CHAPTER XXIII

DEMETRA VAKA

It is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs. Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could conscientiously praise:

_Name in full_: Demetra Kenneth Brown.

_Chief occupation or profession_: Wife.

_Residence & address_: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York.

_Place of birth_: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora.

_Date of birth_: 1877.

_Education, when and where received, in detail_: First privately. Then at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne. One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as frivolous women use garments--throwing away when not becoming.

_Date of marriage_: 1904, April 21.

_Military, political and civic record_: No records whatever except of bad temper.

_Director or trustee of the following educational or public institutions_: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of bringing up my husband.

_Politics_: For the best man who is on the ticket.

_Religious denomination_: Orthodox Greek.

_Professional associations, learned and technical societies, decorations, etc._: None.

_Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if holder of any office, so state)_: Have not any money to spare.

_Social clubs_: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth.

_Business or professional record_: On the editorial staff of Greek newspaper _Atlantis_ for about six months in New York City. French teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903. Writer since 1904.

_Office or position occupied by you_: Wife.

_Title of (first) book_: First Secretary.

_Year first published_: 1907.

_Publisher_: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).

* * * * *

This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.

Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in Constantinople for more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials. Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch, therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home, coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here, however, she was soon left to shift for herself.

Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of _Atlantis_ she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of the French department of the school.

In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey. Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women, and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets. Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she saw and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, _Haremlik_, which means “the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:

Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would write.

_Haremlik_ was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression. There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs. Brown’s later book, _A Child of the Orient_, which is the tale of the author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the _Arabian Nights_ fills the pages of _Haremlik_ and _A Child of the Orient_. The final chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.

Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is, though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty clearly disclosed in the opening chapter of _Haremlik_. And so when the European War had passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor, Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies--at least endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as those entered upon with Serbia.

Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, _In the Heart of German Intrigue_, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to do.

Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her autobiographical books such as _A Child of the Orient_ and _Haremlik_ are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial offering, _The First Secretary_. _The Duke’s Price_, written with her husband; _Finella in Fairyland_, _In the Shadow of Islam_, and _The Grasp of the Sultan_, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are all hers, as well as _The Heart of the Balkans_. Of all these _The Grasp of the Sultan_, which received serial publication and sold well even before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.

The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five years.

This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little Prince Bayazet.

The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive “documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!

BOOKS BY DEMETRA VAKA

_The First Secretary_, 1907. _Haremlik_, 1909. _The Duke’s Price_, 1910. _Finella in Fairyland_, 1910. _In the Shadow of Islam_, 1911. _A Child of the Orient_, 1914. _The Grasp of the Sultan_, 1916. _The Heart of the Balkans_, 1917. _In the Heart of German Intrigue_, 1918.

_Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._