“You know mamma does not like Turkish things, and you had better never explain them to her. As a rule I would rather have you tell them to me when we are all alone. And I shouldn’t like you to repeat this piece again; for, although it may be right for the actors to say all the things they did, it is better for little girls not to repeat them.”
“But, father,” I protested, frightfully disappointed, “Djimlah and I acted it all before her grandmother and the ladies of her household, and they made us repeat it several times.”
“That is because they are Turks. We are Greeks, and that makes a very big difference.”
It was at this Punch and Judy Show that we met the little girl who was to become our constant companion. During an intermission her father came up to salute the old pasha, and brought little Chakendé with him. Immediately Djimlah’s grandfather ordered an extra chair for the little girl, and told her to sit down beside us. She was very sweet looking, about the age of Djimlah. We liked her so much that we asked her where she lived, and on hearing that it was not far from us, we invited her to come the next day to Djimlah’s house.
This she did, and we liked her even better; for she submitted to us very gracefully. She never wavered in this attitude, but it was far from being a cowardly submission.
She was then engaged to be married to a boy in Anatolia, whose father had been a lifelong friend of her father’s. The engagement had taken place when Chakendé was an hour old, and the lad seven years old. By blood I considered Chakendé superior to Djimlah; for Djimlah’s forefathers, for hundreds of years, had been officials, while Chakendé’s had been warriors. They had been followers of the great Tartar ruler Timur-Lang, with whose people the Turks had been in constant warfare for centuries—now one side and then the other being victorious. It was this Timur-Lang, who, early in the fifteenth century, defeated the Turks, in the great battle of Angora, and took Sultan Bayazet captive, and kept him prisoner in a cage till he died.
Chakendé was very proud of this descent, and although she was now half full of Turkish blood, yet she clung to her Tartar ancestry, and when she told me about the battles her eyes lighted up and she was very pretty.
The lad to whom she was engaged, and whom she had not yet seen, was also of the same clan, and she already entertained for him much affection, and often spoke of him in such terms as, “my noble Bey,” “my proud betrothed.”
The more we saw of her the better we liked her, not only because she submitted to us, but because she fitted so well into all the parts we gave her to play, and we generally gave her such parts as we did not ourselves like to do. Whenever there was any fighting to do she was ordered to do it, because she could give such a terrific yell—the yell of the Timur-Lang Clan, she said—and became so wild, and made the fighting seem so real that we liked to watch her. And she was really brave; for she never minded worms—which made Djimlah and me wriggle like one.
Chakendé did not speak with dislike of the Turks to me. She looked upon them entirely as her people. “We have become one race,” she said. “They are full of our blood, and we are full of theirs. Besides, we are of the same faith.”