by Ann Bridge
In the salon Féridé had pulled herself together, and was blowing her nose and dabbing at her eyes.
“C’est lui?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s him all right,” Fanny said rather grimly.
“But why has he come?”
“I don’t know. I’ll go to him in a minute and find out—if you’re all right?”
“It will be this Fisher!” Féridé pronounced.
“Probably, as they’re friends,” Fanny said. She was collected and calm to a degree which astonished Féridé.
“Oh, my poor one! How frightful this is for you!” she exclaimed.
“Perhaps it’s just as well to get it over quickly,” said Fanny. “But look, I must go to him.”
“Bring him in here—I go upstairs,” said Féridé. “Where is he?”
“I put him in the dining-room; the coast is quite clear,” said Fanny with a tiny grin.
When Féridé had gone she went across to the dining-room again.
“She’s all right—she’s gone upstairs. Come to the salon—the chairs are better,” she said.
But in the salon, where Alec stared about him for a moment in surprise at the many strange objects and furnishings, they did not at once use the chairs. Fanny stood in front of him and looked up straight in his face.
“Alec, I don’t know what you’ve heard, though I can guess why you’ve come, but I’d better tell you at once. I’m going to break it off, my dear. I must.”
“Will you please tell me why?” he asked—the sight of Fanny, and the rush of feeling that it brought, for some reason made him very angry.
“Yes, you’re entitled to know that. I’ve fallen in love with somebody else—anyhow enough in love to make it impossible for me to marry you.” Fanny had determined if possible to keep Turkey out of it-Turkey, and her previous doubts and hesitations because of Turkey.
“Is it this Kemal Pasha?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And are you going to marry him?”
“Good heavens, no! There’s no question of that,” she said decidedly.
“Then what do you mean to do?”
“Just not get married at all.”
“But that’s simply senseless!” he said. “If you’re not going to marry him, I can’t see why you won’t marry me.” Then she saw the cloud of a horrible suspicion come into his eyes, but he didn’t utter it directly. “Do you mean to stay out here?” he asked, very coldly.
“No—we shall be coming home fairly soon, I expect; term’s begun, but Uncle arranged to be a bit late if he wanted. I haven’t settled anything with him yet—he doesn’t know about this; but now you’ve come, I suppose he’ll have to,” said Fanny rather bitterly.
“Did you expect me to stay quietly at home and hope for the best, when I heard that another man was making love to you and giving you presents?” Alec Grant asked angrily.
“I think you might have written to me, and told me what gossip you’d heard, and asked if there was anything in it. You know you’d have got an honest answer,” said Fanny stoutly.
“I should have thought that in the circumstances you might have written to me,” he retorted.
“I was going to, today,” she said disconcertingly.
“Why today? Why not before?”
“You mean when this owl Fisher wrote off and told you all the tattle of the town?” she asked, angry in her turn. “Yes, I don’t doubt there was tattle, because I’m English, and talked good Turkish—I was ‘news,’ and he’s always news! But there wasn’t anything to write to you then-it’s only just blown up, really, in the last day or two.”
“Why has it blown up now, then, if there was nothing in it before?”
“Because I suddenly realised what it meant to me,” said Fanny slowly. “I suppose it had been growing in me before, without my knowing, like it does; but I honestly only realised it these last two days. Oh Alec,” she said, suddenly noticing his stricken face, “don’t look like that!” She made a movement as if to put her hand on his arm, and then drew back. “I am so frightfully sorry,” she said. “It’s hideous for you, and impossible of me! You can’t say anything worse to me than I think of myself, when I think of you.”
But Alec Grant was not the man to lose his bride without a struggle —he had not raced across Europe to hear, and quietly accept, her decision not to marry him. He saw that little impulsive movement of penitence and affection, and he stepped forward and took her in his arms. “This is all the bloodiest nonsense I ever listened to,” he said, between ferocious kisses. “You’re going to come home and marry me, and forget this chap. Why, you haven’t known him two months, and I’ve loved you, and well you know it, for six years.” He went on kissing her.
Fanny didn’t struggle or resist, and presently her passivity disturbed him. He let her go.
“Won’t you?” he asked, now pleadingly, looking in her face.
“Alec, I can’t. It’s impossible. I’m sorry; frightfully, desperately sorry, but you must believe me when I tell you I can’t.”
The bitter argument went on, Alec hurt, angry, and pleading by turns, Fanny penitent but implacable. “I can’t understand why,” he said at last, striding across the room and back. “You’re bewitched, that’s what it is—these people have got hold of you somehow. You always were bewitched by that—” He broke off as the door opened, and Féridé came in.
Chapter Twenty-three
FÉridé, while bathing her eyes upstairs, doing her hair and putting on a dress, had nevertheless made some necessary dispositions. First she sent a message by Fatma to the servants to prevent them from irrupting ceaselessly into the salon with cups of coffee; then, while she attended to her face, she thought rapidly. No, Fanny wasn’t going to give way, whatever she said, or whatever her Alec said—she was sure of that. Wretched as it was, the fact had to be faced. So she despatched a note by the chauffeur to Orhan, telling him to arrange a small dinner that night at Carpic’s for himself, Dr. Pierce, Captain Grant, “and this creature Fisher, if you can get him. Tell Dr. Pierce that the Cook has had a seizure! Captain Grant is the fiancé, but there is an éclaircissement going on—I will explain later, but I cannot have you all sitting round the table staring at a broken betrothal!” Féridé wrote hurriedly. Orhan gave one of his shouts of laughter when he read this in his office, before he sent the chauffeur off to book a table at the White Russian restaurant, and to take a note of invitation to Mr. Fisher.
Féridé also kept an eye on the time—this must be being horrible for Fanny. How unbecoming, how distressing, to have to arrange, and still worse to disarrange one’s fiançailles for oneself! How much wiser and nicer to have a marriage carefully prepared for one by experienced and loving elders, who looked into disposition and character as well as resources and status, and produced a thoroughly suitable husband, to last a life-time—with whom, by the normal processes of marriage, one usually fell in love. She herself had had rather more latitude than most of her friends, thanks to Dil Feripé, and had been to some extent in love with Orhan before her marriage; but, she thought, glancing at the little French clock by her bed, in this particular she doubted if western ways were really as good as Turkish—English ways, rather, for old Marthe had often explained to her that in France too marriages were arranged. She looked at the clock again; they had had nearly an hour. Quite enough for that poor child! She went downstairs.
When she walked in and saw Fanny’s face, pale and strained, and the face of the English officer, strained too, but flushed and angry, she felt that she was not too soon; they looked exhausted as well as utterly miserable, and she felt unspeakably sorry for them both. Someone had obviously got to take the situation in hand, and when Fanny had presented Captain Grant, “You had better go and rest a little, ma chère,” she said. Fanny went, thankfully. Coffee was brought in as she went out, and Féridé, taking her cup, explained courteously—she had been a little unwell that day, Fanny had been waiting on her, she must be tired. Alec, listening to th
e beautiful French—his own was quite good—studied this evil genius of Fannys, now that he was at last confronted with her, with a sort of angry fascination. An elegant woman, undoubtedly a lady, but clever as the devil, he should say, and probably as worldly as her appearance. But soldiers instinctively recognise the power of command in others, and he recognised it, grudgingly, in this tall well-bred girl with the quiet voice and the beautiful manners. No doubt that was how she had somehow put it across Fanny—look how she had just sent her upstairs, like a child! Her husband was Kemal Pasha’s principal running-dog, so Fisher said—no doubt she had helped the thing along! Though he could not help noticing what honest-looking eyes she had—and queer that they were grey, too.
Féridé now dismissed the waiting servant with a nod, and then turned again to Alec Grant and gave him the greatest surprise of his life.
“Captain Grant, this thing has happened while Fanny was under my roof, and I cannot tell you how much I deplore it. You must pardon me for not greeting you when you arrived, but I had just been reasoning with Fanny about it; it was a painful conversation, and I was a little upset.”
He stared at her, recalling the sounds of sobbing that he had heard as the salon door opened on his arrival, and the tear-stained face which he had seen over Fanny’s shoulder as he came in—un peu énervée was putting it rather mildly.
“But—you weren’t crying about this?—about Fanny and me?” he stammered, incredulously.
“Certainly I was—about what else? It is such a pity, such a misery!” He continued to stare, and she guessed shrewdly enough at his thoughts —his astonishment was so plain, in his honest red face and greenish eyes. “Is not this a thing to weep for, for her?” she said with great gentleness. “Did you expect her friends not to mind?”
Alec Grant’s mind always moved rather deliberately, and at that moment his ideas were undergoing a complete revolution. For six years he had nourished a jealous dislike of these Turkish friends of Fanny’s, and for the past few days he had suspected them of complicity in hateful things; now he was being given to understand, quite clearly, that the woman before him felt exactly as he did himself about Fanny and Kemal Pasha. He would almost have been glad to be able to think that she was putting it on; but he had seen her tears himself—and anyhow, face to face she didn’t look like a liar. He was silent for quite a long time. At last he said—
“Madame Orhan, I owe you an apology. I didn’t know,” he paused, “that you were on my side,” he ended rather awkwardly.
She skimmed over the awkwardness, left it aside. But she had got to help Fanny all she could, and it was no good giving him encouragement which would, she knew, be quite baseless, and would only involve Fanny in more wretchedness and arguments.
“Yes, I am. I should wish to see Fanny happily married to you. But I realise that that cannot be, now—I am miserable about it, but I accept the fact.”
“Well, can you tell me why?” Alec Grant demanded, breathing heavily. “She will only go on and on saying that it’s impossible. But people get over these things, don’t they? Mightn’t it come all right in time, if we wait a bit?” It did not occur to him to think how strange it was that he should be asking this sort of advice from a total stranger; and one whom he had disliked, without knowing her, for so long.
Féridé answered him with the same compassionate decision with which Réfiyé Hanim had answered the Pasha’s question about whether Nilüfer might be going to bear a posthumous child to Ahmet.
“No, I am convinced there is very little hope of that,” she said.
“It seems so impossible that a thing like that should happen in the time!” he burst out. “Only a few weeks, after all. I simply can’t understand it!”
“No, it is not an easy thing to understand,” she said thoughtfully. He looked at the down-drawn eyebrows that gave her such a peculiar expression of concentration.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Understand it? Yes, I think so. What she is really in love with is Turkey, and she has been in love with that for fifteen years! That is what gives her feeling for Kemal Pasha its strength.”
Again he stared at her.
“Could you explain a little more? I’m not sure that I follow. How can one be in love with a country?” But even as he asked the question he remembered how often he had been irritated by Fanny’s passionate absorption in Turkey and Turkish affairs.
“Fanny came here as quite a little girl,” Féridé said—“from a most uninteresting school, and from a home where there was no normal family life. Istanbul and the Bosphorus are very beautiful, and Fanny was always impressionable; and she came and saw them year after year. And in our house she did find family life, the lonely little creature; she simply basked in it, and that became linked in her mind with all the beauty about her. She adored my Grandmother, even my Father was very fond of her. I remember her telling me one day how lucky I was to live in such a beautiful place, among such lovable people.” Involuntarily a tiny smile crept round her mouth as she remembered that occasion, and Fanny stuck in the cedar-tree. “And that unusual childhood made, I am sure, an indelible impression on her,” she went on, “and has given her an outlook that is not at all common.” With his earnest faithful eyes—like the eyes of Kemal’s English dog, she thought —fixed on her face she was aware of a strong desire to give him what comfort she could.
“Yes—go on, please.”
“So you see, all this, the life here, the people, I and my home, everything to do with Turkey became for her through those years of the war and after it a sort of home for her spirit and her imagination—a place she went and hid in from dull and tiresome things. But she was intelligent enough to realise, as time went on, that it might all be an illusion, because she had been so young at the time. That was why she wished to return and see it with grown-up eyes. And when she came she found it no illusion; and the—it is hard to express it clearly—the longing that she had felt for this country for so long gave her a sort of famished appetite for it, made her love Turkey more than ever. Can you understand at all?” she asked, a little anxiously—for now they were at the crucial point.
“You make it all sound much more reasonable,” he said carefully— “I think you put it very well.” He was silent for a moment, remembering how he and Fanny had argued in the cottage at the time of the Battle of Sakarya as to whether a child could be a person or not, and how she had said that Féridé was a person, and a remarkable one. Fanny had probably been right. Then distress and impatience overcame him again. “But does one break off an engagement just for a thing like that?—for all that you’ve been saying?”
“No, not for that alone. Fanny is breaking off her engagement to you because she has come to care deeply for Kemal Pasha, who is a very remarkable person, it is generally conceded. He admires and likes her very much,” she said steadily, “and has made his admiration plain by seeking her society, and by making her such presents as are customary here.” She felt that it was important to stress the normality of the relationship, which she was sure that miserable Fisher had distorted and exaggerated, as Mme T. had done—it would perhaps lessen this poor Captain Grant’s mortification now, and help his peace of mind later. “And he is, after all, the Head of the State,” she went on—“I imagine most young women would find admiration from a man in his position flattering in a very subtle way.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped it, when you saw what was happening?” he broke in.
“No. I tried to, when I began to guess what might happen, but I failed,” she said promptly. “Fanny is not a child; she has directed her own life for years, more so even than most English girls—and she can be very headstrong, as you probably know.” She said this without any disarming smile, just calmly stating the fact—he nodded heavily.
“But what I should like to make clear to you, if I can,” Féridé pursued, “is this—perhaps it is rather complicated, but I believe it to be true”—she stopped, seeking for words.
“Go
on,” he said. “I believe you really understand her better than I have ever done.”
She could have wept at this unexpected tribute. “Oh, you are kind! It is only because we were children together—like sisters, and that is something different to anything else.” She gathered her forces for the explanation, while he sat staring, vacantly, she thought, in the direction of the photograph of Réfiyé Hanim, which was opposite his chair.
“I want you to understand why her feeling for him is what it is,” Féridé said. “He typifies what she has loved so long—Turkey! He is the visible emblem of the dream—the dream that has obsessed her for so many years. We think of him as the saviour of our country—and I believe the world recognises him as that, also; in any case, she thinks as we think. And she has seen him among his people! I tried to prevent that, but I could not,” she said, with curious urgency. “So you see, this is it,” she went on. “If she were a jeune personne who had just come out here and lost her head about him, I should say that she would get over it. But as it is, I ought not to tell you that I think she will, for I do not—though I wish with all my heart that she would, for as I was telling her, there is nothing in this for her!”
“You mean—it’s really rather a one-sided affair?” he asked, to hex surprise, after a moment.
“In the long run, yes.”
He got up and walked about the room.
“Thank you very much,” he said at last. “It’s very good of you to have taken so much trouble—for both of us. And you don’t advise my trying again?”
“Certainly not!—at least not now,” she said with decision. “I should say goodbye, and go home, in your place.”
She could not bear his face when she said that—no doubt he was thinking of the very different homeward journey for which he had hoped when he came out.