THIS night of terrors proved my last adventure in Turkey. Soon afterwards events began to force me to feel that in order to live my own life, as seemed right to me, I must flee from all I knew and loved to an unknown, alien land. It is a hard fate: it involves sacrifices and brings heartaches. After all, what gives to life sweetness and charm is the orderliness with which one develops. To grow on the home soil, and quietly to reach full bloom there, gives poise to one’s life. It may be argued that this orderly growth rarely produces great and dazzling results; still it is more worth while. People with restless dispositions, people to whom constant transplanting seems necessary, even if they attain great development, are rather to be pitied than to be envied; and, when the transplanting produces only mediocre results, there is nothing to mitigate the pity.
By nature I was a social revolutionist, and I liked neither the attitude of the men towards the women nor of the women towards life, among the people of my race. I have learned bettersince, and know now that social laws exist because society has found them to be wise, and that little madcaps like me are better off if they respect them. But at that time I had more daring than wisdom, and longed to go where people lived their lives both with more freedom and with more intensity. Moreover, I wanted to “do something”—like so many feather-brained girls all the world over—just what, I did not know, for I had no especial talents.
With a fairly accurate idea of my own worth, I knew that I was intelligent, but I was fully aware that I was the possessor of no gifts that would place me among the privileged few and outside the ranks of ordinary mortals. Brought up on books and nourished on dreams, I had a poor preparation with which to fight the battle of life, particularly in a foreign country, where everything was different, and difficult both to grasp and to manipulate. The only factor in my favour was my Greek blood, synonymous with money-making ability; for we Greeks have always been merchants, even when we worechlamidasand reclined in theagora, declaiming odes to the gods, talking philosophy, or speculating on the immortality of our souls.
Knowing my race as I did, and aware that it succeeded in making money in climates and under conditions where other races failed, I was confident that I could earn my own living. Thereis something in us which justifies the tale of Prometheus. Even before I was fifteen I was quietly planning to leave Turkey, to go and seek what fortunes awaited me in new and strange lands—a course which my imagination painted very attractively. America beckoned to me more than any other country, perhaps because I thought there were no classes there, and that every one met on an equal footing and worked out his own salvation.
We are all the possessors of two kinds of knowledge: one absorbed from experience, books, and hearsay, which we call facts; the other, a knowledge that comes to us through our own immortal selves. This last it is impossible to analyse, since it partakes of the unseen and the untranslatable. We feel it, that is all. This subconscious knowledge—to which many of us attach far greater importance than we do to cold facts—is usually as remote as a distant sound, though at times it may be so clear as to be almost palpable. This secondary knowledge told me I must go to America—America that rose so luminous, so full of hope and promise on the never-ending horizon of my young life.
I had not the remotest idea of how my dream of going there could be realized; but I believe that if one keeps on dreaming a dream hard enough, it will eventually become a reality. And so did mine. A Greek I knew was appointedconsul to New York, and was shortly to sail with his family to the United States. I had a secret conference with them, offering to accompany them as an unpaid governess, and to stay with them as long as they stayed in America. They accepted my offer.
This I regarded merely as a means of getting away from home. After I left them my real career would begin. That I was prepared for no particular vocation, that I did not even know a single word of English, disconcerted me not at all. Accustomed to having my own way, I was convinced that the supreme right of every person was to lead his life as he chose. I do not think so any longer. On the contrary, I believe that the supreme duty of every individual is to consider the greatest good of the greatest number. That I succeeded in my rash enterprize is more due to the kindness of Providence than to any personal worth of mine.
Of America actually I knew almost nothing, and what I thought I knew was all topsy-turvy. The story of Pocohontas and Captain John Smith had fallen into my hands when I was twelve years old. I wept over it and surmised that the great continent beyond the seas was peopled by the descendents of Indian princesses and adventurers. My second piece of information was gathered from a French novel, I believe, in which a black sheep was referred toas having gone to America “where all black sheep gravitate.” And my third source of information was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the book which makes European children form a distorted idea of the American people, and sentimentalize over a race hardly worth it.
This made up my encyclopædia of American facts. That all those who emigrated thither succeeded easily, and amassed untold wealth, I ascribed to the fact that being Europeans they were vastly superior to the Americans, who at best were only half-breeds. You who read this may think that I was singularly ignorant; yet I can assure you that to-day I meet many people on my travels in Europe who are not only as ignorant as I was, but who have even lower ideas about the Americans.
We landed in New York in winter, and went directly to Hotel Martin, at that time still in its old site near Washington Square.
What did I think of America at first? This indeed is the most difficult question to answer. I was so puzzled that I remained without thoughts. To begin with, the people, for half-breeds, were extremely presentable. The redskin ancestral side was quite obliterated. Then the houses, the streets, the whole appearance of the city was on a par with Paris. What appalled us all was the dearness of things. I remember the day when we gave a Greek street vendor one centfor some fruit, and he handed us one little apple. “Only this for a cent?” we cried; and so indignant were we that we reclaimed our cent and returned him his apple.
We managed to do ridiculous things daily. At our first evening meal at the hotel, a tall glass vase stood in the middle of the table filled with such strange flowers as we had never seen before. They were pale greenish white, with streaks of yellow. We thought it very kind of the proprietor to furnish them for us, and each of us took one and fastened it on our dress.
The waiters glanced at us in surprise, but it was nothing to the sensation we created when we rose to go out of the dining-room. People nudged each other and stared at us. Of the French maid who came to unfasten my dress I asked:
“Do we seem very foreign?”
“No, indeed,” she replied, “I should have taken Mademoiselle for a French girl, except that she wears her hair loose on her back.”
“Then why did the people in the dining-room stare at us so?”
She suppressed a giggle. “Yes, I know, Mademoiselle, I have heard about it. It is the flower Mademoiselle is wearing.”
“What is the matter with it?”
“Nothing, except that it is not a flower—it is a vegetable, called celery.”
I do not know how many more absurd thingswe did during the three weeks we stayed at the hotel. Then we took a flat near RiversideDrivethe rent of which staggered us, but when it came to the servants we almost wept. Four pounds a month to slovenly girls who were only half-trained, who made a noise when they walked, and who slammed the doors every other minute.
I was anxious to start my English studies at once, for as yet I could only say “All right,” a phrase which everybody used,à proposof nothing, it seemed to me. I went to the Normal College to inquire about the conditions for entering it. The president received me. He was the first American man with whom I talked. He had lovely white hair, and a kind, fatherly face. He spoke no French, and sent for a student who did; and when she translated to him what I wanted, he explained that I could not enter college until I knew English and could pass my entrance examinations. The young girl who translated offered to teach me English for a sum, which, to me, coming from the East and cheap labour and possessor of small financial resources, seemed preposterous. Still I liked her eyes: they were dark blue, and green, and grey, all at once, with long and pretty lashes; so I accepted her offer. That very evening she gave me my first lesson, and proposed that instead of paying her I should improve her French in exchange for her English lessons, an offer that I wasvery glad to accept. She was my first American friend, and remains among my very best.
We had only been a few months in New York when my Greek friends were obliged to return to Turkey. I resolved to remain behind. I must confess at once that I did so out of pride alone. New York had frightened me more than the capture by the brigands, the earthquake, and an Armenian massacre in which I once found myself, all put together. Yet to go back was to admit that I had failed, that the world had beaten me, and after only a very few months.
I had just sixty dollars, and my courage—robbed a little of its effervescence. Since I had had only two English lessons a week, and no practice whatever, because all the people we met spoke French to us, my vocabulary was very limited, but I managed to get about pretty well. Once in a shop I asked for “half past three sho-es,” and obtained them without trouble.
Before my friends left New York for Constantinople they gave me a certificate saying that I was qualified to be a governess—for which I was really as qualified as to drive an engine. Since I had had no chance to modify my opinion about the origin of Americans, I still looked upon them as inferiors, and considered myself quite good enough for them. Taking a small room in a small hotel, I applied to an agency for a position. It did not prove quite so easy toobtain as I had thought it would. In the first place, I was not French born; secondly, I was ridiculously young looking; and then of course I had to admit that I had been a governess in a way only.
How amusing it was to be presented as a governess! Most of the ladies spoke such comical French, and asked questions which I thought even funnier than their French. I could have found a place at once, if I had been willing to accept twenty-five dollars a month as a nursery governess, and eat with the servants.
Meanwhile most of my money was spent, and to economize I walked miles and miles rather than take the street cars; and then came the time when all my money was gone, and I was in arrears with my rent, and had no money for food.
I do not wish anyone to suppose that I was miserable. On the contrary, I liked it: I was at last living the life I had so often read about. I was one of the great mass of toilers of the earth, whom in my ignorance I held far superior to the better classes. I had romantic notions about being a working girl, and my imagination was a fairy’s wand which transfigured everything. Besides, I was a heroine to myself. Those who have even for one short hour been heroes to themselves can understand the exaltation in which I lived, and can share with me in the glory of those days.
At this time I happened to apply to the Greek newspaper for a position, not because I thought there was any chance for me, but because it was so interesting to apply for work. Every time I applied to a new person, it was a new adventure; and I had applied so many times, and been rejected so often, that I did not mind it any more. I knew that if the worst came to the worst I could for a time become a servant. I was well trained in domestic work and could cook pretty well; for, when we Greek girls are not at school, a competent person is engaged to come into the house and train us systematically in all branches of housekeeping. The idea of becoming a servant, of entering an American home and obtaining a nearer view of my half-breeds within their own walls appealed to me. What I objected to, was being hired as a governess and treated as a servant.
To my surprise, the Greek newspaper, a weekly then, took me at once on its staff. I was delirious with joy, not so much because I was going to earn money as at the idea of working on a newspaper. It seemed so glorious, so at the top of everything.
Just at this time—at the agency, I think—I heard of a French home, far out on the West Side in the vicinity of Twenty-third Street, where French working girls stayed while seeking positions. I went there, and made arrangementsto stay a few months; and from there sought my hotel proprietor. I told him that the Greek newspaper had engaged me at a salary which did not permit me to live at his hotel, and what was more that I could not at the moment pay him what I owed him—three weeks’ rent, I believe—but that I would pay him as soon as possible. He was very nice about the matter, and said it would be “all right,” though I doubt very much if he ever expected to see his money.
My work on the newspaper was hard and tedious. I am a bad speller, and can write a word in five different ways on one page without discovering it. On account of this failing I was often taken to task by the editor in chief, who was the proprietor, and had some black moments over it, until one of the type-setters quietly suggested to me that I should pass over my stuff to him and he would correct the spelling before the editor saw it, which I did ever after, and was very thankful to him.
My newspaper work was not only of long, long hours, but it absorbed all my time, as well as my energy and strength, and shortly after undertaking it I had to give up my English studies. I was too worn out physically and mentally to continue them.
It was not so bad during the cold weather, but suddenly, without the slightest warning, the cold gave place to burning heat. There wasno spring. That lovely transition period in which all is soft, both in air and in colours, did not exist in that American year. The summer burst fiercely over the city and scorched it in a few days. It grilled the pavements; it grilled the houses; it multiplied and magnified the noises of horse and elevated cars, of street-hawkers and yelling children—and these noises in turn seemed to accentuate the heat. Every morning I took the Sixth Avenue elevated train at Twenty-Third Street, and all the way to the Battery there was hardly a tree or a blade of grass to meet the tired eye, tosoothethe over-wrought nerves, nothing but ugly buildings—ugly and dirty. And as the train whizzed along, the glimpses I had of the people inside these buildings were even more disheartening than the ugliness and dirtiness of the buildings themselves.
And this was my America, the country of the promised land. It seemed to me then as if my golden dream had turned into a hideous nightmare of fact—a nightmare which threatened to engulf me and cast me into that unrecognizable mass continually forming by the failures of life. That I did not sink down into it was, because, in spite of the hideous reality, I remained a dreamer, and those who live in dreams are rarely quelled by reality. In that fearful, hot, New York summer I began to dream another dream which made the heat more tolerable. Daily, asthe elevated train noised its way to the Battery, I imagined myself having succeeded, having amassed wealth, from which I made gifts to the thousands of toilers in that scorched city. I planted trees for them everywhere, along the streets, along the avenues; and wherever there was a little vacant plot of land I converted it into a tiny park. There I saw the people sitting under the shade of my trees, and so real did my dream become that I began actually to live it, and suffered less from the heat myself; for I was constantly on the look out for new spots where I could plant more trees.
At luncheon time I used to go out for a little stroll on the Battery, and there I used to see immigrant women, dressed partially in their native costumes, and surrounded by numbers of their little ones, jabbering in their own lingo. One day I sat down near a solitary woman, unmistakably an Italian peasant.
“Hot to-day, isn’t it?” I said in her own tongue.
From the sea, slowly she raised her eyes to me. I smiled at her, but received no response.
“You look very tired,” I said, “and so am I. I suppose you are thinking of your own country, of fields and trees, are you not?”
“How did you know?” she demanded sullenly.
“Because I do the same myself. I also aman immigrant. You look across the sea with the same yearning in your eyes as is in my heart, for we are both homesick.”
She was no longer cross, after this, and because another woman was sharing in her misery that misery became lighter. She began to tell me of her sorrow. She had buried her second baby in two weeks, because of the heat. Her lap was now empty. She spat viciously on the water. “That is what I have in my heart for America—that!” and again she spat.
I volunteered an account of my own disillusionment about America; and there we sat at the edge of the Battery, two sad immigrants, telling each other of the beauties we had left behind, and of the difficulties we had to fight in the present. If I had then known a little of the history of America, I might have told her of the first immigrants, of how much they had to suffer and endure, and for what the present Thanksgiving Day stood. I might have told her more of their hardships, and how they had had to plant corn on the graves of their dear ones, so that the Indians should not find out how many of them had died—but I was as ignorant as she, and we only knew of our own homesickness and misery.
The heat had started early in May, and it kept on getting hotter and hotter, with only sudden and savage thunderstorms, which passed overthe city like outraged spirits, and deluged it for a few hours with rain that became steam as soon as it touched the scorched pavements. Occasionally some fresh wind would penetrate into the city, as if bent on missionary work; but it was soon conquered by the demons of heat. It grew hotter and hotter. It seemed as if the city would perish in its own heat—and then came the month of August!
I shall never forget that August. Even now, wherever I am during that month, my spirit goes back to that desolate city to share in the sufferings of its poor people who have to work long hours in hot offices, and then at night try to sleep in small, still hotter rooms, with the fiendish noise of the city outside. And it is then again that my dream comes back to me, to give trees all along the streets and all along the avenues, and shady open spaces to breathe in.