IDID miss Djimlah and Chakendé and Nashan, yet thehalaïcmade up for a great deal, and what is more, knowing now that some day she would go to heaven and meet her Greek lover, I was tellingherthe Greek history, or rather that part of the Greek history where the Greeks were intermarrying with the gods.
It is a pity that the world should be so large, and that we should have to go from place to place, leaving behind those we have learned to love. When the time arrived for me to go back to the island, I wept copiously. I did so mind leaving behind Sitanthy and especially thehalaïc. She, however, in spite of the sorrow she felt at bidding me good-bye, kept on saying: “Think,yavroum, you might never have come, and that would have been far worse. Besides we must submit to Allah’s will gladly, and not weep and show him our unwillingness to obey.”
It is three hours from the Bosphorus to the islands, by going from the Bosphorus to Constantinople, and from Constantinople to the islands. Tears kept on coming to my eyes from time totime, while the boat was steaming on; yet no sooner did I get a glimpse of our own island and our own pine trees than I forgot thehalaïcand Sitanthy and my sorrow, and in spite of the people on the boat I burst forth into a loud song of joy. I was never any good at tune, and there was little difference between my singing and the miauling of a cat; yet whenever I was particularly happy I had to express it by song, and only a peremptory order would stop me. And while I sang, looking at the island, I was only thinking of the three playmates I was to see, and thehalaïcand Sitanthy were forgotten, as if they had never existed. My thoughts were on the three, and on the pleasure they would experience when they saw me returning to them—as indeed they did.
That year was a memorable one in our lives, because it was the last in which my three playmates would be permitted to go uncovered, and play with children of both sexes. They were now nearing the age at which little Turkish girls become women, must don the tchir-chaff and yashmak, hide themselves from the world and prepare for their womanhood. I was, of course, always to continue seeing them and visiting them, but they could no longer enjoy the freedom they had enjoyed up to now—now that they were to become women.
I found all three deep in the study of foreignlanguages. In the spring of that year Djimlah’s grandmother decided that it would be very good for the three Turkish girls to go twice a week and spend the morning at Nizam, where all the European children congregated. She wanted Djimlah to see as much of the European world as possible before she was secluded. It was thus that we all four, accompanied by our French teacher, went to the pine forest of Nizam. We did not like this as much as staying at home and playing by ourselves; but the old hanoum was quite insistent, and for the first time made us do what she thought best.
It interfered greatly with my scheme of introducing my companions to the wonders of Greek history, because now that I was a little older my mother refused to let me spend the nights with Djimlah, and since our time was quite filled with studies the only hours we had for story-telling were those in which we had to mingle with other children.
However, it was interesting, and the different acquaintances we made taught us a lot of games we should never have thought of by ourselves. I cannot say that we liked our new acquaintances particularly, at any rate we did not love any of them. They were mostly silly, we thought, and the English girls were stiff and we did not care for the way they spoke French. Besides most of them had large protruding teeth, which wethought very unbecoming to girls. We used to call them Teeth.
It was there in the pines that we met Semmeya Hanoum. She was much older than any of us, and she ought to have been wearing thetchir-chaff, and to have been living in the seclusion of theharemlik; but her people were not very orthodox, and Semmeya had a way of her own of getting what she wanted, and what she wanted just then was not to be secluded.
We never quite made up our minds about her. We had days when we knew we did not like her, for we did not consider her honourable. She would rather cheat at games than play fair, and she would always tell a fib to get out of a disagreeable predicament. Again there were days when we almost loved her for she was very fascinating.
That year we were particularly unfortunate in doing things we ought not to have done. In many of these—until Semmeya brought her clever mind to bear—we seemed hopelessly entangled. For example, when we stole grapes from a vendor who had fallen asleep. We did not mean to steal: we only thought of how wonderfully exciting it was to walk up on tip-toe, reach the grapes, get a bunch, and slip away without awakening the vendor. Semmeya and Djimlah and Chakendé and I accomplished it successfully. As Nashan wasreaching for a bunch she slipped—and the man awoke!
We did not know what would have happened to us—as we talked it over afterwards—we thought we should probably have been taken to prison to spend our young lives there, without light or air. We were only saved from that dreadful fate by Semmeya’s inventiveness.
Nashan stood there, petrified, staring at the vendor. Djimlah hid her face on my shoulder; I was trying to hide behind Chakendé; and Chakendé was trembling all over.
Semmeya walked straight up to the man and said to him proudly:
“A vendor who has something to sell mustnevergo to sleep. We wanted some grapes, and of course we had to have them, and naturally we took them. Now, how much do we owe you, vendor?”
The man was entirely apologetic, and begged to be forgiven. He said, since we were four, it would make about anokaof grapes, and he would let us have them for fourparas. I knew he was cheating us in asking four pennies. By no possibility could we have taken anoka.
Having paid him we walked away with our heads high, but I trembled, and I know Djimlah did, too, for her arm in mine was shaking.
We spoke then of our feelings and of the awful thing that happened to our hearts when theman opened his eyes. Djimlah wept at the thought of being caught as a thief. “Why did we do it,yavroum?” she kept on wailing to me; “why did we do it?”
“I don’t know why we did it,” I replied, nor did I know then why we kept on getting into scrapes, from the consequences of which Semmeya always saved us. I know now that every bit of devilry we perpetrated was at her instigation.
While we were not conscious of her evil influence, and were fully grateful to her for saving us, yet we always mistrusted her; and once in despair we came together and debated how to tell her that we did not care to have her for a friend any more.
Nashan then gravely remarked: “We must remember that without her several times we should have been compelled to die.”
This we acknowledged to be true, and resolved still to bear with her. Moreover, Semmeya was a remarkable story-teller, and on rainy days, when we could not play outdoors, we would congregate in one house and Semmeya would hold us enthralled with a fabrication of her imagination. She could thrill us or make us laugh, at will, and was the undisputed queen of rainy days.
Just the same, we never felt that she was quite one of us—even I who was much more under her spell than the others. We came to know that whenever she wanted anything she was goingto get it, and that some one else would pay for it.
“It is her Greek blood that makes her so,” Chakendé said one noon; then looked up at me in fear; but at these words Djimlah declared that it was time to pray, and they all fell on their knees, facing Mecca. They knew I would not attack them while they were praying, and they made their devotions long enough for my anger to cool somewhat.
The legend about her Greek blood was that her grandmother had been taken from the island of Cyprus, when a baby, and sold into aharemlik. Semmeya told us that only after she was married and had children did her grandmother learn that she was a Greek; and then she hanged herself from despair. Perhaps this matter of the Greek grandmother helped to make Semmeya dear to me, although now, as I look back upon it all, I think it was because instinctively I understood a little of the curse of temperament, and poor Semmeya had a large share of it.
The following year Semmeya was married, and three days before her wedding we were invited to see her trousseau, and to be feasted and presented with gifts. We had reached the age when we began to talk of love and marriage in tones of awe, with the ignorance of children and the half-awakenedknowledge of womanhood. And, after we came away from her, we put our heads together and whispered our hope that her husband would never find out what we knew about her character.