To-day my rooms are getting an extra house-cleaning, and I have two boys hard at work. One is washing three of my rugs. He has, as little Cousin Myers used to say, "his bare feet on." He jumps up and down on the wet, soapy rugs; then pounds them with a big flat stick that looks like a cricket-bat. They are certainly getting clean—though I doubt whether you and I should adopt that method if we had the job. The boys are trying to talk Armenian to each other. They try hard. But they cannot help falling into Turkish. For in this part of Turkey their mother-tongue is the language of their oppressors—the badge of servitude.
Armenians of breeding and education foster their language with all their heart and soul. There is a desperate attempt to preserve the national unity, always with the opposition of the terrible Turks! The Armenians have natural ability along the line of enterprise and making money, but this has been so curbed by the oppressor that even stout hearts have given up and lapsed into a paralysis of the will that would be contemptible if one did not understand it. Under favorable circumstances, when the Armenian has been given a square deal, he is successful. He is a born merchant. This is proved when he goes to another country where his enterprise can have its own way.
We met a fine young fellow in Adana not long ago. He had come home to see about the education of a little sister in the mission school in Adana. He was in America only six years, but has come back thoroughly Americanized, with a lot of money earned as a candy drummer. He is a good example of our young American hustler who is almost blatantly successful. It was refreshing to meet him, for he sounded like home. The appearance of such a man among his old associates causes considerable dissatisfaction, for he has made more money in this short time than his cousins and brothers can make in a lifetime. The educators of Armenian boys have a problem before them. Are they going to educate the boys in order to encourage them to go to America? Isn't the reason for having the schools to help these people to a better life in their own country? Why educate the bright boys at all, if it is not to equip them to spend their lives for the good of their countrymen? Yet, what can you answer to the pathetic and conclusive argument that the educated Armenian has no chance for advancement, so long as Armenia is under Turkish rule? They really have no chance, the boys with a diploma. They are educated for unhappiness and for danger. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that after they have been years in our schools, American education fits them for American opportunities, and unfits them for Turkish opportunities. More than this, after we have given them the vision of another kind of national as well as another kind of individual life, they are marked men among the Turks, and are the first to be sought out when a massacre comes. Herbert and I have our misgivings about all this work here. In spite of the heralded liberty of the Constitution, it requires more optimism than we have to believe that Armenians are safer under Young Turks than they were under old Turks.
Bairam means feast. After every religious fast, a bairam. It is an occasion for eating immoderately, and for giving a little pleasure and break in the dull monotony of woman and child life. During the last bairam, in the field of the camel market there was a funny little "merry-go-round" and a crude Ferris wheel, which had hanging wooden cages each big enough to hold four children—if they were small. A beaming brown-faced peasant was taking in the money and bossing the two men who turned the wheel and the merry-go-round. He came up to us, and with real pride in his voice, asked: "Have you anything like this in America?"
On Sunday morning, the classes have their lesson taught in their class-rooms, and then they come together in the assembly-room for the concluding exercises. As these are given in Turkish, Herbert and I do not feel called upon to go. So we commit the heresy of slipping out for a walk. It is a heresy, Mother, to these dear good people. The missionaries have puritanical notions of Sabbath-keeping that are different from anything Herbert and I have ever run across. Of course, we say nothing to the boys. But we often wonder if they think that American life is run on missionary principles. The boys are taught that smoking is a sin. That is only one instance. On Sundays, they are not allowed to leave the college grounds except to go over to the Armenian Protestant Church for the afternoon service. Taking walks is taboo. What do you think of that? We easily forego the smoking. It is a question of example to boys: and we see the reasonableness of the point of view. But we simply cannot stay indoors on these glorious days.
We always take the same Sunday morning walk: for it never fails to interest us. We circle the college grounds, and climb up on a mound, under which Cleopatra's castle or Sardanapalus's tomb is supposed to be. There we hear the boys singing. They are wonderful singers, and we love to listen to the familiar hymn tunes. Last Sunday a Moslem wedding was being celebrated at the same time. Men in gay-colored jackets and sashes were moving toward the house where the wedding was taking place: others were already around the door. A native orchestra was playing. The instruments were squeaking reed whistles, two-stringed guitars and drums. You can imagine the music they give forth, when I add that they never get off the minor key. On the flat roof a group of women, veiled and silent, huddled pathetically together. The blending of heathenish music with a Moody and Sankey hymn was indescribable.
Crossing the open space from the mound to the Mersina road, we see ill-kept cattle trying to get grass to keep them from starvation. Sometimes there is a sick or aged horse brought here to die. With all the frightful cruelty to animals everywhere evident, Orientals strangely enough will not kill animals. They do not put out of misery beasts suffering from their neglect and cruelty. This distorted kindness comes to cap the climax of misery for patient burden-bearers broken with toil. When an animal falls by the roadside, and the owner cannot whip or kick it into going farther, he just leaves it there. In riding we see frequently the remains of a camel or a horse. In spite of wanting to avoid the offense to nostrils as well as the struggle with a mount shying for good reason, we have to pass by. For the carcass is generally right alongside the road, and we cannot always make a detour through the fields. Filthy jackals skulk away at our approach, howling in savage protest and yet trembling with fear of us.
We pass out of the town to the Mersina road under an interesting arch, called St. Paul's gate. It is one of the gates of the old walled city, but whether it is of Roman, Byzantine or Arabic origin it is impossible to tell. In Tarsus and all around Tarsus there are numerous archeological remains. But they have been so defaced and mutilated and built over that it is hard to get any idea at all of the original construction. The natives declare that the Mersina gate was built by Harun-al-Rashid, hero of the Arabian Nights. Harun's walls did pass at this point, and the city has never gone beyond. A few yards outside the gate, we are in a Fellahin village. Between two of the reed huts is a mud oven, patted into oval form, baked outside by the sun and inside by a fire of grass. When we pass, the women are always making bread. The whole operation is before your eyes. The wheat is threshed out of its stalks and winnowed, and ground in a stone basin with a huge pestle of iron or copper. The coarse flour is mixed with water, and kneaded in pats about as big as my hand. These are passed to an old hag, who quickly flattens them out on a board, using her forearm as rolling-pin. They are put in the oven with sticks. Two or three minutes—and you have your bread. It is not in loaves. Think of a griddle-cake nine inches in diameter, or something even thinner than a griddle-cake, and you have the Fellahin bread. It is splendid wrapping paper. When there are no fig-leaves at hand, the peasants give you butter and cheese done up in bread.
The Cydnus River runs through and around Tarsus in a dozen branches, all of which do the quadruple service of mill races, drinking troughs for man and beast, washing places for man and beast and carriage and clothes, and irrigation ditches. There is plenty of water and it runs so fast that there is always time for it to get clean for the user below. Tarsus is full of mills: cotton, sesame, flour and sawmills. One of the largest cotton-mills—for ginning and weaving both—is on the Mersina road. Here we stop to watch and tease the turtles in the mill-race. They are lined up on the bank, generation after generation of them—like a family group for a photograph in New England (of the old days only, alas!). The timid ones flop into the water at our approach. Most of them, however, are insolently indifferent. Our idea is to make them all "vamoose." We throw pieces of sugar-cane at them, and Herbert, everlasting kid, is not satisfied until only ungraceful claws, wildly waving above the surface of the water, reveal where the sprawling creatures have taken refuge. Not a head dares appear: for Herbert is near baseball days, and sugar-cane is heavy enough to carry straight. In the wider water beyond the mill, we frequently see long shapeless ridges of brown-black shifting lazily about, moving just enough to show that they are not mud-banks. A rude cart stands on the edge of the stream and on its pole is fastened a double-yoke. Those ridges are the buffaloes that belong to the cart. The lumbering beasts sway back and forth through the streets dragging incredibly high and heavy loads of cotton-bales to the railroad. Occasionally they are unhitched and allowed to get into the water for a rest and a bath. There they lie in the gray mud, absolutely relaxed, languidly flapping their ears to splash water on their heads.
Our walk ends at the bridge half a mile beyond the cotton factory. West of the bridge the Adana-Mersina road enters the great Cilician Plain once more after the long break of Tarsus and its suburbs. Half a dozen broken places in this bridge are a constant menace to horse and camel. It keeps getting worse and worse. An enormous traffic passes over it: but does any one think of mending it? They will wait until it falls down. The motto of this country is every man for himself. There is no public spirit—no idea of the common weal. One is moved only by what affects him directly, and acts only for what he believes is his interest. But none sees farther than immediate interest. To-morrow is in God's hands. The Young Turk régime, on which we see the American newspapers and magazines publishing extravagant eulogies—how will it succeed? The governing classes in Islam cannot be regenerated until Islam is imbued with a different spirit—self-sacrifice, initiative, thought of the future.