by Ann Bridge
Chapter Eleven
At about the time that Féridé and Nilüfer were arriving at the han at Kastamonu the Pasha, down at the yali, went to pay his usual evening visit to his mother. Dil Feripé, who had been sitting with her, scuttled away when he came in; she seemed to have developed a habit of disappearing on his entrance, and though Asaf Pasha paid little attention to the comings and goings of the subordinate women of his household as a rule, he had begun to register this new phenomenon. However, it was not worth mentioning; and after kissing the old lady’s hand with the customary greeting, he seated himself, stretched out his legs to the comforting warmth of the great brazier, and settled down for a chat.
“And when do our daughters return from Kandilli?” he asked presently. “They have been gone now nearly a week.”
Réfiyé Hanim sat up rather straight on her divan, with concentrated eyebrows.
“My son, they are not returning,” she said briefly.
He stared at her.
“Ané, what can you mean? Not returning from Kandilli?”
“Not returning at all. They have gone to Ankara, to join their husbands.”
“But—” he was staggered. “You said they were going to Kandilli.”
“I did. It was not true.” Her old voice was astonishingly firm. “They have acted as faithful wives should, and are joining their husbands at their request.”
The Pasha got up, and walked up and down the room, his long legs moving among the fragile green and white furniture like the blades of a pair of huge scissors; presently he came to a halt before his mother again. He was very angry.
“Ané, I am astounded. You to tell me an untruth! Should I not have been consulted, about my own daughter?”
“My son, I wished to avoid complications,” said Réfiyé Hanim calmly.
“What complications?”
“Your opposition, which can now have no effect, and your anger, which falls on me alone.” She looked at him steadily, but with a look of great beauty. “My dear son, I apologise for my untruth, but I could not do otherwise. Believe me that I was deeply distressed to lie to you.”
He sank down in his chair again, with an almost bewildered expression. The world was all upside-down, and getting more so every day. Ané to tell him a falsehood—the girls to go off secretly to that barbarous place Ankara, remote from civilisation. It was all fantastic. And dangerous, too; there was opposition to this wild fellow Kemal and his rebellious followers: disturbances, down by Broussa even fighting. At that thought anxiety mastered all other emotions.
“How did they go?” he asked.
“By steamer to a place called Inebolu; there Ahmet or Orhan was to meet them and take them up to Ankara.”
“Who accompanied them to Inebolu?—besides their maids?”
At last the old lady showed signs of distress.
“No one—and they did not take their maids,” she said unhappily.
“Not take their maids! Travel unaccompanied on a steamer! Ané, I do not understand, apart from deceiving me, how you could allow this!”
“Féridé refused to take anyone. It distressed me greatly that she would not, but she explained to me that their departure must be secret and unobtrusive, and that it was impossible to do otherwise!”
“You have always spoiled that child!” the Pasha said, in great vexation; “spoiled her, and given way to her. You could surely have insisted.” But even as he spoke he remembered how Féridé had successfully opposed him, so gently, that day in her boudoir. No, one could no longer insist on things with Féridé—and his vexation altered its direction.
“It is all that husband of hers,” he said irritably. “He is a fine fellow, but mad, quite mad; he has no sense of proportion.” He paused, and lit another cigarette, for once without his customary “You permit?” “And where are they to live, up there? I am told that there is nothing —no convenience, no comfort; a dreadful place.”
“Ahmet and Orhan have taken furnished houses for them.”
“And servants? maids? How can they find proper servants in such a place?”
This was a thing which had continued to worry Réfiyé Hanim, who did not altogether share Féridé’s optimism on the point.
“One must suppose that their husbands will have arranged that,” she said. “It would be natural.”
“Bah! Ahmet, with his head in the clouds, and Orhan, reckless of the comfort of others! Much good they will be at such a task! They do not know what they will have to suffer, those poor children; they will live in undreamt-of conditions.”
The old lady did not answer at once; she turned her head and looked out through the low window at the blue sky and blue water. At last—
“Perhaps undreamt-of things are coming to pass,” she said slowly. “If so, they, the young ones, must bear their part in them.”
. . . . . .
Kastamonu, where Féridé and Nilüfer spent that night, is a very ancient city—the Byzantine Castamon, in what had once been the kingdom of Paphlagonia, known as an important place during the middle ages, and eventually the seat of a Turkish vilayet. It lies astride a shallow bright river, climbing the slopes on either side; in the centre, startling as the castle at Foix, an abrupt iron-red rock, crowned with a bronze-coloured fortress, rises into the clear air. Except for the twin embankments along the river, flanked by beautiful old houses, plaster below and graceful silvery wood above, the whole town is on a tilt; narrow cobbled streets and passages lead up-and-down-hill between other houses, silvery grey, with carved super-pending balconies and strange little conceits of recessed arches, all alike enriched with the strange wooden harem-shutters, little lozenges of wood enclosing tiny lozenge-shaped openings, through which the inmates could see, yet not be seen.
This delightful town and the han itself, a noble square edifice of low brick, amused and pleased Nilüfer and Féridé; but they had little time to admire its beauties. A message from the Vali’s bureau was sent to Hassan the night they arrived, telling him to proceed to Ankara as rapidly as possible—it was already three days old, owing to their steamer being delayed, and he came hobbling into their room to say that he thought they should start the following afternoon, and make a short stage to the han near the village of Bostan. “Then we can cross the Ilghaz Dagh next day, and get down to the han at Ilghaz itself. From there it is only four or five days’ drive to Ankara.”
“Another four days, after crossing these hideous mountains!” poor Nilüfer exclaimed. “But how vast this Anatolia must be!”
“Yes, it is rather large,” said Hassan.
So they shopped quickly in the bazaar next morning, buying quilts and blankets in the small open-fronted booths. It had rained heavily in the night, but the sun was shining as they drove off after lunch, bringing out the strange metallic colours of the great rock crowned by its fortress, towering above the piled roofs of the town. The road left the valley in a series of steep bends till it was level with those menacing bronze walls, and then turned south over open downs, where the Ilghaz Dagh broke upon their view, plastered with new snow and glittering in the sun—Féridé exclaimed at its beauty, but Mehmet muttered gloomily about the road. At one point a very muddy track—one could hardly call it more—branched off to the left, near a small roadside cemetery full of tall narrow tombstones with stone turbans on top, leaning drunkenly at all angles; Mehmet pointed to it with his whip—“The Tosia road!”
“Well, it does not look good, I must say,” Féridé observed.
Soon they were in among the foothills of the range; their road rejoined the river and kept beside it up a long valley, where thickets of buckthorn grew along the river-bed, their scraggy twigs, now set with silvery-green buds, rocking in the strong current. Then the hills raked back and the valley broadened out into a wide flat in which stood Bostan, a rather sordid village with a saw-mill; wood-cutters were coming home as they drove through it, and the last rays of the setting sun lit up a peak high above—the snow was only a little way from the ro
ad now, thin and patchy among the leafless beech-scrub; the air was damp and cold. And so they came to the Bostan Han.
It was the most squalid place any of the three had ever seen. The downstairs room, as usual with a stove at one side, was filthy, the floor covered with refuse, the trestle tables greasy; there was a strong smell of rancid fat, combined with an even stronger smell of stables. A rickety staircase with a broken handrail led up inside the stable itself, which was deep in dung, to the upper floor, where the landlord showed them into a small bedroom with one table and one chair. The rusty stove had been newly lit—presumably with damp wood, for it was giving out abundant smoke but no heat—the sleeping-bench sagged down at one end, and the floor-boards were so ill-fitting that the stench from the dung and animals below was as potent as in the stable itself.
Here, after eating a miserable meal the two girls spent a wretched night, rolled up in their new bedding—cold, half-choked with smoke, and eaten alive by insects; neither slept much, but lay listening, after some time, to a steady downpour of rain on the roof. Would that mean more snow up above tomorrow, Féridé wondered; but though she knew Nilüfer was awake, she kept her speculations to herself. They rose early, and dressed at once; Féridé, going down in search of hot water, en countered Hassan in the nasty lower room.
“You are up—that is well,” he said. “Shall I order breakfast at once? We ought to start as soon as possible.” She thought he sounded anxious.
“It is the snow?” she asked.
“Yes—come and look.”
He led her to the door. The mountain-sides a little way above the han were already white, and at a bend in the valley about a mile beyond, where the road turned above a bridge and began to mount, they could see a party of cadets trudging uphill, with the laborious gait of those who walk in snow. “We must lose no time at all if we are to get across tonight,” the young man said, and now there was no doubt about his anxiety.
“I will go and hasten Nilüfer—please order breakfast. Is Mehmet ready?”
“Yes, he is harnessing the horses.”
While Nilüfer packed Féridé, with her own unaccustomed hands, rolled up their bundles of bedding, corded them somehow, and then fetched Mehmet to take them down to the carriage. The man was full of gloom. “Terrible!” he said, waving his hand up the valley. “Certainly we shall stick fast!”
“Let us put our trust in Allah,” said Féridé piously.
For the first two hours after they started it was not so bad. The road climbed steeply, winding in and out across the ravines that cut deep into the mountain-side; it was however very narrow, and the ground sank away below with horrible abruptness—moreover in many places the snow, sliding down off the bank above, had blocked the inner half, so that the carriage had to creep along the extreme outer edge; when this happened Nilüfer closed her eyes, and even Hassan, just ahead on his horse, cast an anxious eye backwards. The beech woods were left behind at last, and they were among the pines; no more snow fell, but a keen wind got up, whisking the fresh surface into small flurries, spilling the loads off the pine-boughs, and making the travellers very cold. The tracks of another carriage which had left the han before they did were always in front of them, as well as those of the cadets whom they had seen plodding up above the bridge, but their light vehicle had out-distanced all the cagnés—the few which had spent the night at the Bostan Han had not attempted to make a start in such weather. Féridé had in fact been surprised to find any there, and asked Hassan about it—“Surely they cannot have come with matériel de guerre off our steamer? They go so slowly.”
“Oh no,” the young man told her, “the stuff comes in all the time, in all sorts of boats, some quite small, sailing-boats, and they get it off as fast as the carriers return to Inebolu; then it leaves Seydiler as soon as cagnés come back from Ankara to take it. There are always some in motion on the road—so Ismail Agha told me.”
Presently they overtook the cadets, who were sitting in a woodmen’s shelter by the road-side, eating some food. Oh yes, they were going on, they told Hassan—“but it is a fatigue of perdition, walking in this snow!”
“So it is for my horses!” Mehmet muttered sourly. The snow grew deeper and deeper, and more and more slowly went the carriage, though the little horses strained to their task, their sides dark with sweat, with white lines of lather where the traces rubbed them. Half an hour later, rounding a bend where a bridge crossed a ravine, they heard a light jingling of horse-bells, and down the spur of hill beyond a carriage came in sight, descending towards them. “Hah!” said Hassan —“they come from Ilghaz. Good; the road must be in order.”
But they did not come from Ilghaz. It was the carriage that had left the han before them, turned back; and as Mehmet pulled his horses in to the side of the road to let the other pass, a vigorous interchange took place between the two drivers. Hopeless, impossible, the other driver said—he was a Kastamonu man; the snow always deeper, worse and worse. “I will not risk myself and my horses—not I.”
This had the worst possible effect on Mehmet, who was obviously not born an optimist, in any case. He was all for returning too. Hassan argued with him: he had got to go on, and he did not wish to leave the ladies; he offered the man a considerable extra sum to push on to Ilghaz. But Mehmet was sulky—no, he should turn back too; he would go on and find a turning-place, and then go back to the Bostan Han.
This was too much for Féridé’s patience—sharply, to the immense astonishment of Hassan and Nilüfer, she intervened in the argument.
“So—like a man from Kastamonu you will let yourself be beaten!” she said. “This is strange! I thought the men of Inebolu were otherwise—equal at least to the women from there, who carry both shells and their infants together, for their country.”
This appeal to local pride worked on Mehmet for the moment; grumbling and muttering, he nevertheless drove on—and drove past the next turning-place, and the next, and the next. At the fourth or fifth they saw the tracks in the snow where the other carriage had turned back, and both Hassan and Féridé silently feared the effect of this on him; however he drove past it, still muttering. But the snow became deeper still, till it was half-way up to the horses’ knees; the slides from the banks above grew more and more frequent, and always more difficult and dangerous to pass—twice Féridé and Nilüfer got out while the little vehicle, tilted on a horrible slant, passed over the hump —Féridé to make the passage easier, Nilüfer because she was too frightened to remain in her seat. At last there came a point where the road, contouring a bold projecting spur of the mountain, swung out sensationally above an almost vertical drop, here bare of trees, into the valley below; and at this very point the wind had produced both a deep drift and a big slide. Mehmet drove forward till his horses were up to their knees, and the carriage wheels up to their axles, in snow; then flung himself back in his seat with the single word “Yok!” (No.)
Hassan, who was ploughing along just ahead, heard him, halted, and turned his horse. “What is it, Mehmet?”
“It is that we cannot go further,” the driver said. “The thing is impossible!”
Féridé, successful last time, was moved to put her oar in. “Hassan Bey, will you not ride ahead and prospect? Perhaps round the bend the conditions are better.”
“I go no further,” Mehmet stated.
Hassan, ignoring this utterance, rode on—and returned presently to say that on the further side of the drift the snow was much less deep, in fact easy.
A long and unpleasant argument then took place between the two men. Hassan was at once determined to go forward himself, and unwilling to leave the two young women in the lurch. He offered a huge bribe over and above the contracted sum for the trip to Ankara—Mehmet appeared unmoved by this.
“Very well,” Hassan said at last, angrily. “I will drive; you can walk—forward or backward, as you will! Féridé Hanim, could you lead my horse? Nilüfer Hanim, will you walk to lighten the carriage?” He dismounted, the girls go
t out; Féridé took his horse by the bridle, while he hoisted himself onto the box, displacing Mehmet. “You can lead your horses if you choose,” he said, “but we go on to Ankara.” “Zut!” he called to the exhausted little beasts, who once more strained forward gallantly.
This display of resolution disconcerted the driver. He went to his horses’ heads, and dragged them forward; Féridé led Hassan’s mount, Nilüfer stumbled through the snow. Pulling, whipping, shouting, the little procession moved forward; slowly, slowly, but always up and on. Now they were out of the long wind-piled drift, and the going was easier; but the horses were panting heavily, and Féridé insisted that she and Nilüfer should still walk, to ease them. “Soon, surely, we must reach the summit of the pass,” she said. “Mehmet, you know the road —is it not soon?”
Oddly enough when one approaches the crest of the Ilghaz Dagh from the north the watershed is almost unnoticeable, whereas coming from the south it hits the eye, with a sharp descent and a wide view. The party from the Bostan Han only realised that they had really crossed the ridge when the road began, unmistakably, to go downhill— the horses stopped panting, and began to trot; whereupon Hassan pulled them up, relinquished the reins to Mehmet, and handed the two young women, who were soaked to their knees, into the carriage again. On this southern slope the sun had power: the snow grew less, then turned to slush, runnels of water ran musically in the roadside ditches; birds sang in the bushes about them, where tender leaves were budding on the boughs. Mehmet began to whistle to his horses, and cracked his whip—at a good round pace they rattled down into the valley of the Gok-Çai, where pretty houses, wooden-built like chalets above solid stone bases were grouped here and there, casting long shadows in the evening light. After some miles of this they quitted the main road, turned right over a shoulder of hill, and as the light was failing drove into the small town of Ilghaz. They were all in good spirits, in spite of being in the chilly state of drying-off after having been soaked through; even Mehmet seemed to share the general sense of triumph and achievement. The han, though modest, was clean and pleasant; a brazier was brought for warmth, and their clothes were dried. Untroubled by bugs, they slept like the dead—all but Nilüfer, who woke Féridé once or twice with a cry of nightmare, and mutterings about precipices.