The Towers of Trebizond (5 page)

So we drove back to Çanakkale. When we got there it was evening. The policeman took Father Chantry-Pigg and aunt Dot to the police station, to complain to the head policeman about the plan and the camera, and Charles and I went to the hotel where we were sleeping, and had drinks in the garden above the Hellespont.

"Will they lock them up?" I asked Charles.

Charles said, dear me no, it was just a Turkish gesture. He and David had been taken to police stations for spying again and again, but never kept more than an hour or two, while the police probed into their past lives and the lives of their parents and other relations, and wrote a report for the police chiefs, then they were given a drink and let out to spy again.

"They'll keep the plan, of course, and the negatives in the camera. They collect plans and photographs and potted autobiographies of tourists; they're kept in the Espionage Department in Ankara, and no harm is done
 
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. Now I'd rather like to tell you why I left David. I don't want inaccurate stories to get about, and if you hear any in Istanbul, and you will, because I know David wrote to a man he knew in the Chancery, I should be glad if you would contradict them."

So he began telling me why he had left David, and it was all rather confused, and I was sleepy after the drive and the drink, and the Hellespont slapped at the sea wall of the café garden, and people were playing tric-trac at the tables round us, and dice clattered, and the radio whined away at that Turkish music which goes on and on like crooning, and which Turks love so much that western music is hateful to them and Mozart just a noise to be turned off. I lapsed into sleep, like the young man Eutychus, and would have fallen three storeys had they been there, and I dreamed of Alexandria Troas, and the Tenebrae types lamenting there, Aleph and Calph, Teth and Jod, Ghimel and Mem and Nun, all afflicted, all put out, all sad about what they had been through, the dark places they had come to, the bitterness and the gall, then the last light went out and the dark was all, and through the dark Aleph and Teth and Jod still wailed for Alexandria Troas broken and gone. And I dreamed of sea winds whispering in rustling grass and asphodel among the fallen columns of Ilium and over the grave of Priam's Troy, and of the Trojan plain stretching level to the sea where the Greek ships lay, and where the Greek sailors, bored to death, played with dice, tric-trac, tric-trac, and the waves lipped on the beach and lifted the ships, and music wailed from the pipes of the Dardan goat-herds on the plain. Ten long years it had gone on, and because of those ten years Troy was our ancestor, and the centre of a world that Turks could never know.

"And then David said
 
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and I said
 
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and he said
 
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"

It was like women talking near you on the bus—she said, he said, I said. And it was like the B.B.C. news—Mr. Attlee has said at Blackpool
 
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Mr. Dulles said in Washington
 
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Mr. Nehru said yesterday in Delhi
 
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The Archbishop of York has said
 
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The Pope has said
 
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said, said, said
 
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The peoples of the Free World, they said, must unite to resist the aggressor. The peoples of the Free World, they said, all long for a just peace
 
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" Where
is
this free world they all talk so much about?" aunt Dot would interrupt the News to ask. "
I
never went there. It must be quite extraordinary, every one doing just as they please, no laws, no police, no taxation, no compulsory schooling, nothing but a lot of people all resisting aggressors and longing for a just peace. By the way, the camel was taken in charge for obstruction again by that stupid policeman."

The slapping of the Hellespont on the sea wall woke me, and I supposed myself Leander, for a light was twinkling on the Europe shore in Hero's tower.

"It's time to swim across," I said.

Charles said, "Swim across what? So we agreed it was really
no
use going on together, if that was the kind of thing that was liable to happen. So I packed up and went. It seemed the only thing to do. Don't you agree?"

I agreed, and said, "Shall we swim across, as Leander, Mr. Ekenhead and I did? If we go in now, we could dine at Sestos, if we make it, and if any Turk can tell us where it is, but they won't know. Or would aunt Dot want to come too, I wonder?"

Aunt Dot was a very fine swimmer, being the right shape and build, and she probably would want to come too.

Charles said, "One has first to find out about the currents. It took Byron and Ekenhead miles out of their course, and Leander never made it at all, that last time. Of course the Abydos-Sestos crossing isn't the shortest, actually. People usually now go in half a mile up the coast from Çanak. But anyhow I'm not in form for it to-night, I should drown. You have to be feeling happy and full of hope for the Leander swim."

So we gave up the Leander swim, and then aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg came back from the police station. Father Chantry-Pigg was very angry about his father's plan of Troas, and aunt Dot was annoyed about her negatives, and a disguised policeman was following them and sat at the table when we dined, and we saw that we had joined the large army of spies who seemed to be going about Turkey.

Next morning we took a motor boat across to the Gallipoli peninsula to see the British war cemeteries, where practically every one has relations. Aunt Dot had a brother there, so she took some red irises for him, and, as we stood by his grave, she began to be angry again, as she had been in 1915 when he was killed, for she had always thought the Gallipoli expedition very stupid, and the most awful waste of her brother's life. However, she left the irises in a jampot, and Father Chantry-Pigg said "
Requiem aeternam dona ei,
Domine
",
and aunt Dot and I said "
Et
lux perpetua luceat ei
", and Father Chantry-Pigg prayed that all the souls in those cemeteries might rest in peace, and then we wandered about the graves, which were kept very beautifully, and I thought how awful it was that all those people should be lying there under the ground of Gallipoli, when they might by now have been elderly men doing well or ill at something, and it seemed too soon for them to be lying dead, in their sixties, though it was all right for Hector and Achilles and Patroclus and all the Greeks and Trojans who lay in the Troad, for they would have been several thousand years old. Death is awful, and one hates to think about it, but I suppose after all those years of it the dead take it for granted.

We went back to Çanak, and got on the steamer for Istanbul, and Charles came too, for he was anxious to be back in Istanbul to tell people about himself and David, in case they should be getting false ideas. When he had given them the true ideas about that, he was going to travel about Turkey and write his own Turkey book, which was now to be a separate book from the one he had meant to write with David. For a time he had an idea that he might come with us down the Black Sea. But when we told him about how we were an Anglican mission to Turks, and how aunt Dot meant to convert Turkish women to independence, and about the camel, whom we were to rejoin at Istanbul harbour, he changed his mind, not wanting to be mixed up with things like that, for he knew what would be said of it at the Embassy and in Shell Company and in the University and in the good houses along the Bosphorus, and in the smart Beyoglu hotels, and by the archaeologists, and all down the Black Sea. Father Chantry-Pigg was glad Charles was not to accompany us, as he was so very indifferent to religion.

The boat was gay and crowded with Turks, and it went up the straits between the Dardanelles shores, Asia to the right and Europe to the left, past Abydos and Sestos, and past where Xerxes threw his bridge of boats across the Hellespont to conquer Greece, and the Europe shore climbed up like mountains, dotted with white villages and houses, and the Asia shore heaved down to Troy plain, and between them the Hellespont ran green, and widened out presently into the sea of Marmara.

We voyaged all day, and before dark Istanbul could be seen ahead, and it is true that it must look more splendid than any other city one comes to by sea. Even Father Chantry-Pigg, who did not think that Constantine's city and the Byzantine capital ought to have had all those mosque-domes and minarets built on to its old Byzantine shape, of which he had engravings in a book, even he thought the famous outline climbing above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, with all its domes and minarets poised against the evening sky, was very stupendous. Aunt Dot, already knowing the place, was delighted to see it again, and was busy making notes of all the things she wanted to do there before leaving it. She had Turkish friends in the University, and knew Turkish lawyers and doctors and archaeologists and Imams, for Istanbul is full of intelligent and cultured Turks, but she agreed that the less she said to the Imams about our expedition the better, as they could not be expected to approve of it. Indeed, aunt Dot herself sometimes felt that it was somewhat impertinent to try and convert the holders of such a noble, powerful and bigoted religion as Islam to another faith. But then she remembered the position of Moslem women, and her missionary zeal returned. She knew a clever and highly educated woman doctor in Istanbul, who would be able to tell her all about the woman position in the country at large, how deeply women were still dug in to Moslemism, how likely they were to prefer Christianity when they heard of it, and what their husbands and fathers would think and do if they did.

Father Chantry-Pigg meant to see Byzantine churches (of which he still counted St. Sophia to be one), and also to get in touch with some Greek Orthodox priests, and with the local Anglican priest, who would give him news of the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission, for he would not care to talk to a Seventh-Day Adventist himself. He hoped to meet the Greek Patriarch, and to have a Byzantine discussion with him on many interesting topics.

Charles meant to leave us as soon as we had landed.

I meant to explore Istanbul and do some sketches and improve my Turkish and keep away from the camel.

The quays and wharves were very noisy and bustling. The boat which had brought us from England was still in the harbour, and after some time we found it, and aunt Dot asked the crew where was her camel, and they took her to a kind of camel stables on the quay, where the camel was tied to a post, with a row of other camels. It did not seem to recognise aunt Dot, but went on chewing and looking distant. We left it there, and took a taxi up to our hotel in Beyoglu. It was a nice hotel, and the management were so eager to help us that they begged us to let them cash our travellers' cheques at a much higher rate than we should have got from a bank, and it seemed very kind that they should want to give us more liras for our pounds than the banks liked us to have, and more than we would have been quite willing to accept, but this is one of the mysteries that only financiers can understand, and it goes on almost all over the world, because the love of the English pound and of the American dollar is so great and wide-spread that foreigners actually compete for them, very quietly, in whispers, and as if they wanted no one else to hear, though actually every one knows quite well what the conversation is about. Aunt Dot, who is very experienced, doesn't whisper, but just asks, "How much on the black market to-day?" and if it isn't enough she says "No thank you, I can do better than that at the so-and-so," and puts her cheques away. Father Chantry-Pigg, being so extreme, agrees with Roman Catholics that to cheat governments is all right, because they spend money so badly, and I like to take all I can get, so we do pretty well, though people like Charles do even better. Actually, aunt Dot knows so many people in all parts of the world who will cash ordinary English bankers' cheques for her that she is very seldom in difficulties. "Have good friends, dear," she says, "make to yourself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and you'll be all right everywhere."

She spent a lot of our week in Istanbul seeing her friends, Turkish and British, at the University and at Robert College, and women lawyers and doctors, and the British Institute staff, and the British Embassy, and several archaeologists, and some Shell Company people, who were, said she, the most hospitable people in the world, only equalled by the Irak Petroleum Company in the Levant; it was important, she always said, to get in with oil, in whatever part of the world you were, just as it was important to get in with port wine when in Portugal. One of her Istanbul friends was Dr. Halide Tanpinar, the woman who had told her so much about the female position in Turkey. This doctor had trained at a London hospital, and had, while in London, joined the Church of England, from being an atheist like most young educated Turks since Kemal Atatürk had shown their parents that Moslemism was out of date. Aunt Dot, who had known her for some years, asked her if she would come with us and help us with our mission tour, sizing up the situation and the possibilities, and telling the women about the Anglican Church in Turkish, and about what a good time Christian women had, wearing hats and talking to men, not having to carry the loads, and being free to go about and have fun like men, and sometimes ride the donkeys instead of walking. Besides, said aunt Dot, she would be able to heal the sick, which was always the greatest help in mission work. So Dr. Halide said she would come, as she felt it was her duty both to Turkish women and to the Church. Fortunately she was not very busy just then with her practice, and had an accommodating neighbour who would take it over, like Dr, Watson, and she would enjoy the expedition very much.