Fontainebleau, Sept. 1906.

When I was quite young I loved to read the history of my country told in the Arabian Nights style. The stories are so vivid and picturesque, that even to-day, I remember the impression my readings made on me. [Alas! the profession of conteur or raconteur is one which has been left behind in the march of time.] Formerly every Pasha had a conteur, who dwelt in the house, and friends were invited from all around to come and listen to his Arabian Nights stories. The tales that were most appreciated were those which touched on tragic events. But the stories contained also a certain amount of moral reflection, and were told in a style which, if ever I write, I will try to adopt. The sentences are long, but the rhythm of the well-chosen language is so perfect that it is almost like a song.

What a powerful imagination had these men! And how their stories delighted me! There were stories of Sultans who poisoned, Ministers who were strangled, Palace intrigues which ended in bloodshed, and descriptions of battles where conqueror and conquered were both crowned with the laurels of a hero. But I never for a moment thought of these tales but as fiction! Could the history of any country be so awful! Yet was not the story of the reign in which I was living even worse, only I was too young to know it? Were not the awful Armenian massacres more dreadful than anything the conteurs had ever described? Was not the bare awful truth around us more ghastly than any fiction? Indeed, it was.

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 rÉgime. 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.

Do you think there is in any language a sentence stronger and more beautiful than that which terminates in Loti’s PÊcheurs d’Islande—the tragedy of waiting—with these words, “Il ne revint jamais”?

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 Yali1 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?

By a curious irony of fate, I had been reading in the Bible2 of Christ’s apostles whose eyes were heavy with sleep. But I could not sleep, and after a time I could not even read. This weary, weary waiting!

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 caÏque has stopped at our Yali.

Now I know what it is. Four discreet taps at my father’s window, and his answer “I am coming.” Like a physician called to a dying patient, he dresses and hastily leaves the house. It is three o’clock in the morning À la Franque,3 but his master is not sleeping. Away yonder, in his fortress of Yildiz, the dreaded Sultan trembles even more than I. What does he want with my father? Will he be pacified this time as he has often been before? What if my father should have incurred the wrath of this terrible Sultan? The caÏque moves away as silently as it came. Will my beloved father ever return? There is nothing to do but to go on waiting, waiting.

*****

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.

Amongst my favourite English books were Beatrice Harraden’s Ships that Pass in the Night,4 passages of which I know by heart, and Lady Mary Montagu’s Letters. Over and over again, and always with fresh interest, I read those charming and clever letters. Although they are the letters of another century, there is nothing in them to shock or surprise a Turkish woman of to-day in their criticism of our life. It is curious to notice, when reading Lady Mary’s Letters, how little the Turkey of to-day differs from the Turkey of her time; only, Turkey, the child that Lady Mary knew, has grown into a big person.

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 (and here I say a Bismillah5 or prayer of thankfulness) 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.

We used often to visit the poor wife, who since her marriage had never left her home, her husband being jealous of her, as he was of all the others; they were his possessions, and in order to err on the safe side, he never let them out.

Our friend, the first wife, was very beautiful, though always ailing. Every time we went to see her, she was so grateful to us for coming, thanked us over and over again for our visit, and offered us flowers and presents of no mean value. And she looked so happy, continually smiling, and was so gentle and kind to all her entourage.

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 rÉgime. 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 cafÉ 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 (what a glorious record for posterity!) 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.