CHAKENDÉ, THE SCORNED
It was dreary going away to Paris without my Lady of the Fountain,
especially since I had made up my mind to have her with me; but it was
a well-deserved punishment for attaching importance to the word of an
elder.
The following two years were years of little to tell. They were filled
with studies and books, and books and studies. Black clouds were
already thickening on my young horizon, and I knew that sooner or later
I should have to encounter the storm. I had a thousand and one projects
for my life. Above all I wanted to become a doctor in order to minister
to the Turkish women, who at the time would rather die than see a man
doctor. I lived in that dream of wonderful usefulness which was to be
mine, and which was to save me from the martyrdom of the women of my
race.
The usual fate of a Greek girl, who has to sit and wait until a
marriage is arranged for her, seemed to me the worst thing that could
befall me. And if the fate of the Greek girl with money was terrible,
what could I think of a girl like me, who had no dowry?
It would mean a ceaseless plotting of all my female relatives to
capture a suitable _parti_. And a man would be a suitable
_parti_ if he had money and position, irrespective of any other
qualifications.
For a long time I had secretly resolved to work and fit myself to lead
my own life, and be spared the humiliation of being delivered over by
my family to some man who would condescend to receive me without being
paid for it. Thus these two years in Paris were years of hard work and
application. I had moments of intense longing for Turkey and for my old
life, which I had to brush aside, and to keep on working. Now and then,
enclosed in my mother’s letters, came epistles from Djimlah and Nashan,
but I never heard from Chakendé.
At the end of two years my mother sent for me again. Since I was now
sixteen years old, this did not presage well for me. I knew that, as a
penniless girl, I had to be disposed of as soon as possible. The older
I grew, the more difficult it would be for my female relatives to make
a match for me.
This was the sword of Damocles hanging over me. It was not that I
was averse to being married. On the contrary, in my most adventurous
schemes I never saw myself an old maid. I had the inherent hatred of
the Greeks for that word. But I wanted to make my own marriage.
I considered for some time, before returning to Constantinople. I
seriously contemplated disobeying the maternal summons and escaping
to America; for America always rose up in my dreams as the land of
salvation. Ultimately, I knew that I must go there, if I were to earn
my own living; but I decided to return to Constantinople. The longing
to see it again was strong upon me, and besides my brother happened
to be there at this time; and as long as he was there I hoped that I
should not be handed over, like bargain counter goods, to any man.
“_Ashadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah!
Bismallah!
Allah-hu-akbar!_”
These were the words chanted, from a minaret near by, in the shrill
sweet voice of a young _muezzin_, as I emerged from my compartment
of the Oriental Express, in Constantinople, two days later.
My soul answered to this call of the East. I felt as if I should like
to throw myself on a prayer-rug, face Mecca, and cry with the young
_muezzin_, “Allah-hu-akbar!”
I had left the West behind--I was again in the East, the enchanting,
poetical East.
This feeling was strengthened when, on reaching my hotel, I found a
letter from my mother telling me not to come to our home on the island
that day, because it was Tuesday, as ill-omened a day with the Greeks
as Friday is with the rest of Europe.
Indeed this was the East again--the East with its cry to Allah, and
its predominating superstitions. But I could not yet feel the proper
respect for ancestral superstitions. I had the arrogant self-confidence
of youth in full, and, as youth feels, I felt that the right lay with
my own inclinations. It was a hot and oppressive summer day in town,
and in disregard of maternal displeasure I decided to go on immediately
by the morning boat.
In spite of the heat and of a strange feeling of oppression in the
atmosphere, I went on foot to the Bridge of Galata, in order that I
might revel again in the crooked streets of Constantinople, hear the
merchants cry out their wares, be followed by some of the stray dogs,
salute my old friend Ali Baba, the boatman, and thus assure myself that
I really was again in my beloved city on the Golden Horn.
By the time I had bought my ticket for the steamer, Paris was as far
from my spirit as it was from my flesh--and the superstitions of my
mother no longer seemed unworthy of attention, even though I still
persisted in pleasing my selfish self. The idea of a happy compromise
suggested itself: I would take the boat to the island, but instead
of going home I would spend the day at my cousin’s, at the other end
of the island, and arrive home on the following day, as my mother had
requested.
Thereupon, in pursuit of this comfortable arrangement, on entering the
boat, instead of making my way to the first class deck, where men and
Christian women sit together, I betook myself to one of those private
little rooms which exist on the Mahshousettes boats exclusively for the
convenience of aristocratic Turkish ladies. By secluding myself in one
of these I effectually avoided the risk of recognition and report.
I opened the door of one. The cabin was in semi-obscurity, and occupied
by three veiled ladies. However, as the place could accommodate four,
I entered. It was their privilege to ask me to depart, if they did not
care for the company of an unbeliever. I sat down and waited to see if
they would use their prerogative. To my surprise a lithe young woman
rose hastily and stood before me. Her two slender and tightly gloved
hands grasped my shoulders, and a pair of fine eyes peered into mine.
“Why, little Thunderstorm!”
A _feredjé_ enveloped me and my lips came into close contact with
the filmly _yashmak_ of Chakendé of the Timur-Lang. It was indeed
delightful to fall in thus with her. We had before us an hour and a
half’s sail with no one to disturb us; for the other two women were
her attendants and sat without saying a word. We spent the time in the
happiest of talk about the years during which we had not seen each
other, and during which we had left behind our girlhood, and crossed
the threshold of womanhood; for in the East we become women at an early
age.
After I had told her all about myself, at her insistence--she being the
elder, and I having therefore to tell my story first--I said:
“You are married now, I suppose. I remember you were to belong to a
young man in Anatolia, to whom you were betrothed when you were an hour
old, while he boasted of the great age of seven.”
She sighed. “No, I am not--not yet--although I am getting on in years.”
“Why are you waiting?” I inquired. All my French manners and training
had gone. I was again delightfully Oriental, asking personal questions
in the most direct way, as I had answered all that had been put to me.
“It is quite a story, and we are nearly there. Since you are not going
home, why not come to my house till to-morrow, where I can tell you all
about it?”
“I cannot,” I answered. “I must go to my relatives, or there will be
too much rumpus, if I am discovered.”
“Very well, then, drive with me first to my house; I will leave the
attendants there, tell my mother where I am going, and come with you.
In this way we shall have the whole afternoon together. My attendants
can call for me in the evening.”
That is how it happened that on reaching the island I drove in a closed
carriage with three veiled ladies to the _haremlik_ of Djamal
Pasha, and afterwards, with only one, arrived at my cousin’s house.
To my cousin I explained my plight and introduced Chakendé Hanoum.
There was no one at home except my cousin and her children. After
luncheon Chakendé and I went into the guest-room, where we made
ourselves comfortable in loose garments. She braided her long, thick
hair in two braids, and put a string of pearls, like a ribbon, over
her head. She had clad her slim, young figure in a loose, white
_pembezar_, made quite in French fashion. Cut a little low at the
neck, it displayed, besides another string of pearls, a throat full and
white, beautiful in shape and in its youthful freshness. She was so
good to look upon that I again bethought me of the man for whom she had
been destined.
“Now tell me why you are not married,” I said.
She laughed, and sighed again.
“Because he will not have me.”
“He, who?” I queried.
“The man I was engaged to when I was a baby.”
“Upon my word!” I cried with indignation.
“Now, Thunderstorm, you need not go ahead and blame him. His reasons
are excellent, as his face is kind and his figure straight--like a
cypress tree.”
“You have seen him then?”
“Yes, he has been in Constantinople for the past two years, and I have
seen him several times through the lattices of my window.”
“And he refuses to marry you?”
“He does.”
“On the ground----”
“That he does not know me. You see, he is tainted with European
culture, and he thinks a man ought to choose his own wife. I was chosen
for him: therefore he does not wish to marry me.”
“Why don’t you give him up and marry some one else? There are plenty
who would be glad to have you.”
She shook her head. “It so happens that I want him and no one else. And
what is more,” she added illogically, “I respect his reasons. He says
that he does not wish to be married to a woman he has not seen, and of
whose character he knows nothing.”
“Very well,” I remarked. “Since you respect his reasons, and since you
are modern enough yourself, why don’t you try to meet him unveiled
somewhere and have a chat with him?”
Dubiously she shook her head again. “I don’t know how to manage it. He
does not go to the Christian houses to which I go. Besides none of my
Greek friends would care to take the risk of arranging a meeting.”
“I’ll do it,” I declared.
Her face flushed with pleasure. “You are just the same madcap as ever.
Paris hasn’t robbed you of any of your spirit. How often I have wished
you were here--only I did not know whether you had become so wise that
you would not do foolish things any more.”
For some time we discussed the matter, though without arriving at any
feasible plan. At length I left her, radiantly cheerful, and went into
the nursery to lie down, in order to leave the guest-room entirely to
her. My little cousins, three in number, were already on their beds,
and I stretched myself out on the divan.
Instead of being cooler on the island, the oppression of the atmosphere
was more intense. There seemed something ominous in the heavy stillness
of the air, only broken by the noise of the yelling dogs in the
distance.
I was just beginning to dose off, when my couch swung to and fro like a
hammock.
My little eight year old cousin raised her head from her bed and stared
at me across the room.
“Alkmeny!” I said crossly, “don’t shake your bed, child. It shakes the
room most unpleasantly.”
“I thought it was _you_ shaking the room,” the child replied.
Then it occurred to me that it would take a giant to shake the huge
room. It was the second story of a rock house, with two foot thick
walls.
The room shook again, so violently that I bit the end of my tongue,
and for the moment thought of nothing except the pain of it. Then it
grew dark, like dusk, and there was a noise as if hundreds of baskets
of walnuts were being poured down the staircase. In the thick stone
walls cracks a foot wide appeared; the edges trembled, as if uncertain
whether to fall inside or out, and with a crash came together again.
The children were thrown out of their beds, and I gazed at them
passively. At this instant did some past incarnation of mine say the
word “earthquake!” or was the word really called by some one outside?
All I know is that “_seismos!_” rang in my ears, and with it
everything I had ever heard about earthquakes flashed into my mind.
“Don’t walk--crawl!” was the first thing, and obeying it I dropped to
the floor, caught up the youngest child in my arms, and told the other
two to cling to my gown. Then in a sitting position I worked my way out
of the room and down the stairs.
The floor was waving up and down, but we managed to get down the short
flight of steps. The noise meanwhile was deafening, and the darkness in
the house complete. When we reached the front door and were about to go
out, one of the maids pushed me violently aside and dashed out herself.
A part of the falling chimney struck her on the head, and she fell to
the ground, quite dead. I climbed over her body, still crawling, with
the child in my arms. My white _négligé_ was covered with the
maid’s blood, but this did not affect me at the time in the least. I
crawled on and on, while the terrific noises and the shaking continued,
always remembering that the safest place was the middle of the lawn--as
far from the house as possible. The children were holding tightly to my
dressing-gown, and they, too, were covered with the dead woman’s blood.
As we were scuttling along the ground, little four year old Chrysoula
cried out: “Cousin, my foot is caught!” One of the cracks in the
earth--which was opening and shutting--had her little foot imprisoned;
but in a second it opened again and her foot was free.
Fortunately, the house was surrounded by a large open lawn, otherwise
we might have been killed by the falling trees. In the middle of the
lawn we lay still, fascinated and bewildered. It was lighter out here
in the open, so that we could see what was taking place. I was not
consciously afraid. A kind of exaltation possessed me that I should be
there to see the wonderful, ghastly spectacle.
The Turks say that during an earthquake devils with fiery eyes fly
about the sky. And surely we saw them, only they must have been huge
stones, hurled into the air, which clashed together, giving forth
sparks that, for the fraction of a second, illumined their dark petrine
bodies. One of those devils fell with a crash on the stable. It went
through the roof, and in a few minutes the entire building was ablaze.
After this the earthquake proper ceased, but the earth still trembled,
so that the oldest child fell over on my lap two or three times; and
Chrysoula, who was sitting comically tilted back with her feet in
the air--her one thought being to keep them from catching again in
the earth-cracks--would tip over, and then scramble back into her
undignified position.
From the stable, now burning like a bonfire, a horse dashed madly out.
He was making directly for us when he fell, and lay where he fell. He
had stepped into an earth-crack and broken his leg, and had to be shot
afterwards.
Meanwhile the noises gradually lessened; but the air was filling with
smoke and the smell of the fires. My cousin’s house still stood,
apparently unhurt, except for the chimneys; but what a devastation
there was of those around us! They were mostly modern with new
anti-seismic devices, such as iron bands around them. All these were
lying in ruins, the irons twisted and warped, the walls shapeless heaps
of stones, beneath which were buried many of those who had loved them
and called them home. The old-fashioned houses, without the irons,
withstood the shocks better. When afterwards I went into my cousin’s
house, I found that most of the furniture was broken, the plastering
had all fallen, the pictures were down, and the cracks in the walls had
not come together smoothly.
During the earthquake we saw no one, except the maid that had been
killed. After an interval Chakendé, whom I had entirely forgotten, came
out of the house, her left arm bandaged and in a sling.
“I am hurt,” she said quietly, sitting down beside me; “but I have
bandaged it up and it is all right. I am troubled, though, about my
people, and it will be some time before it will be possible for me to
go to them, I suppose.”
Her manner was subdued, her face white, her eyes still frightened.
What seemed a very long time passed before the people began to come out
of the ruins of the houses. My cousin appeared, crying hysterically. On
seeing her children she stopped crying. “My God!” she screamed, “I have
children!” She had totally forgotten about them.
A few hours later my cousin’s husband arrived from Constantinople. The
boats, fortunately, had not been injured and were all running. He was
an official and brought out with him three young men, his subordinates,
two Greeks and a Turk. They told us that the damage in the town was
even worse than on the islands, so that we could expect to receive no
tents from the government that night.
The heat of the day had changed to cold, which, in our nervous
condition, we felt severely, and the two Greeks set about building a
fire and preparing something for us to eat.
Chakendé went up to the young Turk and spoke to him; then she came to
me.
“This young man is going to help me bury the maid,” she said. Both to
me and to the Turk she spoke in French, but it was not a day to think
of such trifles. “We have already carried her into the laundry-house,
and now we are going to dig a grave.”
Chakendé and the Turk went off to bury the Christian maid. It was
an odd fact that during this whole earthquake, while all other
nationalities were thinking of the living, it was the Turks mostly who
thought of the dead.
When they came back to me, who still had the care of the children, for
both my cousin and the maids were too hysterical to attend to them,
Chakendé said:
“We are thinking that if we can get several rugs we can put up some
kind of tents for the children and the rest of us to sleep under.”
“It is Mademoiselle who thought of that,” the young Turk said with
admiration, and I realized then, that he was far from guessing that she
was a Mussulman girl; for Chakendé, having nothing to cover her face
with, went about like a European.
“That’s a good idea,” I assented, “but who is going to get the rugs? It
will be difficult to make anyone go into the house.”
“I will go,” Chakendé said.
“Oh, no, mademoiselle!” the Turk protested. “This is a man’s work, not
a woman’s. It is a dangerous task, and besides rugs are heavy.”
She smiled. “But I shall go too. Come, monsieur, don’t lose any time.
The earth is quiet for the present.”
They left me, and on their return he was carrying a heavy pile of rugs,
while Chakendé had all the sheets and pillows she could manage with her
uninjured arm. The two of them proved remarkable tent-makers. One could
see that they came of a race which for centuries had lived in tents.
Not only did they put up one for my cousin’s family, but a little one
for Chakendé and myself. They disappeared again, and returned with
blankets. They made several trips into the house, until they had us
all fully supplied with bedding.
For one reared amid the seclusion of a harem she really was wonderful.
Her presence of mind, her fearlessness, and her resourcefulness
astonished me, engrossed though I was.
After we had had something to eat, and put the children to bed,
Chakendé, the young Turk and I went and sat down at a little
distance, and talked over the events of the day. None of us had any
desire for sleep, although it was late. The earth was still groaning
occasionally, and it was unpleasant to lie down, since one could hear
hideous rumblings and tremblings which gave one a curious feeling of
sea-sickness.
“What a day!” Chakendé exclaimed, after a long silence. There was a
certain exhilaration both in the voice and in the manner of the girl.
She seemed detached from the awfulness of it all, in spite of the
bloody wrappings on her arm.
The Turk hardly took his eyes from her and there was no mistaking
his condition. He had met the woman he was to remember till he died,
whether he ever saw her again or not.
Chakendé did not look in his direction. She sat erect, her head held
proudly above her lovely throat. She was even prettier than she had
been in the daytime.
Presently the young man spoke, addressing himself to her:
“Mademoiselle, we have worked together to-day, as companions--as
friends. I should like you to give me something to keep for the rest of
my life.”
“Monsieur only asks,” she replied, without looking at him, “he does not
offer to give anything to be remembered by.”
It was a weird night, one of those nights when people cannot be
conventional. In my place I made myself very small, trying to forget I
was present, as the two seemed to forget me.
“I, mademoiselle?” repeated the man, in a voice full of emotion. “I
have given you to-day all that is best in me. And whatever my life may
become that best will always belong to you.”
“And in exchange, Monsieur asks?” Chakendé said, still not turning
toward him.
“I only ask your name, mademoiselle. I should like to repeat it
daily--to have it be the nectar of my soul.”
“Since Monsieur asks so little, it would be cruel to deny him.”
She turned slowly around till her eyes met his. Distinctly she said:
“My name is Chakendé, and I am known as the only daughter of Djamal
Pasha.”
The young man gave a start. “You are--? You are----?”
She nodded. “The woman you have scorned for the past two years.” She
turned away, and gazed out into the darkness. In a minute she rose.
“Come, Thunderstorm,” she said to me, “I think we might as well go to
our tent.”
The young Turk rose, too, and barred her way respectfully.
“Hanoum Effendi,” he said, speaking in Turkish now, “I love you--will
you be my wife?”
“Does the effendi think it would be so great an honour?” she asked,
with a little catch in her voice.
“It would be an honour for me; it would give me the privilege of
worshipping you, of protecting you, of taking away all thorns from your
path, and of strewing it with roses. I ask to be allowed to be your
servant, as you are the mistress of my soul.”
“The effendi speaks very beautifully,” she commented.
“I love you!” he cried. “I love you!”
She gave him her right hand, and he, bending as a worshipper, touched
it with his lips; then as a man he drew her to him, and covered her
hair and her eyes and her lips with his kisses.
When Chakendé and I retreated to the little tent arranged for us, the
young Turk lay down on the ground outside, across the doorway. Chakendé
on her rug prayed to Allah, her uninjured arm upstretched with the palm
toward heaven. After she had finished she turned to me.
“Dear little Thunderstorm,” she said, “it has been a horrible day, a
devastating day, a life-taking day, but ah!--to me it has been the most
wonderful day of my life.”