Chapter II: “time’s Folded Wings”

But to return to the burden of letter-writing. Another Turkish friend, a lady who has stayed in England, considers one of the most disagreeable features of our civilization is our continual answering of letters. “Unnecessary letters,” she called them, “and I pitied my poor hostess,” she explained, “wasting the greater part of her morning choosing where she would or would not eat and asking friends to eat with her.” Here our friends come uninvited, they take what we at home call “pot luck” with delightful and refreshing unceremoniousness.

But the greatest obstacle to one’s writing, setting aside the atmosphere, is the lack of solitude. Here there is, except for the honoured guest, the solitude of the multitude and the silence of familiarity, but solitude, as we understand it in the West, _i.e._ one’s own self within one’s own room, and the door locked, never. And I doubt very much as I write these lines whether solitude and its near relative, celibacy, will ever be admitted or even understood in these Eastern homes.

Several times, however, when the thought of dear friends in my home away yonder has pricked my conscience I have escaped to my room to write. But my maid for the moment, Cadhem Haïr Calfat (Calfat means slave), an elegant negress, follows me to see what she can do for me. I am seated on the sofa--she uses the word “esbab,” and I understand the word “esbab” means “dress”--I shake my head. No, I will not change my dress. I hear “sou” (water). I shake my head again. I washed a short while ago. “Satch” (hair). No, my hair is quite in order. I pass my hand over my forehead, and move my fingers, to make her understand I want to write. She thinks I am ill, and runs to fetch my hostess, who hastens to find out what is wrong. She, too, fails to understand why I go to my bedroom to write in solitude when I could write at a big desk in the salon with the other ladies to keep me company.

But what a devoted creature is my chocolate-coloured attendant! With what patience she tries to make me understand! Not a stitch of clothing will she allow me to put on by myself, and only when I am safely tucked up under my mosquito net does she leave me alone. And what would she say now if by any chance the idea should enter her faithful woolly head to come and see whether I am all right? Here I am, outside my mosquito net, writing by the candle light till the scratch, scratching of my pen sounds almost terrifying in this still household and the silence of the night.

The other afternoon, on returning from our afternoon drive, lady visitors arrived. Here was my opportunity to write. So, after we had drunk our coffee and smoked a cigarette, I excused myself, went upstairs, and Miss Chocolate (as my negress is now called by all my friends) removed my tcharchaff (veil and cape). By the time, however, that I could make her understand her service was finished for the moment, the sun began to set, with a magnificence only to be seen in the East. I stepped on to the balcony. From the minaret of the neighbouring mosque a clear, wonderful voice rings through the air, calling the faithful to prayer. I hear also the muezzins, in the distance, singing the Moslem credo; it is like an echo, for every note in the scale is a faint repetition of the beautiful voice which wakes me at the break of dawn with a reminder of the greatness of God--and all the while the sky is increasing in warmth, now it has formed itself into a wonderful vermilion carpet, and wrapped the mournful cypress trees and mosques and minarets which rest upon it, with a wealth of the finest azure blue, and even the wooden houses on the neighbouring hills have changed into little ochre palaces, so distinct that they seem to have been put there as an afterthought. Then there is the beautiful Sea of Marmora, cloaked in a mass of purple and red and blue and gold. Could any spectacle be more gorgeous? How well now I understand those beings who worship the sun!

The visitors have taken their departure--they must be home before the sun has set completely. My friend has now joined me. On the balcony we stand and watch in silence. We, too, have become part of the glorious landscape; we, too, are bathed in the wonderful roseate tints of the setting sun.... The sun has set. Miss Chocolate is there, to dress me for our evening meal ... and my letters are still unwritten. And so the time flies on, and we, unaware of its flight, are happy enough. Letters belong to the West--energy belongs to the West--but the sunset and the dreams and the beautiful, calm felicity which I now enjoy is the inheritance of the Woman of the East.

But, supposing my letters are written, how am I to post them? English letters have to be sent from Galata. It means that a domestic must drive to Galata and post them. That, too, is not so easy as it sounds. I have been trying to work out for myself this problem; if it is the custom of this country to grant two holidays a week to the donkey, how many are necessary for the coachman and gardener? I look into the garden; perhaps I see my answer in the person of the mountainous-bodied gardener, who stands, spade in hand, watching the flowers grow and the fruit falling from the trees. How can the inhabitants of a country of tubes and motor-’buses and telephones understand what life is like here? A distance requiring ten minutes with us would take here quite three hours, at least with Réchad, our coachman, on the box. Of him, certainly, it may be said he is merciful unto his beasts. They need not hurry unless they like; he never whips them; and although my friend and I together weigh less than 18 stone, the horses are allowed “a pause” at the top of each fairly steep hill.

My short stay here shows me more and more clearly how impossible it is to keep up with Western customs with all these Oriental disadvantages. For the first two or three days it may be exasperating, but the philosopher soon becomes resigned. I cannot get about if there are no means of communication, he argues, and his Western friends leave him severely alone.

The night before the Messageries Maritimes steamer arrived at Constantinople we anchored near Haidar Pasha. It was nine o’clock, but too late for the fulfilment of certain Turkish red-tapisms which make commercial life unnecessarily complicated. “See,” said a diplomatist on board to me, pointing to the two shores of the Bosphorus--“Europe and Asia--action and dreams--energy and fatalism--liberty and bondage.” And the lights from the European shore were shedding their brilliance on to the cool, calm Bosphorus, and Stamboul, my present home, showed in the distance only a few flickering sparks to remind us that these good, honest Turks were yet alive, and that even in this twentieth century they had ignored the civilization which had taken possession of the greater part of their capital.

To be cut off from the society of Pera, however, with few exceptions, is no deprivation for the Turkish woman. She dislikes the women, perhaps, even more than the men, because she knows them better, but she lumps them all, both sexes and all nations, into the somewhat contemptuous term _Perote_. She dislikes the loud voices of the women--she, who is taught as the most elementary form of good breeding to speak in a soft, low voice (the domestics here literally whisper)--she dislikes the Perote’s abominable habit of asking questions (for the Turkish woman will not be questioned); she dislikes the inquisitive, staring men, who look as if they would “gimlet” their way through the black face-veil the Turkish women wear....

“But why do you Turkish women dislike the Perotes?” I asked one day. “They have the blood of six nations in their veins and the soul of none,” replied my friend; “and the vices of the six and the virtues of none,” and I have found out recently that it is these Levantines who have told the world the little that is known of Turkish women.

The veiled Turkish woman is always a source of unending interest. A chapter, at least, on harem life will always add to the value of the book; for the word “harem” stirs the imagination, conjures up for the reader visions of houris veiled in the mystery of ages, of Grand Viziers clad in many-coloured robes and wearing turbans the size and shape of pumpkins, and last, but not least, is supplied for the reader’s imagination a polygamous master of the harem, and they have made him the subject of their coarsest smoking-room jokes. Poor Turks! How we have humiliated them! The Turk loves his home and he loves his wife. He is an indulgent husband and a kind father. And yet we judge him from the books which are written, not to extend the truth about a people, but only to sell; the West expects to hear unwholesome stories when it reads of the Eastern homes, and all these falsehoods are put into circulation by expelled governesses and Perote ladies, who have given an ugly form and soul to all that passes behind the door through which they are rarely privileged to enter.

Indirectly the proclamation of the Constitution has meant much to the Turkish woman. After that date she was allowed to travel and see for herself the lands about which she had read so much. Then it was with her observant eyes and receptive mind she understood our lives as no Western woman has been able to understand the East, and the result is that to-day, although to the tourist she appears as veiled and secluded as ever, yet she has advanced so rapidly that I, after an absence of five years, scarcely know her.

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” says our proverb, and poor consolation though it seems, it is heavy misfortune which has been the lot of poor Turkey, which has banded the women together, brought out all their best qualities and determined them, with Western militancy, to save their Fatherland at all costs.

It is time Europe saw the Turkish woman as she really is; saw her splendidly organized Red Crescent Society, her woman’s paper edited by a woman, her programme for the national health, for the training of nurses and doctors, and even telephone clerks, for the near future. Surely, honour should be given where honour is due, and although, for reasons I will explain later, it will be some time before the Turkish woman can or before it would be wise for her to cast aside the veil, she is not what Europe generally imagines she is. She has awakened from the darkness and horror of the Hamidian régime with a courage and determination to show the world that one sex cannot govern a country, that the woman’s voice must be heard in every matter of importance--not in the anonymous manner of yore, but openly and honestly and above-board, as is her right--and that if one sex is to be kept in ignorance it shall not be the women.

I have faith in the women of Turkey. With education--for these women, though of great culture, are not educated--they will acquire the necessary perseverance and exactitude, the lack of which keeps the Turkish woman behind the rest of Europe. With improved means of communication and organized work, too, her character will develop. She can take her place splendidly in a big cause. Whence she acquires her extraordinary courage, sangfroid, and savoir faire I do not know, but it is the details that worry her; she loses patience, and that terrible “To-morrow I will do it,” which is partly due to the climate and partly the inheritance of ages, has been till now the Turkish woman’s stumbling-block in all she undertakes.

I asked Halidé-Hanoum, perhaps the most active and best known of modern Turkish women, in the name of one of our prominent suffrage societies, how we English women could help the Turkish women in their advancement. “Ask them,” she said, “to delete for ever that misunderstood word ‘harem,’ and speak of us in our Turkish ‘homes.’ Ask them to try and dispel the nasty atmosphere which a wrong meaning of that word has cast over our lives. Tell them what our existence really is.”

And so here I am in the heart of Stamboul, a Turkish woman for the time being. Only by living the life of another people can we have any idea of the real value of that people. By sinking for a while one’s own personality one obtains the recompense of superior knowledge, and I have been received in a Turkish home and offered hospitality it would be difficult to equal in any other land.

Halidé-Hanoum paid a very pretty compliment to the energy, indomitable courage, and self-sacrifice of so many of the women of my country. If, then, the Eastern women can understand the tactics of a section of women workers which so many men and women of my own country have covered with ridicule and injustice, surely we in England should try to understand better the Turkish women, for it is to us they still turn for guidance, example, and, above all, sympathy.