Chapter XI: The Man with Two Wives

I had given up hope of seeing a Turkish house where there was more than one wife. I was sorry, and Fâtima was sorry that she was unable to satisfy my curiosity. The opportunity came, however, when we least expected it.

We were sipping our coffee one day in the big salon. _Guzel Sutanna_ (the beautiful nourrice), as I called Fâtima’s nourrice to distinguish her from her little daughter’s nourrice, had tucked us up comfortably amongst the cushions, and whilst distributing to us lumps of pumpkin preserve which she had made for our special benefit, she was recalling certain chapters of her own strange life-story which Fâtima translated for me.

I loved _Guzel Sutanna_. She was so superbly human. Sorrow had sweetened what was still a beautiful face, beautiful enough to allow one to guess what her beauty and charm had been. She had had six successive husbands. Her lords and masters, she confessed quite as a matter of course, had never been more to her than a means towards an end. Maternity was her rôle, not wifehood; then God gave to her for a little while what the old nourrice called “the most precious of His angels,” but death and the Imperial Harem took them all away from her, and in her old age she became what she had firmly made up her mind from girlhood she never would be--childless. Such is the irony of life!

And so Fâtima became the whole world to the old nourrice. She could have lived with us altogether, but her young master (for this old lady had married a man many years her junior), claimed a certain amount of her attention, yet she generally managed to come and see Fâtima every day, and always bringing with her some of her delicious violet and rose jams.

We had made up our minds that Fâtima’s husband must try to obtain a diplomatic post and live for a while in England. I was teasing _Guzel Sutanna_, telling her in England her services would no longer be required, that I should look after Fâtima. But the old nourrice was not to be worsted. “Tell me,” she said to Fâtima, “as soon as the appointment becomes official, then I will marry my husband to some one else and come with you.”

The old nourrice had the form of a young woman. A green plaid dress covered her uncorseted body, around her waist she wore a gold belt and round her neck a thick gold chain which Fâtima had given her, and which she wore day and night. Her skin was not too wrinkled for her age, her eyes magnificent, and sometimes her rebellious little _hennéd_ curls would come peeping out from under her pink silk turban. In the streets she wore a black satin tcharchaff and was also well shod; her manners were aristocratic, and as she was generally somewhere within calling distance of Fâtima, I supposed at first she must be a relation.

One of my greatest difficulties in Turkey is to be sure of the social standing of the men and women. The man you might easily in my country take for a groom is perhaps the Pasha’s son; the man you might take for the Pasha’s son is perhaps a domestic. The woman seated in the place of honour, dressed like a charwoman, may be the mother of a great statesman or a minister’s wife, and amongst them all sits the old nourrice, one of the family.

The nourrice’s answer to my teasing was so different from what I had expected that I did not take her seriously till she began asking questions about my country. “What did it matter after all,” she concluded, “if the sun never shone?” She would be there to make the clove wine if Fâtima coughed, and the coffee and the pilaff, too; she would be there to speak to Fâtima in the language of their own native land, and above all to teach the little girl to say her prayers. The one thing which was worrying her, however, was her veil. What would she do if the police tried to make her wear a hat? She never had worn one and she never would.

“But your husband,” I ventured to suggest.

“Fâtima is my child,” she answered, “I will choose him a suitable wife,” and she seemed astonished that I should see anything extraordinary in the fact that a foster mother should follow her child even to the other end of the earth, if necessary, and relieve her conscience by seeing that her husband was properly cared for during her absence.

I asked Fâtima whether this situation was frequent in Turkey. “It does happen,” she answered. Then she told me the curious life story of the golden-haired erstwhile beauty, who in the evening of her existence was allowed to occupy a modest place in the basement of our Konak in exchange for her occasional service as dish-washer. She had started her career as an oar maiden on the caique in which the Sultan Abdul-Aziz rowed about on the lake in his park when he was weary. But she grew tired of celibacy, asked to be allowed to marry, and finally was presented to an old Pasha as a reward for his distinguished services to the State.

When the Pasha died, she married a man years her junior, whom she loved with all her heart and soul, and who in his turn loved her. Knowing how bitterly disappointed he was not to have children, she herself found another wife for him, left for her successor everything she possessed, and came penniless to Fâtima. And her husband? When not washing dishes, she dreams of him as she wanders amongst the garden trees, she writes long letters to him which she never posts, and he, probably, has forgotten her very existence.

All these curious stories brought us back to the subject of polygamy, and the harem with two wives I wanted to visit.

“Do you know of a harem where there is more than one wife?” asked Fâtima.

“Yes!” answered the nourrice, “my two friends, the wives of the Dervishe ‘R.’”

The words “My two friends” surprised me just a little, but I made no comment. It was arranged, however, that I should go the next day to the dervishe service and _Sutanna_ should take me afterwards to call on the two wives. _Sutanna_ knew all the dervishes in the out-of-the-way districts of old Stamboul. These performances, I may at once explain, have little in common with the paid exhibitions arranged for tourists in Pera and Scutari. The Faithful howled and danced not for the curious spectators, for none were admitted, but to praise the Lord, the whole of their creed being based on the words of the Psalmist David: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, make a loud noise and sing praise.”

On these occasions I accompanied _Sutanna_ to the woman’s gallery, always wearing a veil. Seated on a cushion I watched the worshippers below through the lattice work of the gallery. The atmosphere was never very invigorating, the lack of fresh air being supplied by an unpleasant mixture of incense, sandal wood, and tobacco, and a stuffiness which almost choked me. We were so many women huddled together in this kind of magnified dog-kennel, and the worshippers, too, needed some space to do the same movements as the male howlers in the body of the mosque below. The dancing dervishes were charming. I enjoyed the weird piping of what sounded like a shepherd’s flute, the curious beating of the drum, the graceful movements of the men as they “waltzed” bare-foot on the polished boards, their wide skirts expanding and contracting like a well-chosen crescendo. Curiously enough the women did not attend or follow the “dancers” with the same delight as the “howlers”; they preferred the noise. What an extraordinary conception must they not have had of the Deity, these poor primitive souls, that they should suppose He would find delight in the medley of grunt and bark which accompanied their curious contortions and drowned in its hideousness the wonderful words “Allah al Ecbar.” (God is Great.)

I was studying the profile of the polygamous dervishe who sat on his legs amongst the Faithful, his arms crossed on his chest and his head reverently bowed. He had a turned-up nose, on the top of which rested a growth. He certainly was a hideous specimen of humanity, and yet two women loved him!

Yes, after all, is not humanity the same all the world over, Mahomet saw the danger of a priesthood, he did not wish the holy men to have more power than, let us say, the recorder of the Quakers. The Sheik-ul-Islam himself impressed upon me that there were no priests in Islam, and yet here, face to face with the truth, are dervishes who have grafted on to the bare spirituality of the religion of Mahomet _credenda_, fanaticism and external manifestations, just as the priesthood of the West has done in a different manner from the religion of Christ.

Every one of the dangers which Mahomet tried to guard against in denying a priesthood to Islam are in existence to-day. The words of the Prophet are interpreted in such a manner as to keep the people in ignorance, and in spite of the large sums of money left by the Faithful to pious foundations for their enlightenment. Do not the dervishes in the Tekhi live on the fat of the land and enjoy all the privileges of the “cloth”? It makes one sore to think when money for the regeneration of the country is so urgently needed that a poor woman whose six sons fell in the war gives her bed-cover to the National Defence, all this money is lying there in so unproductive a form. It surprised me rather that, when the shoe pinched so hard, the Turkish Government did not take a leaf out of France’s book, and help itself to some of these funds. After all, however, they have acted wisely, for the money can now be used for National Education.

The dervishe’s two wives came in towards the end of the ceremony. Sutanna, after kissing them both, introduced me, and we were invited to coffee in the harem. The first wife was a sickly looking, resigned creature, not very much older than her colleague, to whom she seemed quite attached; indeed, her attitude towards her rival was rather that of a mother. She was quite content to wear the old clothes, to do the work to be done, to wait on us, to give way in everything to the second wife, a well-built, healthy woman not without charm, and whom Allah had blessed, for she was to be a mother.

The first wife talked to Sutanna with delight about the expected new-comer, and alluded to it as “our child.”

She worked at its layette, she spared its mother every fatigue, she seemed as enthusiastic as a mother whose daughter is expecting a child; and yet, who knows the sorrow which may have been gnawing at her heart-strings?

For she loved her Master; she was proud of him. Sutanna had her confidence and told me so, and it was she and Sutanna together who chose as her successor, a friend of their own.

Strange and inexplicable it all seemed, and not altogether pleasant. “Our grandmothers,” one woman explained to me, “submitted to this as their written fate; they could not understand why pride should not allow us to accept such a degrading position.”

The pride of the Turkish woman takes her through an ocean of suffering. Just as the woman of the last generation accepted to remain with a rival for the sake of her children, now the woman of this generation is too proud to take advantage of the protection the law gives her in monetary assistance for the upbringing of her children when she leaves her husband. Personally, I know more than two women working against terrible odds to pay for the children’s education. When I have suggested alimony, “Never!” they answer.

They, however, like other women of Turkey, will learn as the women of the West are learning, that they must, as individuals, insist on their rights for the benefit of the community, and reserve their pride for something else.