1718, “all tiffany, embroidered with silks and gold, in the finest manner, in natural flowers.” She added: “It was with the utmost regret that I made use of these costly napkins, as finely wrought as the finest handkerchiefs that ever came out of this country. You may be sure that they were entirely spoiled before dinner was over.” But you, madam, may be sure they were not, for I bought some of them from the ladies of Thrace, rather improved than not by their many washings. They are technically known as Bulgarian towels, being really Turkish; but it seems to me that the tradition which persists in this beautiful peasant embroidery must be Byzantine. Mistress Hyacinth was able to make it, as well as to sell it. And to turn an honest penny she and her friends set up their funny little hand-looms in a house we hired for them, and wove the narrow cloth of their country, loosely mingled of linen or cotton and silk, and shot, it might be, with bright colours of which they had the secret.

Peasant embroidery

The consort of Mistress Hyacinth, I regret to add, seemed to show less willingness to add to the resources of the family. Perhaps it was because of an inward conviction of which I once or twice caught rumours, that as unbelievers had deprived him of his ordinary means of sustenance, we other unbelievers were in duty bound to keep him alive. For the rest he is outwardly and visibly the decorative member of the family. He inclines less to bagginess than Mistress Hyacinth, or than his brother of Asia. He affects a certain cut of trouser which is popular all the way from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic. This trouser, preferably of what the ladies call a pastel blue, is bound in at the waist by a broad red girdle which also serves as pocket, bank, arsenal, and anything else he pleases. Over it goes a short zouave jacket, more or less embroidered, and round my lord’s head twists a picturesque figured turban, with a tassel dangling in front of one ear. He is a surprisingly well-made and well-featured individual—like Mistress Hyacinth herself, for that matter, and like the roly-poly small fry at their heels. On the whole they give one the sense of furnishing excellent material for a race—if only the right artist could get hold of it.

Young Thrace