Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/184

 highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said: "This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we forsake our country when it needs us?"

I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into Papa Eftim's head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.

The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great role. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that he