Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/234

 three young ladies of the Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris, entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in consequence.

Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged pantaloons, turbaned hojas robed in more somber colors, smart Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish soldiers in somebody's cast-off khaki, Government officials in kalpaks and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town—these came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return). Out of a narrow side