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 we thought 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 the tchir-chaff, and to have been living in the seclusion of the haremlik; 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 was reaching 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 must never go 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 an oka of grapes, and he would let us have them for four paras. I knew he was cheating us in asking four pennies. By no possibility could we have taken an oka.