The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  “This evening, at dinner.”

  “And he left when?”

  “When he had taken coffee, as I have said.”

  “He did not say where he was going?”

  “No. He goes sometimes,” said Féridé thoughtfully, “to the Café Luxembourg.”

  This was a rather smart haunt, much patronised by the more rakish young men in Istanbul, but practically never by such as Orhan or Ahmet. The man thanked her, and with more bows and more apologies, he and his colleagues got themselves out of the room, escorted by the Pasha. When they had gone, and Féridé, back in the bedroom, was taking off her çarşaf—“Where is he?” Mdlle Marthe whispered.

  “Gone!” Féridé said.

  “Who warned him?”

  “Little Ali. Ah, Niné is a person!—she has had a hand in all this! I hope,” said Féridé, snuggling down in bed again, “that when I am Niné’s age, I shall be at least a little like her.”

  “My child, you will be exactly like her,” said the Frenchwoman, kissing her ex-pupil warmly.

  Chapter Seven

  As early as possible next morning Féridé went to see Réfiyé Hanim. She flung her arms round the old lady’s neck and hugged her, as she had done when a child, crying—“Oh Niné, what things you have done for us!”

  “Good-morning, my child,” said the old lady calmly, but looking a little amused all the same—“I hope you slept well?”

  “Niné-djim, I never knew you maligne before!” the girl exclaimed. “Yes, I thank you, my revered grand’mère; once my bedroom was no longer full of policemen, I slept very well indeed.”

  Réfiyé Hanim laughed.

  “Your Father said you were wonderful, and embarrassed them very much—as was most desirable,” she said, taking up her embroidery.

  “But Niné—ah, how sly you have been!—when did you arrange all this? And tell Orhan? Zeynel ready at the caïque-hané, and Little Ali to bring word! Now I see it all; poor Dil Feripé banished to the vine-house, too, just to look after Orhan! But you never told me”.

  Réfiyé Hanim sorted all this out, and answered after her own fashion.

  “There was no need to tell you, my child. Orhan knew, and that sufficed.”

  “But—who told you what Orhan was doing?”

  “I learned, naturally. And I concerted certain means to make his escape easy, with him.”

  “But when?”

  “One day when he was with me. Your husband does me the honour of visiting me sometimes” said Réfiyé Hanim, with fine irony.

  Féridé almost blinked.

  “Nine, you are tremendous! No, I am not jealous! You did what I could not have done, or not half so well. Did you hear anything, last night?”

  “Voices of course I heard, and at that hour I guessed what it must be. I rose from my bed, and prayed to God, and then I went to bed again,” said Réfiyé Hanim.

  Féridé jumped up and gave her another hug. Re-seating herself— “But there is one thing—how came it that the door into the outer passage was open, for Little Ali to come in by?” she asked. “It is always kept locked.”

  “Oh, for weeks past Marthe has gone down to unbolt that, when the servants have gone to bed,” said the old lady.

  The autumn dragged on. Orhan now only came to the house after dark, and usually by water. Féridé never knew when he was coming; she spent most of her evenings, wrapped in a fur coat, huddled up on the divan under the open window in the boudoir, waiting, straining her ears for the faint chocking noise that oars make in the rowlocks, or the grating sound of a boat’s keel against stone—and if she heard these, sooner or later she would hear a low whistle, a few bars of the Falcon song. That was Orhan’s signal, and she would run silently downstairs to let him in. But after that first visit of the police she went with Zeynel, at Orhan’s orders, and had two stout iron pitons driven into the face of the cliff opposite his dressing-room window, and a rope stretched across between them, concealed among the bushes; from two more pitons at the top a loop of rope, similarly concealed, hung down.

  These precautions were not wasted, for presently the English took to coming, a couple of officers and a posse of men—which was a very different matter from the Ottoman police. They stood in no awe of the Pasha and his position, and while perfectly courteous, they were very efficient, posting men all round the outside of the house. Twice Orhan made that formidable leap—with the rope to snatch at he managed it, crawled along the top, and slithered down the cliff-face to the caïque-hané; he got away, to lie perdu at Chamlidja. But the third time the English had put men at the boat-house too, and when, creeping through the bushes, he reached a point above it he heard their voices, and smelt their English cigarettes; crouching there he listened with amused admiration to an officer examining poor old Zeynel in surprisingly good Turkish. Zeynel kept his simple head, and baffled them entirely. Yes, he was an old man, and poor; the Pasha allowed him to sleep in the boat-house—the Pasha was a devout man, fearing God, and merciful to the poor, as those who worshipped Allah should be. Orhan, above in the darkness, could hardly control his laughter—the old fellow was being so completely himself. Tired of these pious maunderings, the English at last left the boat-house, but their tell-tale Virginia tobacco still hung on the air, and Orhan went up into the koru and spent the night under the very cedar in which Fanny had got stuck, five years before, curled up on the short dry scented needles.

  The efforts to raise and arm the troops in Anatolia went on, and by November they began to bear fruit—in the South an attack was launched on the French at Maras; behind Smyrna the English, alarmed at the hornets’ nest which the Greek landing had stirred up and by die toll which the Turkish bands, regulars and irregulars alike, were taking of the Greek troops, sought to control both by fixing “The Milne Line,” a sort of neutral zone which neither side should cross. In fact all the English experts with real knowledge, both in the War Office and the Foreign Office, had protested against the Smyrna landing, but in vain— the peace-makers in Paris, who were politicians, not experts, had taken their own way. Lord Curzon and Mr. Montague, speaking respectively from the Christian and the Mahometan points of view—England was then still the greatest Mahometan Power in the world—were arguing in London as to whether the Sultan, indeed any Turks at all, should be allowed to remain on the mainland of Europe, or whether they should be expelled “bag and baggage”—an argument which dragged on for some months. The one sane voice uplifted in Paris or London, among all these divided counsels, was that of Mr. Churchill, who pointed out that Turkey could no longer be held down and divided in pieces save by main force, and that England, at any rate, no longer possessed that force—he gave the exact figures of the disposable manpower. He was not heeded.

  The Ottoman Government, for its part, sat at Istanbul, frequently-changing Cabinets, continually saying “Yes” to the Allies and doing nothing or next to nothing, in the best traditional Turkish manner; this did not prevent them, towards the end of October 1919, from sending an olive-branch, borne by Salih Pasha, the Minister of Marine, to that now uncomfortably powerful and menacing rebel Mustafa Kemal at Amasya—which really constituted practically an official recognition of his position. After conversations lasting three days Salih Pasha took upon himself, in the name of his Government, to sign certain protocols, of which the most important was that the Government in Istanbul recognised that organisation with the long name, the “Association for the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Roumelia” as having a juridical status; and further undertook that no provinces with Turkish inhabitants should be ceded to any foreign Power, nor would any foreign mandate or protectorate be accepted for any part of Turkey. All this sounded magnificent—how the Ottoman Government interpreted these under-takings in actual fact appeared later. And so the unhappy year of 1919 drew to its close.

  But before that year ended, something else happened—on December the 27th Mustafa Kemal entered Ankara, and took up his residence in a railway-coach in a siding at the station
.

  Ankara lies right up on the central plateau of Anatolia, 3000 feet above sea-level, among the pale, bare, rolling uplands out of which rise mountain ranges, cream-coloured from the gypsum in them. Here the resplendent burning sun and the savage Asiatic winds rule unchecked, untempered by the moisture which the sea brings; from the air one sees the huge promontory of Asia Minor as a vast beige relief-map, with a green ribbon running round its borders—along the Black Sea, along the Marmara, along the Mediterranean—the strip where the ocean-bred moisture brings fertility. Ankara is an ancient city, and has borne many variants of its present name. One can see that there was a Greek town there once, and then a Roman one, by the inscriptions and bas-reliefs built (usually upside down) into the walls of the mediaeval Turkish citadel whose irregular outline crowns one of the twin hills on which the town was mainly built; over one of the many gateways leading in through the walls there is an inscription in very archaic Turkish which begins: “That the Name of God may in all things be glorified,” and then goes on to prescribe very exact regulations governing the sale of grain—it dates from the 13th or 14th century. By 1919 the town had spread out beyond the citadel walls, and some distance down the slopes below; there lay the swarming market, with its narrow streets, each devoted to some special form of merchandise; there were the larger schools, and a mosque or two. But the site of the modern town of Ankara was just a rather swampy plain, in the middle of which sat the railway-station, with an odd house or so beside it, linked by shining lines of rails to civilisation—on the north to Istanbul, fourteen hours away, on the south to Adana and Syria. This was Ankara’s one life-line, the German-built “Baghdad Railway.” A strange, utterly oriental, barbarous place Ankara was then, with no water-supply but wells and the muddy river winding below and behind the citadel hills, no electric light, and no made roads; up in the old town the steep narrow streets were paved with cobbles of an excruciating steepness and roughness, between which domestic slops seeped away or stagnated; the so-called “road” to the station was just a track, a sea of mud in winter, a wilderness of dust in summer.

  Such was the city, later to become his capital, into which Mustafa Kemal came riding, with an escort of whom Ahmet made one, on that day at the end of December. Ankara in winter is piercingly cold—the winds from Central Asia tear across the plateau, screaming between the ranges, whistling among the houses, rasping the skin of any face exposed to them; but the sturdy Anatolians did not care. Backward, barbarous, simple they might be, but there were certain things they understood, as simple people will: their Fatherland had been, and still was, menaced by hated foreigners, infidels; and their liberator, their Warrior Prince, was coming to them. In their thousands, from miles around, they assembled to greet him. Turks as a nation have no idea of time, usually they are late for everything; on this occasion they were early-three days early. They did not worry, they waited—camping in the streets, killing sheep and roasting them in the open, sleeping under the walls of mosques for a little shelter, sleeping anywhere. They were all in gala dress, in their best—and gala dress on the Anatolian plateau, even today, is something to see. The women wore full flowered trousers in a deep cherry-red, with brightly-coloured quilted jackets above, and brilliant scarves over their heads and faces; the men’s trousers were hitched up by equally brilliant scarves round the waist, and they wore bright jackets or thick sheep-skin coats, and fezzes or skull-caps wound round with gay striped turbans on their heads. They had brought banners and flags, they had brought musical instruments—and it was through these flower-bright crowds, loud with music, animated with banners, and yelling their heads off that Kemal Pasha rode along the route to the Station. Thence he went to the Bairam Mosque for prayer, the crowd waiting outside, and then to the large ugly building, at that time a college, where a few months later the National Assembly was to make its home; here he spoke to the populace from the balcony, wearing his thick fur-collared coat and the kalpak, the high cap of caracul. As they listened to his words the people wept for joy, seeing for the first time that extraordinary face, hearing that resonant, rather ugly, but unforgettable voice speaking words of reassurance and faith-faith in them. Then he went to his railway-coach, and settled down to work, hearing reports, giving orders, studying maps—and the peasants roasted some more sheep, and presently trailed home to their villages along the narrow rutted upland tracks, through the sticky whitish gypsum mud, which rose above their ankles. But a new epoch had dawned, and simple as they were, he had made them understand it.

  . . . . . .

  On New Year’s Eve, late in the afternoon, a very bent, dirty old man came to the door of the yali; when Mahmud Agha opened to him, he asked to speak with Nilüfer Hanim. Mahmud Agha was as obstructive as door-keepers are meant to be, but the old man was persistent—he must speak with Nilüfer Hanim in person. So he was taken down to the taslik, Nilüfer was sent for, and smothered in her çarşaf and fur coat she spoke with him. He put a letter into her hand—the address was printed in capitals, but when she opened it she saw Ahmet’s writing. “How come you by this?” she asked the old man, trembling in her excitement— “Where do you come from?”

  “From Scutari, Hanim Effendi.”

  “But who gave you this?”

  “A man, Hanim Effendi—a seller of sweet-meats.”

  “A young man?”

  “No, Hanim Effendi—an old man; old and poor, as I myself am.”

  There was no more to be got out of him; Nilüfer gave him some money, and sped upstairs with her treasure. Letters from Ahmet had been few and far between during these six, nearly seven months of their separation; in her own rooms she read it greedily. It was headed Ankara, and “Here we are, at last” Ahmet wrote triumphantly—“and here by Allah’s goodness we shall stay, away from all the weakness and cowardice and corruption of our capital. It is rough and wild and strange, this place, and not comfortable; but the people are splendid. Had you but seen them today as we came in!” He went on to describe the arrival, and at the end wrote—“I hope that soon we may see O here; I have spoken about him, and he knows what he has been doing.”

  When she had read and re-read the letter, Nilüfer went and sought out Féridé, and read most of it to her. “Has Orhan said anything of going away?” she asked at the end.

  “No. I have not seen him for ten days. You and I lead strange lives, for married women!” said Féridé ironically. Nilüfer looked sad, and the younger wife laughed and teased with her until she was cheerful again. But Ahmet’s words made his sister more eager than ever to see her young husband, and that night she sat again on the divan under the window, waiting and listening. The cold air off the sea blew into the room with the Persian ceiling, chilling her in spite of her coat; the damp salty sea smell was in her nostrils, the small unceasing noise of the waves against the stone embankment dinned in her ears, till she felt that her ears could never hear anything but that. And then, out of the darkness, came a faint chock-chock, the sound of oars. Instantly Féridé was alive all over. Now the grating noise of wood on stone— and then the low sweet whistle of the familiar tune—“I launched my falcon in flight.” She rushed downstairs, to the door into the covered passage; silently Orhan came to her side.

  “Come in, my love—come up. Oh, how cold you are!” she said as he kissed her and took her hands.

  “My treasure, my love, I cannot.”

  “Why not?” She pulled him into the lobby, and by the hanging lamp saw that he was very oddly dressed. This was not his familiar dirty, dump-raiding suit—he was wearing peasant’s clothes, with thick hand-knitted white woollen socks pulled up over his rather baggy trousers, goat-skin moccasins on his feet, and a striped turban wound round his head over a very shabby faded fez.

  “Orhan, what is this?” she asked, astonished. “Oh, how very funny you look!” She laughed softly. “But what does it mean?”

  “I have had the word that I was waiting for, and I am going” he said.

  “To Ankara?”

 
“Why do you say that?” he asked quickly.

  “Nilüfer had a letter from Ahmet today—a dirty old man brought it, she said. Oh Orhan, was it you? You are dirty enough!” Féridé said, bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

  “No, it was not I. What did the letter say?”

  “Oh, it was all about their arrival up there, and the people, and the enthusiasm. It must have been wonderful! But Ahmet said that he spoke of sending for you. Has he?”

  “My dearest love, you know too much—you are like your Grandmother!” said Orhan, half-smiling. “Yes, it is there that I go. At last I shall work with him, as well as for him! But listen, my treasure, my darling one—we cannot be separated like this for long! As soon as I can arrange something, will you come to me?”

  “But naturally—of course I will come. Oh, how wonderful that will be! Entirely together!”

  They embraced—then Orhan slipped away into the shadows of the covered passage, and Féridé bolted the door. There was no need to leave it open any more. She hastened upstairs, and sat again by the window, listening for the sound of oars; she heard them for a little, then they were silenced in the splashing of the waves.

  Part Four

  Chapter Eight

  In Istanbul the year 1920 opened in uncertainty and gloom. What was, in the event, to prove the last session of the Parliament of the Ottoman Empire, the Chamber of Deputies, met on January the 12th. They did do one quite important thing during this session—on January the 28th they adopted the “National Pact,” a series of resolutions, in essence practically the same as those passed at Sivas and Erzerum the previous summer, but couched in milder language—as well they might be, since the deputies were deliberating under the guns of the Allied Fleets. Plebiscites were agreed to for areas where there were mixed populations, but the Pact stated firmly that all the conditions essential to an independence as complete as that of any other State must be assured to Turkey, unhampered by restrictions inconsistent with the status of a free nation. But, though it was plain enough, it was mildly said.