by Ann Bridge
Now, close ahead, she could see the yali, a long graceful complication of silvery baroque, and at the sight she forgot about Nilüfer as well as Ankara. Behind it the conifers of the koru stood out in dark masses—she thought she could even pick out the cedar in whose boughs Fanny had hidden, years and years ago; to the left of the garden, with its magnolias and Judas-trees, the low dark entrance to the caïque-hané gaped like an open mouth; beyond the house stood the great plane-trees, leafless now, under which her father and Dr. Pierce used to walk up and down, deep in talk, in those happy summers in the past. Now they were close inshore, and she could see a little group standing at the top of the short flight of marble steps which led up from the water—as the caïque drew in closer still she could pick out Zeynel, the gardener, old Mahmud, and a stumpy veiled figure which could only be Dil Feripé. There was a fourth, small and slight—“Osman, who is the youth on the terrace with the others?” she asked.
“Little Ali, Hanim Effendi—Mahmud’s grandson. He works now under me—he has the makings of an excellent servant.”
“Little Ali! He has shot up like a reed beside a lake! He used to be so tiny,” Féridé said, remembering how Litde Ali had crept like a mouse to her bedroom to warn Orhan of the arrival of the Ottoman police, only three years before.
“Ah, there is good living in our Pashas house!” Osman said, complacently. “But we still call him Little Ali.”
With a graceful sweep and a smooth skilful shipping of oars the long narrow boat drew up beside the steps—Little Ali ran down and held it as Osman stepped ashore and handed out Féridé. The next moment, with her old familiar pea-hen screech, Dil Feripé fell upon her, and hugged her as if she could never let go. “Oh, my little one!—my pet, my nursling—at last you return! Come in, come in—I wish to see your face.”
“Dadi, it is good to be at home again,” Féridé said, returning the hug.
“So I should think! What a terrible place, this Ankara! Greeks all about, and you, my poor lamb, with only these peasants, these Fatmas and Kezbans, to look after you. What a life for Our Master’s daughter!”
Féridé had to laugh—Dil Feripé was exactly her old self. But now Zeynel came up, to bow low and greet her; and then it was Mahmud’s turn. ‘Welcome, Kü-jük Hanim,” the old man said, in his excitement using the word by which he had addressed her as a girl; his old face was working with emotion. “Allah is merciful,” he said, and turned quickly away. Dil Feripé impatiently drew Féridé into the house; in the wide hall she pulled off the çarşaf and scrutinised her darling at length. “Thin!—much too thin,” she pronounced. “Ah, we will put some flesh upon your bones here.” Then she surprised her by asking—“And this Kemal Pasha, have you seen him, yourself? What kind of a man is he to look upon? Handsome? Ah, how I should like to see him! Is he tall?” It was clear that Mustafa Kemal had now become a hero even to dadis.
“He is not as tall as Orhan Bey,” Féridé said, amused, as they started upstairs.
“Orhan Bey is a fine young man, we all know,” the dadi said. “He is well? That is good. Very important, I hear he is now.” Then her poor old face suddenly seemed to crumple up. “But oh, my Ahmet—my beautiful boy!” She wept.
Mdlle Marthe was waiting in the upper hall—too tactful to intrude on her pupil’s meeting with Réfiyé Hanim, too excited to wait to see her till it was over.
“Alors, mon enfant, at last one sees you!” she said, embracing Féridé with much warmth. She too scrutinised her closely, and likewise said that she was very thin. Marthe herself had not altered in the least-the grey hair no greyer, the Victorian clothes no less Victorian, the old eyes as shrewd and watchful as ever. “Come in to your Grandmother,” she said—“She has wearied for this moment.”
“One second, dear Marthe; tell me how she is,” Féridé asked eagerly.
“Better; much better, since she heard that you were coming. In truth, I think she has remained alive to see you! But she is fragile; the heart troubles her a good deal, especially at night. She gets little sleep. But come to her—she has been watching for the boat.”
The Frenchwoman threw open the doors as she spoke—“Here is our child, at last, Madame,” she said, and went out, closing them gendy behind her.
As Féridé crossed the wide spaces of the Savonnerie carpet, threading her way swiftly between the French furniture towards the familiar figure by the window, silhouetted against the brilliant light outside, past and present together so flowed in upon her that she felt as if she were in a dream. Could it be real, the mixed beauty about her, the soft perfection under her feet? It bore no relation whatever to her life and surroundings for the last two-and-a-half years. But when Réfiyé Hanim rose at her approach, a thing she had never done in the past, and came towards her with small uncertain steps, everything else was blotted out in a bliss of profoundest affection and love. “Oh Niné, my dearest darling!—come back, sit down,” she said, folding the old woman in her young arms. “There!” she set her on her sofa again, and knelt beside her. “Oh, why did you rise for me?”
“My child, I suppose I was impatient,” the old lady said, fondling the crisp dark head beside her. “I saw the caïque come in—but of course there were many who wished to greet you, Mahmud and Zeynel and Dil Feripé. You cannot know how eagerly we have all waited for this moment! To us, you know,” she said simply, “the time has seemed long, while you were absent. But let me look at you”—and she tilted up her grand-daughter’s chin.
“Niné dearest, please do not tell me that I am thin!” Féridé said, with a little half-sobbing laugh—“I have had enough of that already!”
“Well, if it is true, and I fear it is, it becomes you,” the old lady said. “You are very much en beauté, my darling. It is surprising, for it must have been hard for you, up there. Quelle vie!—no servants, all this work in the house and for the wounded. Ah well, it is another world, nowadays! Who could imagine you, doing the cooking!”
“Oh yes, Niné, I am become a very good cook!—though not as good as Nilüfer. But really, you know, in many ways Ankara is assomant— quite terrible! You have no conception”—she glanced round her—“how good it is to be here again.”
“Je le suppose bien! Tell me, how is my dear Orhan? Also thin, also surmené?”
“Rather over-driven, yes. For the moment things are a little easier, since we are no longer in danger, and the Delegation has gone to Lausanne—he gets more rest. At one point I was really frightened about him—before the last battle.” Her lips quivered, remembering that conversation about Orhan with Ahmet in her kitchen—it was the last time that she had had a really intimate talk with her brother. “Ahmet was worried about him too, then,” she said with her usual outspokenness.
The old lady’s face changed at the mention of that name. “Ah, Ahmet!” she said, with indescribable sorrow in her voice. But at that moment the door from the dining-room opened, and the Pasha walked in. “We will speak of this later,” Réfiyé Hanim murmured, as Féridé sprang up to greet her father.
The Pasha’s appearance shocked her. He had aged very much. Orhan, standing with Ahmet’s body at his feet in a gully on the battlefield of Dumlupinar, three months before, had said to himself that this would finish his father-in-law—and if it had not completely finished Asaf Pasha, it had certainly made an old man of him. His hair had turned grey, his thinness and his stoop were more pronounced than ever, all his taut firmness had somehow deserted him—only a sort of fragile elegance remained. He greeted his daughter with unusual warmth-“My child, it is very good to see you. I trust that you left your husband in health?”
“I thank you, my Father—by Allah’s goodness, yes.” But after her formal words she gave him one of her old impulsive hugs. “Oh Baba-djim, how I rejoice to be at home again!”
He was warmed and pleased, she could see, but all the same the conversation limped a little after he came in—it was very different from the complete spontaneity and ease of her intercourse with her grandmother.
And so it remained throughout her visit, which lasted for over two months. Asaf Pasha was almost visibly restraining himself all the time from adverse comments on the abolition of the Sultanate; while Orhan’s last words to Féridé, on the platform of the small station where they had boarded the train, seemed to be ringing perpetually in her ears when she was talking to her father: “Do not discuss politics with him; and above all, say nothing of the future. Kemal Pasha will choose his own time for the next move, of which I spoke to you.” There was constraint on both sides, which really only vanished when they spoke of Ahmet. There Féridé could add more details to those given in Orhan’s letter, and could describe her brother on his last visit to Ankara; and on this particular subject the Pasha could feel warmly, and speak warmly, about Mustafa Kemal and his courteous gracious letter, which had produced a tremendous effect on the old gentleman. He was proud, too, of the victory over the Greeks, and praised the Ghazi’s military skill; but the horrors of the Smyrna massacres had tainted even this to some extent for him, with his old-fashioned correct uprightness. He fled as often as possible to happier and more neutral subjects of conversation with his daughter. “Do you ever see Ismet Pasha?”
“Oh yes, frequently, at Çankaya. He is a delightful person, so modest and gentle.” She took pains to amuse and beguile her father with rapid verbal sketches of the new personalities up at Ankara, who, hitherto little known, now counted for so much; with her keen observation and gift for lively racy description she kept him happy and amused in this way for hours—when he drove off to the Club, he was able to regale the other old gentlemen there with all sorts of fresh titbits from the new capital, the parvenu political front.
To do this comforted her. Féridé was extremely fond of her father, and to see him stricken by Ahmet’s death, aged by sorrow, and with his world as he knew it crumbling about him—with worse to cornel-filled her with a profound pity. In her childhood’s blue-and-white bedroom—she had refused absolutely to return to her own married apartments on this visit—she thought over, at night and in the early morning, fresh bits of gossip with which to entertain him; she put on the prettiest of the many pretty trousseau frocks for which there had been no room in the scanty luggage which she had taken to Inebolu, to please his eye —altogether, she exerted herself for his happiness and amusement with energy and skill. She was rewarded by his evident pleasure; his mind became more alert, even his walk and movements brisker under this treatment.
But with Niné all was ease, perfect ease and delight in the freest possible intercourse. Féridé had been starving for just this—to discuss, by the hour, all the new aspects of her own life, all her various and unwonted activities up at Ankara with her grandmother. She wanted to bring them, so to speak, before the tribunal of Réfiyé Hanim’s wisdom and judgement—the tribunal before which, up till two-and-a-half years ago, her whole life had always been brought. She had said nothing in her letters about nursing in the hospital, fearing to cause the old lady distress; now, sitting quietly in the salon one morning, she told her grandmother all about it “I wish you to know this, Nine,” she said at the end. “I think I did right, but I should greatly like to hear your opinion. Oh,” she broke off impetuously, “I must tell you one thing— so amusing, and so moving, too. One morning when I got to the hospital—it was during the Battle of Sakarya, at the very darkest moment of all—I found complete consternation. Thirty patients were missing—they had simply vanished during the night! They were all what are called walking cases,’ men with wounds in the’ arms or head; and in time I learned from the men in my own ward what had happened—I was rather bien with them by then. They had quietly slipped out during the night, and set off to walk eighty kilometres, to rejoin their regiments and go on fighting!” She paused. “For such people, one would do anything! Is it not so?”
Réfiyé Hanim had listened very quietly to the recital of Féridé’s doings, to her so extraordinary and unprecedented, making very little comment—now she spoke.
“My child, this is all very strange to me. But if men were suffering, perhaps dying, for lack of attention and help, certainly you did right to go and succour them. As for these dinners with strangers in Mustafa Kemal Pashas house, that seems to me more doubtful. But since you tell me it was by your husband’s wish, in fact at his direct command, I think that you could not do otherwise.”
That satisfied Féridé. “I am very glad to hear you say this, Nine. I must confess that at first I found it very—difficult, trying; the dinners, I mean. Somehow nursing the soldiers was much easier; I suppose because it was a real, a human need, not just a social obligation. But Orhan attached so much importance to that—Kemal Pasha, you see, wishes to have everybody about him very modern, and in the European manner.”
The old lady gave the tiniest sigh. But— “He is a great general; he has saved our nation,” was all she said.
Féridé prolonged her visit to the yali from week to week. She found it very hard to leave her father and Réfiyé Hanim, to whom her presence was such an evident delight; and she was not in the least needed at home, since Orhan was away from Ankara, accompanying Mustafa Kemal on the first of his speechifying tours—“marrying his people,” as Dr. Pierce called it afterwards. At Smyrna, at Ismit; to the journalists of Istanbul, who travelled westwards to meet him—the man was everywhere, explaining the future as he foresaw it, what he wished the Turkish nation to do and be, and how they should set about doing and being it. Féridé, remembering her talk with Orhan, was greatly struck by the speech which the Ghazi made at Smyrna on the status and the rights of women, in February. She was still at the yali, and as so often before Asaf Pasha brought the afternoon paper up to the salon, and sticking his feet out towards the great glowing brazier read excerpts from the speech aloud to his womenfolk. “If a society is content that only half the members who compose it should live in a manner appropriate to the ideas current in any given century, that society is weakened by half its potential…. Woman’s principal duty is motherhood; but since mothers are those who give the most primary education of all, the importance of their role is evident…. It is on our mothers that we must depend, in great measure, to make adequate human beings of us. In the past they have done what they could, but now we need men of a new mentality, of a different sort of excellence.” He read on a little further, and then threw down the paper with a snort.
“He has picked up these ideas from his advanced’ women friends, who have thrown off the veil—and with it all modesty!—and gone abroad to get a so-called ‘education’; and now they will be doctors, lawyers, and God knows what else!”
Réfiyé Hanim had listened in silence so far; now she said-“It sounds strange to me, this, my son, as it does to you, but I am not altogether sure that it is really so foolish. You noticed what he said about motherhood being women’s essential duty—that is true and wise. Enfin, without women there would be no Turkish nation.”
Féridé laughed out at that; the Pasha frowned at her.
“But I do not see,” the old lady pursued slowly, “why wholly ignorant mothers should bring up better sons than women with at least some education.”
“Our daughters are well-educated, but so far they have not produced many sons,” the Pasha said, with a burst of uncontrollable bitterness.
Réfiyé Hanim frowned in her turn. “My son, in my opinion such things are better left unsaid,” she observed, in a tone of quiet severity. It was the first and probably the only time, since he grew up, that she had so spoken to her son.
Chapter Eighteen
The negotiations at Lausanne dragged on till July, 1923—“It took as long to come to birth as a baby!” Orhan said laughing to Féridé, when at last the Treaty was signed. And it was another two months before the Entente forces finally left Istanbul; two days later the Turkish Army made their formal entry into the old capital.
This time Asaf Pasha went and watched everything, instead of keeping out of the way, as he had done five years before when the Allied troops, hea
ded by Franchet d’Esperey, marched in. He was greatly impressed by the formal salute to the Turkish flag and the Turkish Army given by the English Commander, in his white uniform, on the open space below the mosque at Dolma-Batché before the embarkation; by the smartness and soldierly bearing of the troops who lined the square, and by the brisk music played by the military bands. “It was well done—very well done,” he told Réfiyé Hanim on his return. “Enfin, the whole thing was extremely chic.”
“My son, the English are chic—as my dear Father always said, they are ‘gentlemen,’,” she replied, using the English word. When the Nationalist troops marched in four days later, the old man was rather less impressed. The days of belts and rifle-slings made of lamp-wicks were over, and the smartest troops had been chosen for the formal parade of this entry—but their marching was a little ragged, their uniforms and above all the rather slovenly cut of their hair bore no comparison with the traditional “spit-and-polish” of the British Army. But they were fine tough-looking men, they had notable victories behind them, and above all they were Turkish. “They were stout fellows; really they looked very well,” Asaf Pasha told his mother. “One cannot ask more of them, considering all our handicaps. Now, I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “the Government will come to Istanbul. After all, this has always been our capital.”
But in that the Pasha was mistaken, though he was by no means alone in his mistake—most Turks took it for granted that the seat of government would be transferred promptly from the remote and barbarous discomforts of Ankara to the more civilised surroundings of the old capital, with its lights, its shops, its beautiful buildings, all its metropolitan graces and elegances. That however was not in the least Mustafa Kemal’s idea. He knew the old city too well—its age-long tradition of bribery, of the greased palm, and its large population of Armenians, Greeks and Levantines, whose methods no appeals to Turkish patriotism could ever touch or alter. The subject came under discussion one night when Féridé and Orhan were dining at Çankaya. Féridé was sitting beside the Ghazi; an elderly General on her other side leant forward and gave utterance to the popular opinion. “And when does the Assembly move down to Istanbul, Your Excellency?”