XXIII
It was a British ship which took me from Constantinople to Smyrna, and it gave me a thrill of patriotic pleasure to get porridge for breakfast, and ham and eggs with buttered toast.
Apart from the officers and crew, there were few English folk aboard. I can only remember one—a good-looking and good-humored major, who was bound for Alexandria in company with a pretty Greek woman who seemed to be under his chivalrous protection. The other first-class passengers were Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. On the lower deck were groups of Italian soldiers who sang and danced continuously, a few Turks, an old Arab woman in a dirty white robe, who gazed all day long over the side of the ship as though reading some spell of fate in the lace work patterns of froth woven by our passage through the dead calm sea, and families of Israelites lying among their bundles.
It was good to lie on the boat deck in the direct glare of the sun, pouring its warmth down from a cloudless sky, and to watch with half-shut eyes the golden glitter of the sea and its change of color and light from deepest blue to palest green, as the currents crossed our track and white clouds passed overhead and the sun sank low, as evening came. Fairy islands, dreamlike and unsubstantial, appeared on the far horizon, and then seemed to sink below its golden bar. At night the sky was crowded with stars, shining with a piercing brightness, and it seemed no wonder then that to each of them the Greeks had given a name and godlike attributes. They seemed closer to the world than in an English sky, heaven’s brilliant train, and on this ship in a lonely sea—no other boat passed us—the company of the stars was friendly and benign.
From the lower deck came the singing of the Italian soldiers, with their liquid words and open notes, in which I heard something very old in the melody of life. The Greeks were singing, too, in a separate group, softly, to themselves, and with a melancholy cadence. Tiny sparks of fire, like glow-worms, flitted to and fro on the lower deck. It was the glow of cigarette ends, as the Italian soldiers danced the fox trot and the one step. Now and then a match was lighted, and one saw it held in the hollow of brown hands, illumining a dark Italian face.
My son and I sat on coils of rope, up on the boat deck, with a Greek girl with whom we had made friends. She talked and talked, and held us spellbound by her philosophy of life, her gayety, her bitter wisdom, her fearlessness and wit. It was a short voyage, and we have never seen her again, but we shall not forget that laughing Greek girl who spoke half the languages of Europe, and English perfectly, and American with such intimate acquaintance that she could sing little old nigger songs with perfect accent, as it seemed to us. Yet she had never been in England or America, and had spent nearly all her life in Constantinople, with brief visits to Greece, and two frightful years in Russia. She had learnt English, and her negro songs, in the American College at Constantinople, to which she looked back with adoration, though she had been a naughty rebel against all its discipline.
As a governess to a German family in Russia, she had learnt another language—besides Russian, Greek, French, Turkish and English—and had been thoroughly amused with life, until the Red Revolution broke in Moscow. Her Germans fled, leaving her alone in their empty flat, and then she learnt more than ever she had guessed about the cruelties of life. Her life was saved by her gayety and “cheek,” as she called it. When a crowd of Red soldiers threatened to slit her throat, she jeered at them, and then made them roar with laughter by playing comic songs on the piano and singing them with merry pantomime. That was all right, but she starved and went in expectation of death month after month. Her Russian friends, students and intellectuals, were mostly shot or hanged. She recognized some of them as they hung from lamp-posts in the streets, and gave us a vivid imitation of how they looked, with their necks cricked and their tongues hanging out. She became used to that sort of thing.... After wandering adventures, abominable hardships, in dirt and rags, she got through at last to Constantinople, and lived for a time on a Greek gunboat, as one of the crew, wearing one of their caps and a sailor’s jersey. They saved her from starving to death, until she was able to get in touch with her family. Now she was going to Alexandria, as a typist in an English office.
She was tremendously amused with all this experience. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was the adventure of life, and the great game. There was nothing in life but that—and what did death matter after this adventure whenever it came! We spoke of war, and the chance of world peace, and she scoffed at the chance. War was inevitable—the greatest adventure of all. Cruelty?—Yes, that was part of the adventure. Men were heartless, but amusing, even in their cruelties. It was no good looking at life seriously, breaking one’s heart over impossible ideals. It was best to laugh and take things as they came, and shrug one’s shoulders, whatever happened. It was Life!... So we talked under the stars.
There was another girl on board who talked to us. She belonged to a different type and race—a tragic type, and Armenian. She had some frightful photographs in a satchel which she wore always round her waist. They were photographs of Turkish atrocities in Asia Minor. There was one of a Turkish officer sitting on a pile of skulls and smoking a cigarette. Those skulls had once held the living brains of this girl’s family and townsfolk at Samsun. She told me of the death march of the Armenians when the Turks drove them from the coast into the interior. The women and children had been separated from their men folk, who were then massacred. Her father and brother had been killed like that. They passed their bodies on the roadsides. The women and children had been driven forward until many dropped and died, until all were barefoot and exhausted to the point of death. Kurdish brigands had robbed them of the little money they had, and their rings. Some of the younger girls were carried off. Their screams were heard for a long way. There were not many who reached the journey’s end.... A terrible tale, told with a white passion of hate against the Turk, but without tears, and coldly, so that it made me shiver.