As the play went on, the audience did not need candied almonds or music to keep them awake. Things began to go badly for Hamlet's mother's husband. People stopped fanning. The dignitaries moved uneasily in their places. With heads hunched down in their shoulders, they kept their eyes glued on the stage. They are not familiar with our great William, and believe, no doubt, that we invented the play as well as the actors' costumes. Horror of horrors! We had forgotten what they might read into the most realistic scene. An Armenian warning for Abdul Hamid? The assassins mastered the struggling king. He lay there with his red hair sticking out from his crown, and the muscles of his neck stiffened as he gasped for breath while his throat was cut with a shiny white letter-opener.
As I fell asleep last night, I saw the three dignitaries leaning forward frowning. The Mufti had clinched the sides of the bench with his thin hands. Could they be seriously disapproving of our show, because we killed a king in it? I went to sleep laughing over Doctor Christie's story of the way the authorities would not permit him to teach physics in the early days because he was obliged to use the word "revolution."
April ninth.
Last night Herbert and I drove on the Mersina road. We love this drive in the late afternoon. It leads in the direction of home—straight to the sunset. Camels came towards us. From the head the line was double. As they parted to the sides of the road, I said to Herbert, "Let's count the beasts. You take your side and I'll take this." They numbered more than two hundred, all laden with petroleum tins.
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We drove again this evening. Even walking is proscribed for me now. I can go out of the college grounds only in a carriage, and then not far. In a Moslem quarter, on a road between vegetable gardens, boys threw stones—the first time it has happened to us. As Charlemagne was nervous and reared from being hit several times, Herbert did not dare to get out and leave me alone. There was nothing to do but drive on, and accept the stoning. I was hit on the left shoulder—a big stone it was. The bruise is painful.
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April thirteenth.
Could not finish for Thursday's post. We have had Easter to think about—examinations, and the boys going off for their ten days.
Miss Talbot has come to stand by me. Isn't she a dear? Imagine a soft-voiced Englishwoman of the upper class being a trained nurse, and my nurse—when there is none in the world for me to turn to. It seems as if she has been dropped from Heaven at my door. Miss Talbot is a woman of independent means, who studied nursing to equip herself for doing good. She came out here to Turkey to find work at her own expense. She is going into mission dispensary nursing, but thinks just now that I am "the duty at hand." Lucky for me!