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A TURKISH WOMAN'S EUROPEAN IMPRESSIONS

A DASH FOR FREEDOM

A few days after my visit to the D?senchant?es at Fontainebleau, which is described in the Introduction, I received the following letter from Zeyneb:

You will never know, my dear and latest friend, the pleasure your visit has given us. It was such a new experience, and all the more to be appreciated, because we were firmly convinced we had come to the end of new experiences.

For almost a quarter of a century, in our dear Turkey, we longed above all for something new; we would have welcomed death even as a change, but everything, everything was always the same.

And now, in the space of eight short months, what have we not seen and done! Every day has brought some new impressions, new faces, new joys, new difficulties, new disappointments, new surprises and new friends; it seemed to both of us that we must have drunk the cup of novelty to its very dregs.

On Sunday, after you had left us, we talked for a long time of you and the many subjects we had discussed together.

Sympathy and interest so rarely go hand in hand--interest engenders curiosity, sympathy produces many chords in the key of affection, but the sympathetic interest you felt for us has given birth on our side to a sincere friendship, which I know will stand the test of time.

We felt a few minutes after you had been with us, how great was your comprehension, not only of our actions, but of all the private reasons, alas! so tragic, which made them necessary. You understood so much without our having to speak, and you guessed a great deal of what could not be put into words. That is what a Turkish woman appreciates more than anything else.

We, who are not even credited with the possession of a soul, yet guard our souls as our most priceless treasures. Those who try to force our confidence in any way, we never forgive. Between friend and friend the highest form of sympathy is silence. For hours we Turkish women sit and commune with one another without speaking. You would, I know, understand this beautiful side of our life.

Since our departure from our own country, and during these few months we have been in France, from all sides we have received kindness. We were ready to face yet once more unjust criticism, blame, scandal even; but instead, ever since we left Belgrade till we arrived here, everything has been quite the opposite. All the European papers have judged us impartially, some have even defended and praised us, but not one censured us for doing with our lives what it pleased us.

But in Turkey what a difference! No Constantinople paper spoke of our flight. They were clever enough to know that by giving vent to any ill-feeling, saying what they really thought of our "disgraceful" conduct, they would draw still more attention to the women's cause; so we were left by the Press of our country severely alone.

The Sultan Hamid, who interested himself a little too much in our welfare, became very anxious about us. Having left no stone unturned to force us to return he next ordered that all those European papers in which we were mentioned should be sent to him. As our flight drew forth bitter criticism of his autocratic government, he must, had he really taken the trouble to read about us, have found some very uncomfortable truths about himself. But that was no new r?gime. For years he has fed himself on these indigestible viands, and his mechanism is used to them by now.

Yes, my friend, we ourselves have lived that life of constant fear and dissimulation, of hopes continually shattered, and revolt we dared not put into words.

Yet never did the thought occur to us that we might adapt ourselves to this existence we were forced to lead. We spent our life in striving for one thing only--the means of changing it.

Could we, like the women of the West, we thought, devote our leisure to working for the poor, that would at least be some amusement to break the monotony. We also arranged to meet and discuss with intelligent women the question of organising charity, but the Sultan came down upon us with a heavy hand. He saw the danger of allowing thinking women to meet and talk together, and the only result of this experiment was that the number of spies set to watch the houses of "dangerous women" was doubled.

Then it was that we made up our minds, after continual failure, that as long as we remained in our country under the degrading supervision of the Hamidian r?gime, we could do nothing, however insignificant, to help forward the cause of freedom for women.

I need not tell you again all the story of our escape; it is like a nightmare to me still, and every detail of that horrible journey will remain clearly fixed in my mind until death. Shall I tell you all that has happened to us since? But so much has been said about us by all sorts and conditions of men and women, that you will no doubt have already had an overdose. Yet I thought I understood, from the sympathetic interest you showed us the other afternoon, that there was much you would still like to hear. Have I guessed rightly? Then there is nothing you shall not know.--Your affectionate

ZEYNEB.

What a long and interesting letter! and from a Turkish woman too! Several times I read and re-read it, then I felt that I could not give my new friend a better proof of the pleasure that it had given me, than by writing her at once to beg for more. But I waited till the next day, and finally sent a telegram--"Please send another letter."

ZEYNEB'S GIRLHOOD

How can I impress upon your mind the anguish of our everyday life; our continual and haunting dread of what was coming; no one could imagine what it means except those Turkish women who, like ourselves, have experienced that life.

Had we possessed the blind fatalism of our grandmothers, we should probably have suffered less, but with culture, as so often happens, we began to doubt the wisdom of the Faith which should have been our consolation.

You will say, that I am sad--morbid even; but how can I be otherwise when the best years of my life have been poisoned by the horrors of the Hamidian r?gime. There are some sentiments which, when transplanted, make me suffer even as they did in the land of my birth. I am thinking particularly of the agony of waiting.

I mention this to you because my whole youth had been so closely allied with this very anguish of waiting.

Imagine for a moment a little Turkish Yali on the shores of the Bosphorus. It is dark, it is still, and for hours the capital of Turkey has been deep in slumber. Scarcely a star is in the sky, scarcely a light can be seen in the narrow and badly-paved streets of the town.

I had been reading until very late--reading and thinking, thinking and reading to deaden the uneasiness I always felt when something was going to happen. What was coming this time?

So I rose from my bed and looked through my latticed windows at the beautiful Bosphorus, so calm and still, whilst my very soul was being torn with anguish. But what is that noise? What is that dim light slowly sailing up the Bosphorus? My heart begins to beat quickly, I try to call out, my voice chokes me. The ca?que has stopped at our Yali.

Let us change the scene. A Turkish official has arrived at our house, he has dared to come as far as the very door of the harem. He is speaking to my mother.

"I am only doing my duty in seeing if your husband is here? I have every right to go up those harem stairs which you are guarding so carefully, look in all your rooms and cupboards. My duty is to find out where your husband is, and to report to his Majesty at once."

This little incident may sound insignificant to you, yet what a tragedy to us! What was to happen to the bread-winner of our family? What had my beloved father done?

The explanation of it was simple enough. A certain Pasha had maligned him to the Sultan in a most disgraceful manner. And the Sultan might have believed it, had he not, by the merest chance, discovered that my father was at the Palace when the Pasha so emphatically said he was elsewhere. On such slender evidence, the fate of our family was to be weighed! Would it mean exile for our father? Would we ever see him any more? Again I say, there was nothing to do but wait.

As we told you on Sunday, we Turkish women read a great deal of foreign literature, and this does not tend to make us any more satisfied with our lot.

There are two great ways, however, in which we have become too modern for Lady Mary's book. In costume we are on a level with Paris, seeing we buy our clothes there; and as regards culture, we are perhaps more advanced than is the West, since we have so much leisure for study, and are not hampered with your Western methods. And yet how little we are known by the European critics!

The people of the West still think of us women as requiring the services of the public letter-writer! They think of us also--we, who have so great an admiration for them, and interest ourselves in all they are doing--as one amongst many wives. Yet Polygamy has almost ceased to exist in Turkey.

I know even you are longing to make the acquaintance of a harem, where there is more than one wife, but to-day the number of these establishments can be counted on five fingers. We knew intimately the wife of a Pasha who had more than one wife. He was forty years old, a well-known and important personage, and in his Palace beside his first wife were many slave-wives; the number increased from year to year. But again I repeat this is an exception.

She told our mother, however, of the sorrow that was gnawing at her heart-strings, and when she spoke of the Pasha she owned how much she had suffered from not being the favourite. She treated her rivals with the greatest courtesy. "It would be easy to forgive," she said, "the physical empire that each in turn has over my husband, but what I feel most is that he does not consult me in preference to the others."

She had a son fifteen years old, whom she loved very dearly, but she seemed to care for the fourteen other children of the Pasha quite as much, and spoke of them all as "our children." Although her husband had bought her as a slave, she had a certain amount of knowledge too, and she read a great deal in the evenings when she was alone, alas! only too often.

The view of the Bosphorus, with the ships coming and going, was a great consolation to her, as it has been to many a captive. And she thanked Allah over and over again that she at least had this pleasure in life.

I have often thought of this dear, sweet woman in my many moments of revolt, as one admires and reverences a saint, but I have never been able to imitate her calm resignation.

Unlike our grandmothers, who accepted without criticism their "written fate," we analysed our life, and discovered nothing but injustice and cruel, unnecessary sorrow. Resignation and culture cannot go together. Resignation has been the ruin of our country. There never would have been all this suffering, this perpetual injustice, but for resignation; and resignation was no longer possible for us, for our Faith was tottering.

But I am not really pitying women more than men under the Hamidian r?gime. A man's life is always in danger. Do you know, the Sultan was informed when your friend Kathleen came to see us? Every time our mother invited guests to the house, she was obliged to send the list to his Majesty, who, by every means, tried to prevent friends from meeting. Two or three Turks meeting together in a caf? were eyed with suspicion, and reported at head-quarters, so that rather than run risks they spent the evenings in the harems with their wives. One result, however, of this awful tyranny, was that it made the bonds which unite a Turkish family together stronger than anywhere else in the world.

Can you imagine what it is to have detectives watching your house day and night? Can you imagine the exasperation one feels to think that one's life is at the mercy of a wretched individual who has only to invent any story he likes and you are lost? Every calumny, however stupid and impossible, is listened to at head-quarters. The Sultan's life-work has been to have his poor subjects watched and punished. What his spies tell him he believes. No trial is necessary, he passes sentence according to his temper at the moment--either he has the culprit poisoned, or exiles him to the most unhealthy part of Arabia, or far away into the desert of Tripoli, and often the unfortunate being who is thus punished has no idea why he has been condemned.

I shall always remember the awful impression I felt, when told with great caution that a certain family had disappeared. The family consisted of the father, the mother, son and daughter, and a valet. They were my neighbours--quiet, unobtrusive people--and I thought all the more of them for that reason.

One morning, when I looked out of my window, I saw my neighbour's house was closed as if no one lived there. Without knowing what had happened to them, I became anxious, and discreetly questioned my eunuch, who advised me not to speak about them. It appeared, however, that in the night the police had made an inspection of the house, and no one has since then heard of its occupants, or dared to ask, for fear of themselves becoming "suspect."

I found out long after, from a cutting sent me from a foreign friend in Constantinople, that H. Bey's house had been searched, and the police--and this in spite of the fact that he had been forbidden to write--had found there several volumes of verses, and he was condemned to ten years' seclusion in a fortified castle at Bassarah.

This will perhaps give you some idea of the conditions under which we were living. Constant fear, anguish without hope of compensation, or little chance of ever having anything better.

That we preferred to escape from this life, in spite of the terrible risks we were running, and the most tragic consequences of our action, is surely comprehensible.

If we had been captured it would only have meant death, and was the life we were leading worth while? We had taken loaded revolvers with us, to end our lives if necessary, remembering the example of one of our childhood friends, who tried to escape, but was captured and taken back to her husband, who shut her up till the end of her days in a house on the shores of the Marmora.

You have paid a very pretty compliment to our courage. Yet, after all, does it require very much to risk one's life when life is of so little value? In Turkey our existence is so long, so intolerably long, that the temptation to drop a little deadly poison in our coffee is often too great to withstand. Death cannot be worse than life, let us try death.--Your affectionate

ZEYNEB.

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