This scrubby functionary of the Sublime Porte seemed to be in a very great hurry. His pock-marked face glistened with perspiration under his Turkish cap. His martial cavalry sword kept clattering against his bowed legs. Usually the sight of Bagradian Effendi was enough to make him turn a reverent face; today he only saluted stiffly, though even his salute had a worried look. This change of manner struck Gabriel so, that for some minutes he stood looking after him.

 

 

A few stragglers were still hastening over the square before the church of Yoghonoluk -- the late-comers who lived a long way off. Women in gaily patterned head-scarves and puffed-out coats. Men wearing the shalwar, in baggy trousers, and over these the entari, a kind of gaberdine. Their faces all looked serious and withdrawn. This sun had akeady the power of summer in it; the chalk-white houses glittered harshly. Most were single-storied and freshly daubed: Ter Haigasun's presbytery, the doctor's house, the apothecary, the big council-house, owned by the chief of Yoghonoluk's notables, that rich mukhtar Thomas Kebussyan. The Church of the Ever-Increasing Angelic Powers was built on a wide pediment. Unbalustered steps led up to its portals. Avetis Bagradian, its donor, had copied on a smaller scale a certain famous national edifice in the Caucasus. The voices of the choir, singing mass, flowed out through its open doorways. Away, beyond the dense congregation, the altar, pale with lit tapers, shone in the gloom. The gold cross gleamed on the back of Ter Haigasun's red vestment.

 

 

Gabriel and Stephan went up the steps. Samuel Avakian, Stephan's tutor, met them. He had been waiting impatiently.

 

 

"Go along in, Stephan," he ordered his pupil. "Your mother's waiting for you."

 

 

Then, when Stephan had vanished through the buzzing congregation he turned quietly to his employer. "I only wanted to tell you that they've been here, asking for your passports. Travelling passport and passport for the interior. Three officials came from Antioch."

 

 

Gabriel glanced sharply at the student's face, He had lived for some years as one of the family. It was the face of an Armenian intellectual. A rather sloping forehead. Watchful, deeply troubled eyes behind glasses. An expression of eternal surrender to fate, but at the same time a sharp look of being on guard, ready every second to parry an attacker's blow. Only after a few instants' concentrated study of that face did Bagradian ask: "And what have you done?"

 

 

"Madame gave the officials all they wanted."

 

 

"Even the passport for the interior?"

 

 

"Yes, foreign passport and teskeré."

 

 

Gabriel turned back down the church steps to light a cigarette. He drew a few deeply reflective puffs. The passport for the interior is a document which gives its possessor freedom to move as he pleases over the length and breadth of the Ottoman empire. In theory, without this scrap of paper a subject of the Sultan has no right to move from his village into the next. Gabriel threw away his cigarette and straightened his shoulders with a jerk. "It only means that today or tomorrow I shall have to join my battery in Aleppo."

 

 

Avakian stood looking down at a deeply sunken wheel-rut, left by the last rains in the loam of the church square. "I don't think it means your marching orders for Aleppo, Effendi."

 

 

"It can't mean anything else."

 

 

Avakian's voice had become very quiet. "They made me give them mine, as well."

 

 

Bagradian, who had begun to laugh, checked himself. "That only means you'll have to go to Aleppo to be medically examined, my dear Avakian. This time it isn't a joke.