Immediately upon my arrival, of course, I communicated with His Excellency, Saïd Pasha, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to present my credentials and arrange for an audience with His Majesty the Sultan, Abdul Hamid. The Pasha replied at once, appointing a time two days later, and accordingly I went to the Sublime Porte, as the Turkish Government seat is called, in company with the chargé and the dragoman or interpreter. That was about May 26th. Not until June 6th, however, did I receive a communication from Munir Pasha, Grand Master of Ceremonies, that His Majesty had named June 8th for my audience. The next evening I received a telegram postponing the audience to the 10th. On the 9th I received another communication, postponing it sine die. On the 15th a new appointment was made for the 17th; then, between midnight and one o'clock on the night of June 16th-17th, the personal secretary of the Sultan came knocking at the door of my apartment, and, after apologizing for his arrival at that untimely hour, informed me that he had come at the Sultan's special request to say that word had come from the Porte that June 17th was a most sacred day, a fact just determined by the phases of the moon, and the Sultan therefore was constrained to postpone the audience again. The date was later set for July 1st, when I finally had my audience.
It was a peculiarity of Abdul Hamid to delay audiences to new representatives for weeks and sometimes months by these successive appointments and postponements, to no other purpose than to impress the agents of foreign governments with the importance of His Majesty. In my case there was some added cause: it was the month of Ramazan, during which only the most pressing official functions take place.
Ramazan, ninth month of the Turkish calendar, is a period of fasting. For twenty-nine days every Mussulman abstains from food and water, and even smoking, from sunrise to sunset; which the rich arrange conveniently by sleeping all day and eating all night, while the poor who have to work all day eat at sundown, at midnight, and very early in the morning. The first meal after the fasting, at sunset, is called iltar. The fast is broken with Ramazan bread, a cakelike bread, circular in shape, which we saw much in evidence at a bazaar in the courtyard of a mosque at Stamboul, the more Oriental part of Constantinople, where the costumes of Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Arabs form a strange mixture indeed.
During Beiram, a three days' feasting following Ramazan, the mosques are all illuminated at night, and the view over the water, with the moving lights of boats in the foreground and the dimly lighted houses beyond, interspersed with brightly illumined mosques, is quite like a picture of some enchanted land.
Because of the Sultan's peculiarities in receiving foreign representatives, the custom in regard to official calls at Constantinople is different from that at most capitals. Elsewhere calls on colleagues are not made until after a minister or ambassador has had his audience; but here usage dictated calling on one's colleagues as soon as possible. Therefore I called first on Baron de Calice, ambassador from Austria-Hungary and doyen of the diplomatic corps. He received me with great cordiality and kindness, and advised me fully regarding diplomatic practices at Constantinople. And we were welcomed by each and all of my colleagues in turn, so that I found these calls very much less disagreeable than I had anticipated; I even enjoyed many of them. At each visit coffee or tea was served, and generally cigarettes too, as is customary with the Turks, which is wonderfully effective in taking off the chill of diplomatic formalities. One soon gets to expect these refreshments; it is a delightful custom that might be adopted in other places to advantage.
Another reason why these formal calls were less formidable than they might have been was that three days after our arrival at the capital we were invited to a garden party given by Lady White, wife of the British ambassador, Sir William A. White. This served to give us a prompt introduction to all my colleagues. In fact, in the five weeks intervening between our arrival and my audience, we had attended so many garden parties and dinners given to us, that I found myself heartily longing for respite. My natural inclination was to regard these social gatherings in the light of idle frivolities, especially in the summer, when one is supposed to be relatively free from functions of this kind; and I was not alone among my colleagues in preferring more evenings at home to the occasional headaches that it cost to continue the very late hours these many engagements forced us to keep. Yet I could not consistently decline invitations; such a course might have been interpreted as a desire on my part to withdraw from the diplomatic circle and would have interfered with the pleasant social relations it was incumbent on me to cultivate. Attendance was really part of my duty, and in time I found these functions distinctly advantageous.
We looked forward with more than usual interest to the evening of our dinner at the Persian embassy. The Persian ambassador's wife had been a Circassian slave, whom he was said to have bought for £300 with a horse thrown into the bargain. The ambassador's wife was, of course, typically Circassian; chalky white skin, soft black eyes, small features, an unattractive figure unattractively dressed, with whom conversation was almost nil because she knew only Persian.
The streets of Pera, the European part of Constantinople, are exceedingly narrow and very hilly, for the city is built on several hills, like ancient Rome; in addition they are poorly paved and dirty. This makes driving dangerous and, as in mediæval times, sedan chairs were quite generally in use as a means of conveyance for the ladies of the diplomatic corps and the wives of the higher Turkish officials, especially at night to dinners and other official functions. Two sinewy porters carry these chairs, one in front and the other behind, and they shuffle along with considerable rapidity. Usually the lady is carried while the gentleman, preceded by his cavass in the case of a diplomat, walks alongside, except in inclement weather when he follows also in a chair. I am reminded of the wife of the German ambassador at the time, a large, heavy woman, whom the porters quite justly charged double. She, however, was entirely oblivious of her extra avoirdupois and always complained of the injustice of these porters! The Austrian and Russian embassies were particularly difficult of approach by conveyance other than the sedan.
We certainly were living in a new sphere of life, in a strange land among strange people, with customs and habits that brought to mind the age of the patriarchs. There was much to see where some thirty nationalities lived and did business as if in their own homes—much to wonder at, much to deplore, much to praise and admire. The natives are a peculiar people, with many admirable characteristics; they are kind and hospitable, comparatively honest and reliable, especially the lower classes, and they manifest a most sincere devotion to their religion. The lower classes are poor, very poor; yet they are content and reasonably happy because their wants are few. Their poverty is not a suffering condition and they seemed to be better off than the poor elsewhere. Their religion strictly interdicts the use of alcoholic drinks, and as they are true to it and live faithfully up to its principles, they are spared all the evils that fall in the train of drunkenness.