“Oh, what a goose you are, dear! Of course I did not. He will have that riddle in the depths of his heart to torment him—until I give him a fresh one.”
I attempted to lecture her, but she closed my lips with a kiss and adjured me not to be a simpleton until nature turned me into a man.
CHAPTER XIX
THE CHIVALRY OF ARIF BEY
UP to now I have only spoken of the women of Turkey, because such are the conditions there that men and women do not mingle freely.
By the Western world Turkish men are held in low estimation: it may be with reason, and it may be merely out of ignorance. One of the episodes of my life deals with a Turkish man, the Arif Bey who used to come to our house as my brother’s friend, when I was a little girl, and who for awhile got mixed in my head with the Greek demi-gods. I had not seen him for years. Once I had asked my brother about him. He had only told me that he was now a pasha, and then changed the conversation.
My brother and I were invited to spend a week in Constantinople with some friends, the Kallerghis. Our host was a charming, dashing man of over forty, one of the few remaining members of a formerly rich and powerful Greek family. He was a Turkish official, and the only support of a bedridden mother, to whom he was so devoted that on her account he remained a bachelor.
He was very fond of talking, perhaps because he told a story so well, or perhaps because, being of an adventurous disposition, he had been in many a scrape. One night, he told us of his experience when, in disguise, he had managed to penetrate into the tekhe of the dervishes of Stamboul and witness one of their secret ceremonies. It was one to which the most orthodox Mussulmans alone were admitted, and a Christian took his life in his hand if he tried to be present. He described the ceremony as something weird but not unpleasant, as something worth seeing.
There are people in the world who add splendour to whatever they describe, a splendour which is in their hearts and minds and not in the seen thing. Such a man was Damon Kallerghis.
In the silence that followed his words, the tapping of the hour by the bektchi, on his nightly rounds, came to us from sleeping Constantinople outside.