The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  The next day they strolled about the old town, admiring the peculiar and rather specialised beauty of its architecture; loggias and balconies of silvery carved wood above pale plaster, recessed, or projecting startlingly across the steep narrow streets; the buildings of Kastamonu have a great reputation all over Turkey, and rightly so. In the market Fanny bought bright cottons and scarves. Orhan had to go and pay an official call on the Vali, and came back to lunch in high mirth. Everyone knew by now that this journey of the Ghazi’s meant something, some new project to be launched, and the Vali had demanded eagerly to be told what it was. “If I do not know, how can I prepare?” he kept saying distressfully. “I told him to wait—so few hours to wait, and then he would see,” Orhan said laughing.

  “Well, in a few hours we shall all see,” said Dr. Pierce tranquilly. “Fanny, do you want to come up and look at the citadel? He won’t be here before five, will he, Orhan? Féridé Hanim, I shouldn’t come if I were you—it’s a bit of a climb.”

  But Orhan said that there would not be time for the citadel—they ought to leave soon after three, to drive out along the road a little way to meet the President.

  “But we only got in at six,” Fanny said.

  “He will have left early,” Orhan said. (In fact he left Ankara at 5:30 a.m. in order not to be seen off by anyone.)

  They drove through streets thronged with people in holiday dress: many of the men in blue or white baggy trousers, with goat-skin moccasins and high white socks, the women in loud gay jackets and trousers, and still gayer aprons, with white or coloured scarves over their heads. There was a general outward flow of this throng along the highway leading to Ankara—the car followed it too, moving slowly through the crowds, and after climbing the first two or three loops pulled off the road at a projecting curve. From here they commanded a view both of the road above and the town below, where the river seemed to be flowing between two vast flower-beds, so dense and so brilliant were the crowds filling the embankments which flanked it on either side. They got out of the car and sat on some rocks to see better; the crowd, still moving slowly upwards above and below them was in holiday mood as well as holiday attire, laughing and talking— but there was a curious sense of tension, of expectancy, and the most diverse theories were being put forward as to what “the Ghazi” would do, or tell them, or show them, when he came. “Ah, whatever it is, it is to us that he will tell it, not those blokes in Ankara!” Fanny heard more than once. “He comes to us and tells us himself what he would have us do—it is not like in the old days, when we had to take our orders from men like ourselves.” The girl listened with a curious emotion. This was the opposite end, so to speak, of that two-hours’ discourse to which she had listened under the poplars at Çankaya; here, among Kemal Pasha’s own people, was where those far-reaching plans made their impact on the people themselves, whose lives they would affect—and she was here to see that impact taking place. Fanny was full of the liveliest curiosity as to what the new development would be, but she was quite unable to guess. Chancing to glance round now, she saw Orhan returning from the car carrying a square parcel done up in brown paper, which had been a good deal in evidence during the previous day’s drive—it had always been getting under someone’s feet, and Orhan had shown a tender solicitude for its safety.

  “Orhan, what on earth have you got in that?” she asked now. He gave her his side-long smile—“Wouldn’t you like to know, Fani Hanim?”

  A burst of shouting and cheering from further up the hill made them look in that direction. Down the road, at a foot’s pace, a small procession of cars was coming—in the leading one, standing up, rode Mustafa Kemal Pasha; but instead of the familiar high shape of the kalpak the astonished onlookers saw that he was wearing a Panama hat! —his entourage in the following cars were also seen to be wearing felt hats, except for one or two officers in flat Staff caps. As the crowd surged round his car, shouting, laughing and pointing, the Ghazi repeatedly pulled off his Panama and waved it at them, pointing to it with his left hand.

  So the secret was out—hats for Turks! Dr. Pierce looked on regretfully; he liked the old ways, he liked the fez—and he realised that he was attending its funeral. Fanny, feeling ever so slighdy deflated, glanced round at Orhan—taken by surprise, he was wresding with the strings on his parcel; a moment later, triumphantly, he produced a neat trilby and clapped it on his head. Fanny turned away to conceal her amusement—the young man looked so odd in the unwonted headgear, and his air of triumph was so naïve that it quite upset her gravity. But Féridé was clapping her hands in sincere delight—she realised now why Orhan had insisted that she should put on the toque made for the Counsellor’s luncheon. This was another step towards modernity, towards western ways, another move away from being a peculiar people. First the fez to go, then the veil—yes, that was the right order; and with the veil gone, a freer, fuller life, such as Fanny had always lived, would open for her and her countrywomen. As she watched her friend’s face, ardent and yet grave, Fanny no longer felt like laughing; she realised a little of the meaning of what she was seeing.

  She realised it still more that evening when they all went to the house of an acquaintance of Orhan’s, across the river from the one where Kemal Pasha was staying, to watch the torchlight procession which the good folk of Kastamonu had organised in honour of the occasion. The streets were still full of those rejoicing throngs of people in their gay outlandish dress, the dress that he hoped to abolish; though many of the men had already abandoned their fezzes, and having nothing else to wear, went bare-headed. Whether the immense enthusiasm was really at the prospect of wearing Panamas and trilbys instead of the fez, or for the Ghazi himself, Fanny could not know, and dared not ask, for Orhan was in a state of blazing excitement over the new, the wonderful move; so she simply leant from the window and watched. Presently an orange glare away to their left heralded the advent of the procession—as it passed along the further embankment, the torches streaming in the air with the movement, a band drumming out a rather monotonous tune to a stirring rhythm, while the innumerable flames were reflected in the darkly-gleaming water, the thrill of die popular excitement ran like needles along her nerves, and she cheered as vigorously as the multi-coloured crowd in the roadway below. The procession halted outside the Ghazi’s house, and after a moment or so he came out, bare-headed himself, and stood at the top of the steps, smiling down at his people, and raising his hand in greeting. While the crowd yelled with joy, pressing and surging round, Fanny watched his face, strongly lit up in that primitive orange glare—the extraordinary breadth and height of the forehead, the prominent cheekbones, the blunt jutting nose, the wide mouth above the solidity of the heavy chin; all now illuminated, not only by the flaring torches but by affection and even tenderness—the tenderness a hint of which had so surprised Féridé the first time she met him. Ah, no wonder they loved him, Fanny thought; no wonder anyone loved him. Now he was talking to the people, colloquially, jollily, they could see, though his words were drowned in the shouts and laughter of the crowd; presently he waved to them again in farewell and went indoors, and the procession moved on. Orhan, his face vivid with enthusiasm, swung round on Dr. Pierce.

  “Now do you believe that he can do anything he wants with this people?” he demanded.

  “He can,” said Dr. Pierce.

  Next day there was a tremendous reception in the Town Hall, attended by delegations from all the organisations in the city itself, and from the various prefectures throughout the vilayet—Orhan’s party was of course present. Now for the first time Kemal Pasha was to speak his mind about the hat and the fez, and Dr. Pierce listened with the deepest interest to see how he would deal with the subject; the Ghazi’s relations with his people were beginning to fascinate him, whether he would or no.

  Kemal Pasha dealt with it with his usual practical simplicity. He asked if there was a tailor present, and a little man was pushed up onto the platform. Kemal showed him his suit. “Is this a good, cheap su
it?” Yes. “Is it an international form of dress, such as civilised men wear everywhere?” The tailor, fingering it, agreed that it was—he spoke up stoutly, in a voice that all could hear, and other working men in the crowd averred audibly that it was indeed a good civilised sort of suit.

  “Right. Well, you see what a simple suit it is, easy to make; and all the materials are manufactured here, in our own country. Now, you could make caps out of this cloth, caps with peaks, such as other nations wear.” He beckoned to another man in the crowd, who was still wearing the national head-gear—“Come up here, my friend.” Rather abashed, the man mounted the platform—Kemal clapped him on the back with cheerful friendliness. “Will you give me your fez for a moment?” he said. More abashed than ever, the man took it off, revealing a cotton skull-cap such as the poorer Turks, who had but one fez, habitually wore to keep it clean, and handed it to the Ghazi; the fez itself had a piece of embroidered linen twisted turban-wise round it, in the country fashion.

  “Thank you,” Kemal said nicely to the man—then he held up the turbaned fez for the whole gathering to see.

  “Now, look what we have here: first a cap, then a fez, then an embroidered turban. How complicated!—and much of their cost goes out of the country, to foreigners. When I say this,” he said, glancing at the owner of the despised objects with great kindness, “it is because I wish to emphasise one thing of great importance, this: we have got to become a civilised people, in all respects. We have suffered many evils— and for this reason, that we have never known or understood the outside world. Now it is time that our ideas and our mentality should become, from beginning to end, those of civilised peoples; and we will not listen to what this one or that one says about it! Look at the whole of Turkey, of the Islamic nations; think of the evils that they are suffering, even today, because they will not change their ideas and their way of life, and conform to the general advance of civilisation. That is why we were rolled in the mud during our recent disasters—and if we managed to save ourselves from utter ruin in the last five or six years, it is thanks to the change which we were able to achieve in our system of government.” He was speaking now with an immense controlled emotion, and Dr. Pierce recognised the vibrant response of his audience, though they remained perfectly silent.

  “Now,” Kemal Pasha went on—and his voice rang out—“we cannot stop! We must go forward; we are forced to it. The nation must clearly understand this fact—civilisation and progress are a burning fire, which consumes those who stand aside from them, are indifferent to them. Our next task is to occupy worthily, nay, to raise still higher the place which we already hold in the family of nations—of civilised nations. In doing that, and believe me, only in doing that lies our prosperity, our happiness, and an existence worthy of the dignity of human beings.”

  He stopped—and when it was seen that he was not going on, tumultuous applause broke out, lasting for minutes. Dr. Pierce studied the faces of the audience. He had known Turkey well for over thirty years, and he was quite familiar with the rather moderate degree of enthusiasm or expression habitual to the race—this outburst of emotion was unlike anything he had ever seen, or ever thought to see. From the alive and ardent faces of the crowd in the hot hall his glance travelled to that of the man who had stirred up these depths of feeling in a normally impassive people. Kemal Pasha stood very quiet, not smiling now, with a sort of tenseness of expression, as if he were holding the people in front of him to their new resolution—it occurred to Dr. Pierce that that was precisely what he was doing; for he put up a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, and for the first time the Doctor noticed how far back his almost colourless hair had receded from it, and the greyish pallor of his face. It must be an exhausting job, he thought, first to create a nation out of the ruins of a decrepit empire, then to galvanise it into waging a successful war for freedom against impossible odds, and finally to start dragging it, primitive, stubborn and conservative as it was, along the road of progress and modernisation. He regarded Kemal Pasha with more sympathy than he had felt for him as yet.

  Later that day he spoke of the speech to Orhan. “He did it most awfully well—so simply, and yet it couldn’t have been more clearly, more tellingly said. The tailor was planted, I suppose?”

  Orhan laughed, a little unwillingly.

  “Well yes—he had to be. The one preparation I was able to tell the Vali to make yesterday, was to have some tailors in the hall. That puzzled him very much!”

  “That phrase about the advance of material progress—I’m not sure that I should call it civilisation, myself—burning up the laggards is quite true, too,” the Doctor pursued; “but he put it very originally. My goodness, what magnetism he has!”

  “Ah, you felt that too? Yes, indeed.” Orhan was pleased.

  “It must take it out of him no end, doing that to a crowd, all the same. It suddenly struck me this afternoon that he’s getting a little bald—he can’t be a young man any more. How old is he?”

  Orhan was vague. “Really, do you know, I am not sure.”

  “He is forty-five,” said Féridé promptly. She was rather glad to have the leader’s age and baldness brought out. But Fanny’s reaction to this pleased her a good deal less.

  “People like him have no age,” the girl said decisively. Orhan however was delighted by this sentiment.

  Mustafa Kemal Pasha spent a second night at Kastamonu, and then drove on to Inebolu; Orhan had to accompany him this time, and there was a suggestion that the rest might go too. But Féridé was really getting tired; there had been a lot of going about and social activity, and though Fanny was wild to go on and see the Black Sea coast and the port where Féridé had landed, and all that further stretch of the Road of the Revolution, on this occasion her hostess frankly pleaded exhaustion. So she and the Pierces returned to Ankara, speeding over that interminable plateau across which she and Nilüfer had crawled only five years before; travelling in the same direction, the contrast struck her even more forcibly than it had on the outward journey.

  Back in the comfort of the villa among the vineyards they read—at least Fanny did, avidly—of the Ghazi’s further activities on his tour. The young men of Inebolu, gathered to meet him, had greeted him with the cry—“Ask of us what you will! We will do it.” In reply, with the same directness that he had used at Kastamonu, Kemal Pasha told them—“I speak to you as a brother, a comrade, or a father. The Turkish nation, which claims to be a civilised people, must demonstrate to the world that it is really civilised, by its outlook, its mentality, its wav of life—and especially its family life.” There followed a good deal more about clothes and head-gear: the fez was really of Greek origin, the soutane worn by the Imams was the dress of the Jewish rabbis; finally—“Nations which attempt to achieve progress encumbered with a mediaeval outlook and primitive superstitions are doomed to extinction, or at least to slavery and humiliation,” he thundered—and the youth of Inebolu thundered their applause in reply. Back at Kastamonu, encouraged by the reception which his revolutionary ideas about dress had received, he showed his hand more clearly, and proceeded to an open attack on the religious orders, the monasteries full of dervishes and novices who encouraged the people in superstition. He made a neat pun on the word tarikat, which has the double meaning of a religious order, and a road or way—“The only rational tarikat is the tarikat of civilisation.” And again the young applauded, but the older people went away shaking their heads and murmuring dissent. And so, pausing at many towns on the way to explain his views to fresh audiences of humble people, who at least listened to whatever he said because he had saved them and he loved them, and they loved him, he slowly made his way homewards.

  Turkey is a great country for gossip, and even if Féridé was a little unjust to diplomats in general, they certainly do hear a lot of it—after all it is part of their business to do exactly that. So Mr. Fisher soon learned that Dr. and Miss Pierce had gone to Kastamonu for the hat announcement. Fisher had his full share of that
odd loyalty to men who have been at the same school as themselves which is one of the most peculiar characteristics of Englishmen; it often persists into middle life, even in the case of a man they have hardly seen in the interval. But Fisher had “kept up,” as he had told Fanny, with Alec Grant, and was very fond of him; and all this gossip, coming on top of the tesbih and what he had seen at the ball, vexed and worried him on his friend’s behalf. Everyone knew what Kemal Pasha was like where women were concerned, after all. “If this goes on, that girl is going to make a fool of herself,” he thought. And after twenty-four hours of angry cogitation he wrote what he considered to be a tactful letter to a mutual friend, who had also been at Wellington, telling him what was going on. “I can’t make up my mind whether old Alec ought to be told or not,” he ended uncomfortably. This letter went off by bag the day after Féridé and the Pierces returned to Ankara.

  Two or three days later Kemal Pasha returned; and Orhan with him, enthusiastic over the success of the tour. Fanny could not hear enough about the latter part, which she had missed, and the two of them talked away about it, and the Ghazi, and Turkey’s future, endlessly. Three weeks before this would have delighted Féridé; now her eyebrows drew together as she listened. The rides continued—and one evening when they got in Fanny, instead of coming to the salon as she always did, went straight up to her room—Féridé heard her light step on the old wooden stairs. For some reason this trivial thing made the young woman nervously alarmed—presently, unable to control her anxiety, she went up and tapped on Fanny’s door. Fanny was changing, but bid her come in; she found her friend distraite, deep-eyed, with a sort of radiance about her that confirmed her suspicions. She asked about the ride—Fanny, pulling clothes out of drawers, chattered away in reply, elaborately casual. At last it emerged that—oh such fun —Nazli had been frightened by something and had bolted, “and the others all got left behind. We ended up in a little valley with a spring in it, all among the bushes, so pretty.” That was all Féridé could get out of her, but at dinner and throughout the evening the girl had an absent look, with a silvery hint of bliss about it; when spoken to she would look up as if she were coming back a long way from some distant secret place. It was a look Féridé recognised—she felt certain that there must have been some passage between the two, and she worried more than ever.