The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  “So. I too am serious, and I say that you cannot do this.” She rose as she spoke, slowly—there seemed to be no end to that long upward movement; when at last her friend stood looking down at her Fanny could no longer be in any doubt as to what that unfamiliar expression betokened. It was more than disapproval, it was a contained condemnation. Fanny was quite unprepared for this; it wounded her. Her temper began to rise.

  “And why can I not?”

  “Because it is not wise, and moreover it is not seemly. For your own sake it is unwise, and also wrong—you are betrothed. If you go now, as I tell you, it will pass; indeed it will pass in any case—all such things pass in the end,” Féridé said, a momentary sadness dimming the swordlike edge of resolution in her face. “But it cannot go on; it must end, at once,” she continued, her face again determined.

  “Why?” Fanny asked again, coldly.

  “Because there is gossip.”

  “I do not mind gossip,” Fanny said, more coldly still.

  “Possibly not, but I do. I will not have gossip going on about the Ghazi and a member of my household. It is unseemly,” Féridé repeated.

  “In that case we can go to the hotel,” said Fanny, now in a cold fury —the word “unseemly,” so reiterated, stung her intolerably. She too rose at last and stood confronting her hostess. “It is late today, and my Uncle is out, but we will go to the hotel tomorrow. I do not wish to leave Ankara at present.”

  Féridé looked at her a long moment, with down-drawn brows. There was pain in her face—this quarrel with Fanny was hideous—but there was also an implacable resolve and immense strength. All that she had become, all that had been forged in her to a fine temper by the events of the past few years shone from her now with an intensity that was like a clear flame.

  “Fanny, you will leave Ankara, dear as you are to me, and whether you wish it or not,” she said steadily. “You say that it is your wish to remain, but my country is more important than your wishes, more important even than our friendship. I will not have you, for the sake of your personal feelings, spoiling and undoing my work among the women here—which is also his work, his wish. See!” she said, throwing out her long narrow hands—“You come among us as a western woman, free, independent, what we aspire to be, what we are struggling to become. At the ball you gave us courage to appear in western dress; you wore it yourself, and we all envied you for the naturalness with which you did it, and your indifference to adverse comment.” She paused for a moment, as if gathering her forces to say the necessary, the intolerable thing. “Do you remember those comments? ‘Brazen hussies, loose women’? But if you, English, now behave before us all as a loose woman would behave, what can we think of western manners, western freedoms? What becomes of our aspirations?”

  She paused again; but before that tremendous indictment Fanny was silent. Féridé watched her face, rebellious and wretched, in which the colour came and went for a few moments, and then went on.

  “Do you not see, you of all people, that our women must be serious-minded, irreproachable, in their approach to European manners? I have been trying, I mean to try to do more to make them understand this. True, we begin with externals like dress, but behaviour is more than dress, and honour and seemliness are more than details of behaviour, like passing first through a door! Freedom has its responsibilities-must I tell you that?” she asked, throwing the question in Fanny’s face as Fanny had thrown her question about the Ghazi’s greatness at Féridé herself a few moments before. Still the girl was silent, staring in stubborn anger at her friend. “Oh, you must see this,” Féridé exclaimed. “You cannot be so blind! You must see that you must go.”

  “No, I don’t see it, and I won’t go!” Fanny burst out at last, furiously. “I will leave this house, but I won’t leave Ankara. You—you’ve got it all wrong; you don’t understand. I never thought you could be so cruel!” she exclaimed, half-sobbing in her anger and distress. “Oh!—”

  Whatever else she might have said was cut short by the sound in the passage outside of the Doctor’s voice, making a pleasant remark to the servant as the front door opened and closed. The two girls stood listening. His step was heard approaching—then another door closed. He had gone into his study. Without another word, but now sobbing undisguisedly, Fanny fled from the room and ran upstairs.

  For both the young women the evening passed wretchedly—Fanny white and silent, Féridé conscientiously leading the conversation into channels congenial to her husband and the Doctor; when the two men, neither of whom was habitually very observant of the aspect of womenfolk about them, engaged in a prolonged discussion she lapsed thankfully into silence. Now and again she glanced warily at Fanny, but both at table and in the salon afterwards the girl avoided her eyes. They parted for the night upstairs, still in silence, and without their usual embrace. Nor did Féridé say anything to Orhan of what had passed; she waited on events. She had spoken; the next move was Fanny’s. But she passed a wakeful and miserable night, thinking, thinking, thinking—of her friend, and of her quarrel with her friend. Oh, it was all wrong, this line that Fanny was taking about the whole thing, and besides it was all unreal. She was deluding herself doubly, Féridé was sure—as to Kemal Pasha’s feeling for her, and as to her own feeling for him. “It is Turkey that she really loves,” the young woman thought, just before at last, as dawn was breaking, she fell asleep.

  The same discomfort prevailed the next morning, when Orhan had gone to his bureau and Dr. Pierce retired to his little room. There was no family breakfast at the villa; coffee and rolls were served in the guests’ rooms, though Orhan usually took his on the balcony, and Féridé, in a wrapper, sat with him. This morning she remained there for a long while, waiting, listening for Fanny’s movements, usually so audible in the fragile old house, and trying to decide what course to pursue. If she explained matters to Dr. Pierce he would, she was sure, see the necessity for their departure, but the very idea of doing so was deeply repugnant to her. If only she could make Fanny see it, and do the thing herself, naturally and gracefully. To Féridé, brought up as she had been under Réfiyé Hanim’s calm and dignified sway, any roughness and ugliness in personal relationships was horrible, and this breach with her dear Fanny unspeakably so. At all costs that must be healed; they could not part in anger and bitterness. She got up and moved into the room, intending to send for Fatma and ask Fanny to come to her—but the recollection of yesterday’s wretched scene, when she found herself standing in the actual surroundings where it had taken place, suddenly made her feel so ill that she sank into the nearest chair: her heart was beating uncomfortably, a light sweat sprang out on her forehead. Oh, could she really tackle Fanny again? Yes, she must; without giving way on the main point, somehow she must make their peace. In a moment, she thought; I must have a moment first—and folding her hands over the arm of the chair she rested her forehead on them.

  It was in that position that Fanny, also moved by acute unhappiness and a restless desire for a reconciliation, found her. She too had spent a miserable night, and though in theory she was still determined to get her own way, the practical difficulties, as she had stared at them through the hours of darkness, had begun to daunt her a little. But whatever happened—before she spoke to her uncle, or did anything—she must get right with Féridé again somehow. Perhaps she could make her understand. The door of the salon was ajar, and moving noiselessly in her white tennis-shoes she came in without being heard. At the sight of her friend in that strangely broken attitude, she ran to her with a little cry.

  “Féridé, dji-djim, what is it? Aren’t you well? Oh, what is the matter?”

  Féridé raised her head.

  “It is nothing. I felt a little faint, or sick, or something—I am better now. I slept ill,” she said apologetically. “But how are you, dear Fanny? You look pale. Did you sleep?”

  “No! How could I sleep when you and I had quarreled, and were angry with one another?” Fanny exclaimed impulsively. “Of course I di
d not sleep a wink.”

  Féridé began to laugh weakly. She put her arms round her friend and drew her close; childishly, Fanny knelt and snuggled her head into Féridé’s bosom. (She had never had a mother to do that to since she was nine years old.) Féridé stroked the yellow hair as a mother might, in silence. This was an unexpected help. Oh what a boon affection was, the solvent for so many difficulties!—without affection everything was impossible. There darted into her mind, unbidden, a recollection of the day at the yali when Nine had feigned a heart attack in order to check a quarrel between herself and the Pasha—and involuntarily she gave another tiny laugh.

  “What is amusing?” Fanny asked, lifting her face from Féridé’s wrapper and smiling too, but rather uncertainly.

  “Something Nine once did. But I shall not tell you!—it has no importance.” She went on stroking Fanny’s lifted head, almost mechanically, while she looked into the girl’s face; the motion of her hand was something Fanny needed, was glad of—she realised that. But the point at issue had still to be dealt with, and she felt so weak, so completely unequal to it.

  “Are we friends again?” she asked, as a preliminary.

  “Oh dji-djim yes!—I do hope so. How can you and I be at odds? It has made me so miserable.”

  “Me too. But dearest one, all the same you must listen to me, whether either you or I like what I have to say or not.” She felt Fanny stiffening in resistance within the arm which held her as she said that, but she forced herself to go on. Féridé’s instincts were feminine and sure, based on a natural wisdom unclouded by modern notions of rights or economic independence or any psychopathic theories of “self-expression” for women; it was unaccountable to her that Fanny should not see what she saw so clearly: that gossip about an affair between the Head of the State and a foreign woman was a breach of taste, a breach of style, which was altogether impossible, inadmissible.

  “Darling, have you reflected on what I said yesterday?—perhaps with too much heat, though it was true.”

  “Yes, I have,” Fanny said, rising as she spoke; doing this, she released herself from the influence of that long hand which had been stroking her head so soothingly. “I really don’t know what to say! I see your point, in a way, about the women here, though I don’t quite see why my going on seeing him in—well actually in quite a proper way, as I’ve been doing—should matter so tremendously.”

  “He would not let it continue in a proper way for very long!—that is not his fashion, ma chère! And in any case no one would believe that it was an innocent relationship. That is an Anglo-Saxon conception which it will take us several centuries to arrive at—if we ever do!” She said that with a candid little grin, quite unlike her usual fine smile of irony, and Fanny made a rueful little grimace in return. “No, I am not so ambitious as that,” Féridé pursued. “I want Turkish women to learn the alphabet of freedom, of life and behaviour outside the haremlik, before they start studying complicated English romances!”

  Fanny smiled rather unwillingly.

  “And I am to be sacrificed to their A B C?—I and my opportunity, my happiness?” she asked a little bitterly.

  “Yes! I should say yes even if there were any opportunity of real happiness for you with Mustafa Kemal Pasha. But there is not—there is none! Oh, how I wish you would believe me when I tell you that.”

  “No, I don’t quite believe you, because I’ve been made so incredibly happy by the little I have had from him. He’s so rich!—he has only to give one a few odd pieces, crumbs, to make one feel like a millionaire,” the girl said slowly. Féridé was moved, almost shaken by the soft tone of recollected rapture with which Fanny uttered those words.

  “Oh my dearest, but that is all illusion! It is just him—it is his charm. It will pass, assuredly it will pass,” she said urgently, as she had said the day before.

  A photograph of Réfiyé Hanim stood on a table at the further side of the room. Fanny went over to it.

  “No, it won’t pass,” she said, staring at the picture. “Réfiyé Hanim was quite right.” She turned back to Féridé. “Do you remember what she said, the very first time that Ahmet sang the Falcon. Song, down at the yali?—The heart does not come back.’”

  This time it was Féridé who burst into tears. Memories of Nine, memories of Ahmet came over her in a flood; and memories of Fanny too, the little merry Canary of long ago, who now spoke those fatal words with such fatalistic calmness. “Oh, don’t cry, dearest,” the girl said, going over to her. “Don’t cry for me. No, stop,” she said, as Féridé’s sobs became more violent, putting her arms round her and holding her close—“Remember the baby; it will be bad for him if you get so upset.”

  But Féridé was now quite overwrought. The strain of having had to broach the subject again, the moral effort which, so vainly, she had put out to persuade Fanny against this infatuation, and now seeing the imminent wreck of her friend’s happiness was too much for her self-control. Fanny, alarmed, went on trying to soothe her. Distracted as they both were, neither had heard nor heeded the sound of a car drawing up outside the house on the track below. Fanny was really worried— Féridé, so poised, so calm as a rule was not only sobbing, but murmuring broken phrases:—“Oh, it is cruel! Why must this happen to you, whom I love so much?” And then with a fresh access of sobbing—“And what will he say to this, your fiancé, your poor Alec?”

  Before Fanny could answer a servant threw open the door, and Alec Grant walked into the room.

  It so happened that precisely when Mr. Fisher’s letter reached his friend Alec was in London for a regimental dinner, and they encoun tered one another at the club. Over a drink the friend remarked that he had heard from Fisher. “Did he say anything about Fanny? She mentioned that she’d seen him,” Alec said cheerfully.

  “Yes—yes, he said he’d met her,” the friend replied, with some constraint; he was a good deal embarrassed. “At a ball,” he added needlessly.

  “Oh yes—Fanny wrote about the ball,” Alec said, still cheerfully. “It sounded a pretty queer show.”

  “Did she say anything about Mustafa Kemal?” the friend asked, rather nervously.

  “Yes—she said he beat up the old Turks who were being rude about the ladies in low-neck dresses,” Alec replied readily. “I must say the Turks are a queer lot.”

  “Ah,” said the friend—and nothing more. Alec at last noticed that there was something odd about his manner.

  “I say, what’s up with you?” he asked briskly. The friend said— “Nothing, nothing”—with such an obvious air of guilt and discomfort that Alec became suspicious, and rounded on him.

  “Look here, what is all this? Is it something about Fanny? Isn’t she well?”

  The friend floundered. “Oh, she’s well enough,” he said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Well, Billy’s worried—he wasn’t sure if you ought to be told or not,” the friend stammered.

  “Told what?”

  “Well, Billy thinks that—that perhaps—”

  “Oh, cough it up, man, for God’s sake,” Alec interrupted impatiently, as the friend showed signs of bogging down again.

  “Well, he said he thought she seemed to be getting rather interested in this man Kemal,” the friend said uncomfortably—Alec was beginning to look remarkably like the Fiery Cross.

  “Have you got his letter on you?” Alec asked, with a sort of cold sharpness. “Yes, I see you have”—as the friend reddened and leant back in his chair. “Let me see it, please.”

  “Oh I say! Really, I’m not sure—” the wretched friend protested.

  “Hand it over,” Alec said implacably, quietly stretching out one of those hands whose redness had so impressed the Pasha—and the friend, cowed, drew out his pocket-book and did as he was told.

  Alec, sitting in a deep armchair in the comfortable club room, read the letter through without the smallest change of expression. Mr. Fisher, though he had written in anger at what he regarded as Fanny’s “
goings-on,” had not exaggerated; the temperateness of expression which is instilled from the outset into English diplomatists already coloured even his private correspondence. But he did report that Fanny had danced with the Ghazi, about which, carelessly, she had said nothing to her fiancé; and he mentioned the gift of the tesbih, as to which she had also kept silent. “It was a wonderful thing—the finest I’ve ever seen,” wrote Mr. Fisher, who was becoming an amateur of Turkish objects of virtue; “and when she saw his card she blushed.”

  Alec Grant folded up the letter, slipped it back into its envelope, and returned it, still impassive, to his friend. “Thank you,” he said coldly. “If you will excuse me, I’ll go now. I have an engagement.” And he stalked away. The poor friend thought that Alec seemed to take his girl’s flirtations with another man uncommonly quietly. But Captain Grant made his way at once, by taxi, to his Colonel, who was also in London for the dinner, and asked for twelve days’ leave—to go to Turkey, he said, in reply to a question; on urgent business.

  “But will twelve days be enough?” his startled CO. asked.

  “Yes, Sir, thank you. Five days to go, five days to come back, two days to do my business.”

  The leave was granted, and Alec went off to the Foreign Office, where he had a friend, to arrange about his visas, and then cabled Mr. Fisher to get him a room in Ankara. And all through the four days and nights in the Simplon Orient Express, staring out of the window by day, turning over in the narrow bed at night, the poor Fiery Cross, shooting like a meteor across Europe, cursed all Turks in his heart, and three of them especially—Mustafa Kemal Pasha, this Orhan Bey, and above all his wife Féridé, who had put some sort of an enchantment on Fanny when she was too little to know any better, from which she had never been able to free herself.

  . . . . . .

  When Captain Grant walked into the salon and saw his fiancée kneeling beside a woman who was in floods of tears, he came to a halt just inside the door. Fanny sprang up. “Alec! What on earth! Oh, come outside a minute,” she said, going over to him and taking his arm; she led him across the passage and into the empty dining-room. “Wait just a second—I can’t leave her now; she’s all upset, and she’s going to have a baby,” she said hurriedly, and ran out again.