Oriental houses are reticent, like the women who live in them. They are meant for animals and women, the animals on the ground floor and the women upstairs—both created and kept in captivity to work for man. You can tell a Christian from a Moslem house from the fact that the Moslems put lattice-work over the windows. Otherwise they are the same. While Christians do not seclude their women, they have nearly the same ideas about making them work.
Miss Hallie Wallis has her home and dispensary near the Girls' School, in a house built with a blind wall toward the street, and windows opening only on the court. Within the court an outside stairway, mounting to the balcony, leads to the living part of the house. When I went to call, I got into the hospital side. Miss Wallis popped out of her office to receive me and led me into a waiting-room which, although furnished only with a few carpets and divans sporting wide-meshed native crochet tidies, was cozy. At the door were the patients' wooden clogs. In one corner a soft-voiced Armenian Bible woman was talking with an elderly blind woman and a little blind boy. These people were in their stocking feet, and although I knew it was the native custom, I felt that they had left their clogs at the door out of respect to Miss Hallie's spotless rooms. Miss Wallis gently divined fatigue that I didn't know was there. In a few minutes, although it was mid-morning, there was a steaming cup of tea and the paper-thin slices of bread and butter that can be made only by an Englishwoman.
The Armenian doctor asked me to take a look at the work. He gave me a high stool near his operating table. The hours of the morning flew as I watched the tender skilful handling of the cases, one after another. This is the only real medical care the people of Adana receive—and it is a city of sixty thousand! I saw eighty-seven people come and go. Of these fifty-eight were eye cases. Miss Wallis has books for the blind, and a Bible woman who does nothing else but read to them. She is a thorough-going saint, this Miss Wallis, a gentle, tireless saint. How many women there are in the world, women of means, of brains and position, who, in unawakened stolidity, live wasted lives! They belong to the army of the unemployed just as much as bums and hoboes. Some unmarried women, middle-aged ones, feel a little bitter as they look upon their married sisters' lives. That is because they are not working. Here is a woman who, by self-abnegation and glad assumption of responsibility, has the richness of life and the wide full satisfaction a mother feels in doing for her brood of children. Mothers haven't really a corner on contentment and blessedness. The most common examples of unselfishness and happiness that we see about us are the mothers. But there is opportunity for all women to become happy through service, and thus taste the joy of motherhood. Think of the many unmothered people in the world, both kids and grown-ups, that cry out for woman-souls to shelter and minister to them.
When we finished the morning's work in the clinic, Miss Wallis went with me to lunch at Mrs. Chambers'. As we walked along the street, a haggard old woman stopped us, clutching at a fold of Miss Wallis's coat. "Please tell me," came the rapid question, "why you are so happy? I have seen people who looked as happy as you do, but never before two women each one happier than the other. Can you tell me why? Are you sisters?" "Yes, yes," said Miss Wallis, "we are sisters. God is love, Madama and you and I are his children, and so we are sisters." Miss Wallis stopped right there to explain further. Before we went on our way the old woman heard the Good News the missionaries come here to tell, and she hobbled away happy because she was a sister to somebody who was happy.
I fell in love with the green pitcher and basin in my bedroom. Mrs. Chambers took me to the pottery. In a cellar, without much light, the potter was working at his wheel. He was making an amphora of the common kind women and donkeys carry to the fountains. His right arm was inside the jar. He worked the wheel with his foot, and with his left hand guided the rude uneven course of the paddle-like affair which was molding a lump of clay into shape. With the very slightest pressure, the potter was able to change radically the contour of the clay. It was the first time I had ever seen the Potter and the Wheel. I understood.
In the courtyard was a scrap heap piled high with all sorts of broken and rain-soaked bits of discarded vessels. I spotted a little squat vase, just my color of green. You know the soft shade the under side of apple leaves take on when you lie in a hammock under the apple-tree and half close your eyes as you look up at the sky on a cloudy day in spring. Kicking aside the debris with my foot, I pulled out the vase by its uncovered handle. The other handle was safe. Rough lines, grooved by the potter's will, had dried into the lovely thing before it was polished, and the glaze added by the fire must have been weather-worn in this old courtyard for more years than I am old. There was a slight depression, left by the potter's thumb, on the bottom of the vase. A police magistrate could have made a thumb-print from it. I bought the vase for two cents. It is my most precious possession.