Tarsus,
Saturday,
April seventeenth,
Sometime in the morning.
Mother dear:
Once that wind changed, we slept. Mary and I slept from one to three. Baby Rogers is a good little chap. Yes, my dear, "I laid me down and slept. I awaked, for the Lord sustained me." This is the way to learn a text—live it.
When we got awake, it was daylight. Shouting again at the gate. I ran to my study window that looks down into the street outside of the gate. Excited men were pushing and struggling. Their cries were shrill. My heart sank. Was the killing to be renewed under our eyes? Then Mary said, "They are selling bread, and want six metallics a loaf." The business of life goes on in spite of cataclysms. Selling bread! In the midst of life we are in death. Yes, but in the midst of death we are in life. The family goes home to dinner after the funeral. When you are living the cataclysm, however, your vision is not adjusted to the small events. The matter-of-fact things are happening because they always happen and must happen.
* * * * * * *
A door outside slammed. Then the door into Mary's room opened. In came Mother Christie, looking as though she hadn't slept. The steel-rimmed spectacles used indifferently by herself and Daddy Christie, were pushed away up on her forehead. She said briskly: "Another baby! a dear little boy, and not a rag to put on him!" I went to my steamer trunk to fetch three little flannel petticoats and two kimonos. Down jumped the spectacles without her putting her hand on them. "No, no, my child, I cannot take them." Before I had pressed them into her arms, she had finished her protesting. Away she went, murmuring: "Give and spend and the Lord will send. That's what you think." Well, there may be time for me to make more petticoats.
They say that eight hundred houses have been burned. Many people were still in the houses. If they showed themselves, or tried to get out by windows or roofs, they were shot. It was death either way. We fear that few Armenians are alive in Tarsus outside of our compound and in the Catholic Mission nearby. The whole Armenian quarter, right up to my windows, is burning. The bright blaze persists in many places where there is yet much to feed upon.
Saturday afternoon.
We did not think of breakfast. Mary had fallen asleep again after nursing the baby. I munched biscuits in my bedroom, and then I undid on the bed the bundle I had made up in the night. The piece of flannel might be needed sooner than I could use it. So I stretched it out on the mattress, and cut four flannel petticoats. With the blinds barricaded, my only light was what filtered through the slits in the shutter of the side window. I had to keep doing something, and I did not want to go out to talk to any one. So I found my thread and thimble, and began to make up the petticoats.
It may have been minutes or hours. I shall never know, for I had not looked at the clock when I woke. Suddenly I heard cries outside, that were taken up by the thousands in the college yard. In the mingling of voices I caught my husband's name. "Steady now," I thought. "Is this life or death?" Then Jeanne's golden head appeared at my door.