The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  “Yes, ma chère—but what have I been saying is true all the same,” Féridé returned. “All my life you have opened windows for me on new worlds. I think I should not have ventured to do that nursing if I had not known that you were nursing too. So if I am capable, now, of helping our women here to learn a new way of life, much of it I owe to my having known you.”

  She spoke with emotion as well as with conviction, and Fanny was touched. Féridé was being kind, of course, and she knew why, but probably there was some truth in it, too.

  “Dji-djim, I am very glad to hear you say that,” she said. “It’s as if I had somehow been able to pay back a little, in return for all the happiness you and your family—and Turkey—have given me.” She paused. “And it will make me feel as if, through you, I’m helping one of his things along,” she said, colouring again. “Because I do think what he’s trying to do for his country is so splendid.”

  “But now, when you go home, what shall you do?” Féridé asked.

  “Oh, what I’ve been doing—look after Uncle. He needs someone, really; and I can help him in his work. But I was thinking—later on, if they want translations made of European books for the schools here— Kemal Pasha was talking about that—that would be a thing I could do. You must let me know if there were a chance of my doing that. You will, won’t you? Promise?”

  “Yes, I promise,” Féridé said. She smiled. “I will keep it, too—as you kept your promise to me on the quay—do you remember?—that you would come back.”

  For some reason the tears came into Fanny’s eyes, at that—the happy past was brought back so sharply by the memory of that parting in the crowd beside the steamer. “You were independent that day!” she said, with a little unsteady laugh.

  “Yes, and you got the blame for it!” Féridé said.

  “Well, I’m glad I came back, in spite of—everything. Oh, tremendously glad. I found you again,” Fanny said, the tears now standing openly in her eyes—“and to you, I know that I am not just a fantasy!” The tears spilled over.

  “You are not! Oh my dear one, indeed you are not to me. Nor to Orhan—he has formed such a high opinion of you. And this does not always happen, that a husband thinks highly of his wife’s friends,” said Féridé with an attempt at gaiety, though there were tears in her eyes as well.

  “Dear Orhan—he is really an angel,” Fanny said. “Oh; I am so glad about you, altogether. It does not always happen, you know, either, that a wife’s friends think so highly of her husband!—at least not with us. You will have to learn to be critical of people’s husbands, dji-djim, if you are to be truly European!”

  Féridé laughed.

  “But I wish I had seen Réfiyé Hanim again,” Fanny went on wistfully. “It’s all very well to talk about European women, you know, Féridé—but if ever there was a wise woman and a great lady, it was she. I think really you owe much more to her than you do to me.”

  Féridé did not answer for a moment. She was thinking that in those matters of intuitive good taste and right feeling, where Fanny had certainly failed, Réfiyé Hanim’s feminine instinct would indeed have been unerring.

  “I owe her very much,” she said at last. “I believe that wisdom like hers is something international, and also outside Time. But I owe a great deal to you, Fanny, all the same.”

  Orhan saw the Pierces off that night. Féridé and Fanny said their Goodbyes in the salon. “I don’t promise to come back this time,” the girl whispered—“but I shall see you some time, somehow. Anyhow I shall never forget.”

  “Nor I,” Féridé murmured back.

  When Orhan returned from the station his wife was sitting in her place under the lamp sewing at a small garment. “So! Now we are alone again,” he said, looking round him contentedly, as he sat down. “But it has been interesting, this visit. Almost too interesting, perhaps!” She nodded in silence.

  “But now, have you reflected on this matter of Paris?” he asked. “These last days have been so full, I have hardly seen you alone.”

  “Yes, I have,” she said, raising her eyes from her work. “I think we should not go.”

  “So!” he said. He looked surprised, and a little disappointed. “Why not, my Life?”

  “For several reasons. First, I think that the Ghazi needs you; he is tired, he is not well, and every day he starts some fresh piece of work. There is this whole business of the property of the Tekkés to be cleared up” (the Tekkés were all the monasteries of various types, which Kemal had closed abruptly the very day after his return from Kastamonu). “There is the law abolishing the fez to be drafted, there is the opening of the Law School—it has no end!”

  “He has said that he is willing to release me,” Orhan objected.

  “I know—but should you take advantage of that? You told me that he spoke of his right hand being cut off, when the Minister first proposed it.”

  “True, he did. And your other reasons?”

  “For myself, I would rather remain here for the present, within reach of my Father,” she said. “He is old now, and very lonely. From Paris I could at most return once a year—here I can slip down to see him at any time.”

  “Yes, that is so. But should one put such private considerations before one’s duty?”

  “No, certainly not,” she said decidedly. “And if you are quite certain that it is your duty to go, and that no private considerations, such as Paris being a more amusing place than Ankara, enter into it, I have no more to say.”

  He laughed a little shamefacedly.

  “My Life, you are too astute, and too incorruptible! I think that has weighed with me; and I thought that you would like Paris, too. But there is also this to consider,” he went on—“It is important that our diplomats’ wives now should be women who can hold their own in the society of foreign capitals. You could do so, and I have reason to believe that the Minister has taken this into consideration.”

  “I have taken it into consideration too,” she said. “It is an obvious point. But on those grounds too, I think that perhaps we should remain.”

  “Do you? Why so?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I think there is even more to be done among the women here,” she said, “and that I might help to do it. We do not want many repetitions of a scene like that ball!”

  “But what could you do, exactly?” he asked. “Certainly they need alteration, Allah knows!—but I do not see how you would set about it.”

  “I cannot préciser too much now,” she said calmly. “If we stay you will see what I mean. But if the veil is to follow the fez, there will be much to be done first, to prepare our women and give them courage. And that is a sort of work that only women can do, really. Kemal Pasha can dragoon the deputies in public, and so perhaps teach them manners, however embarrassingly; but there are certain things that women can only learn from women.”

  “I believe you are right,” he said thoughtfully—then he smiled. “Fani Hanim could have helped in this,” he said rather slyly.

  “Yes—a little; not so much as a Turkish woman, as I and Mme T., for example. From foreigners they would not take it; it would not occur to them to imitate a foreigner, as it is already occurring to some of them to imitate me,” Féridé said smiling, thinking of the requests for advice on dress that she had received from various deputies’ wives since the ball.

  “I wonder what she would have thought about this, all the same. She is very intelligent, and she is a good friend to Turkey, as the Ghazi himself said.”

  “She was of my opinion,” said Féridé.

  “You asked her? But my Life, this should not have been spoken of: it is confidential still.”

  “I spoke of it to her four hours before she left,” said Féridé. “And Fani does not need to be told what to repeat and what not—she has lived among men and affairs all her life.”

  “Tiens, you are becoming quite western yourself!” he said. “Arguing in this way with your husband! But Fani Hanim was of opinion that it would be
better for us to stay?”

  “Very definitely, from the point of view of our women; naturally for herself she would have liked us to be in Paris, within easy reach. And Orhan, I do not see why you should not take a post abroad later—it is these next few years that will be so critical. I think myself that the society of foreign capitals will be much more lenient to the wives of our diplomats now, when we are a new and young State, than they will be five years hence, so that we should use the present to educate ourselves in social matters.”

  Orhan got up from his chair to kiss her.

  “Light of my Eyes, have you by any chance some Greek blood?” he asked—“for you are talking like an oracle!”

  “No, but I have had a European friend,” she said, returning his kiss.

  The following morning Orhan told Kemal Pasha of his decision to refuse the Paris post and to stay in Turkey. Kemal turned his keen icy eyes onto him, from under his bushy eyebrows.

  “Oglum, for myself I am delighted—I have no desire whatever to lose you. But is this really what you wish? I would not stand in your way.”

  “It is my wife’s decision, Sir,” said Orhan merrily.

  “Féridé Hanim’s?” Kemal said, his eyes and eyebrows now incredulous.

  “Yes, Sir. She has become quite modern, practically American, and now directs the affairs of the family! This, I take it, has your approval?”

  Kemal laughed loudly. “Orhan, my son, you are very impertinent. Is this the effect of your foreign visitors?”

  “Partly, Sir, I think it is.”

  “And did Féridé Hanim vouchsafe to give you her reasons?”

  “Yes, Sir. In the first place, she did not wish me to leave you during these next years,” Orhan said, serious now. “She thinks the work will be tremendous, and flatters me by imagining that I could be of some small use.”

  “She has a very clear head,” Kemal said, also no longer joking. “I shall be immensely glad to keep you by me. She has my gratitude. And in the second place?”

  “She is concerned about the social education of the women here; she thinks that both more important and more urgent than an elegant diplomatic representation abroad, at the moment.”

  “And how are you to effect this?”

  “I am not—she is to do that,” Orhan said, smiling again. “I believe her idea is that she and a few other young women might form a sort of feminine corps d elite here in Ankara, and by example and encouragement teach the wives of officials and deputies how to dress, how to behave in mixed gatherings—in effect, how to live as western women live. And she has the audacity to say, Sir, that though you may be able to teach the men, only women can educate women!”

  Kemal’s mouth smiled his peculiarly charming smile, but his eyebrows above his light eyes were as concentrated as Féridé’s own.

  “Really, she is formidable, Féridé Hanim! She is quite right. This task is more important than the other, and I fancy she is also right in thinking that in this particular affair she can do more for our country than I can,” He spoke thoughtfully, and a sudden look of fatigue came over the whole man as he did so. “It is not an easy job, to turn a primitive oriental nation into a twentieth century one,” he muttered. Then he seemed to give himself a shake, like a dog coming out of the water, and brisked up again.

  “But with helpers like, you, Oglum—and like her—it can be done. Now look, my son”—he pulled a file towards him as he spoke—“Here is this matter of the properties of the Tekkés in the Eastern Provinces which we must settle.” And Master and man bent together over the desk, loaded with papers, and began to deal with the immediate problems confronting the new Turkey.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © 1952 by Lady Mary O‘valley

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  ISBN: 9781448207404

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