But the best of these good-looking Sulaimanian women—for they are a well-favoured people—was Gulchin, flighty, good-hearted Gulchin. She was a tall girl of about eighteen, a little pale for prettiness, but of finely formed features. The gossips of the quarter objected to her because she was light-hearted and ran from house to house much as my serving-child Ghafur did, chaffing and teasing. She had quite a sad little history, too, and concealed under her frivolous manner lay a sorrow that broke out in tears sometimes when the other women returned her harmless badinage with a taunt, when she would fly to her house and sit in a corner sobbing till the natural buoyancy of her spirit asserted itself, and she came forth a little sobered, but still ready to meet the others.
She had been the young wife of a certain Taufiq, a handsome lad who had a good position under the local government, and a large house. With him she had been very happy, and had borne him a child. Unfortunately there were a mother-in-law and grandmother, who, each detesting Gulchin, laid their wits together to eject her. So they spread rumours concerning her, to give a cause of irritation to her husband, and at the same time, with the assistance of a hedge-priest, discovered certain invalidities in her marriage bond. With this in hand, they continued the dissemination of scandal, till the husband, hearing it from certain respectable people, came in wrath to Gulchin. She being a spirited girl, and moreover, innocent, naturally gave the retort very direct, and a quarrel occurred which for the time embittered one against the other. The old women now came to Taufiq with the defective bond, and taking the opportune moment of his resentment and wrath, induced him to divorce his wife.
So, disgraced and stripped of her good clothes and her ornaments, which, though she might have taken, she refused, Gulchin came to the house of her aunt Asima Khan, my neighbour, a descendant of the ancient priestly families of Hakkari, and as such bearing the masculine title “Khan.”
Here Gulchin was reduced to the level of a superior maid, and had to do the housework, but her uncle gave her clothes and protected her, for he, Abdullah, was a grave, respected man, the senior of the quarter.
Had Gulchin’s resentment against her husband continued, it would have been well for her, but unfortunately, she was too good-hearted a girl to hate anybody, and really loved him, so she wept tears of regret and remembrance. And worst of all for her she had, in a soft moment, confided her trouble to one of the other women, and had become a subject for chaff, good-humoured enough certainly, but hurtful all the same, and had she not been naturally light-hearted would have led a very sorry life.
GULCHIN
What lost her the respect of her neighbours was the habit she had on hot days of coming outside the house without her turban, bareheaded except for a tiny skull-cap, her thick, long hair exposing its ten or twelve ropes of thick plaits uncovered by the veil that accompanies the turban. But she was perfectly honest; an immoral woman is the exception in Sulaimania, and she scoffed at those who sacrificed comfort to false modesty. Ghafur had succeeded, in a hunt for someone to mend my clothes, in capturing her for the job, and she would spend some of her mornings with the old house-dame, often dropping her work to romp with the child. Her methods were original sometimes, for she had little patience. One morning she swept into the courtyard at a moment when I had just discovered a piece torn out of the sleeve of a shirt, and called to her to mend it. She said she had no linen and no money to buy any, and Ghafur not being there to get some from the bazaar, she tore a piece from her own, and then, seeing the expanse of white skin thus discovered, fled, blushing, to pin it up in a corner.
It was not long after my first visit from the police that Sayyid Nuri again called. This time he came without the knowledge of old Mustafa Beg, and was accompanied only by a kind of confidential companion-servant and a hideous old man whom he made the excuse for his visit, for he said he wanted to introduce him to me because he was a doctor, and I had considerable knowledge in the science. He was a horrible-looking old creature, with a beaked nose and but three yellow teeth, and had an intensely evil look in his small eyes. Like all of his class, and Sulaimanians in particular, he commenced asking a number of questions concerning myself; but his native suspicion did not allow him to believe most of the replies, and at last he asked if I had a passport, to which I answered in the affirmative. Sayyid Nuri here interrupted and objected to this inquisition, for though he himself had no scruples in asking the most intimate and offensive questions, he demurred when another would arrogate the privilege to himself. The old creature bent towards him and said, “If we could only see his passport, then we should know what he is”—but I interrupted him by telling him that had I a dozen passports in my pocket I should not display them to him, a remark which amused Sayyid Nuri and annoyed the old man. Then he put forward the proposition he said he had come to make. It appeared he possessed an old Arabic book setting forth the medical science as understood by the Arabs; the old Greek theory of heat and cold, the calorific and frigid temperament, with its diseases all classed under the two headings and cured by medicines antagonistic to such conditions of the body. He now proposed that he should produce this book, and with a stock of herbs purchased from the Jews, go into partnership with me, a proceeding which he asserted “would fill our pockets speedily enough, for a combination of European and Oriental skill will cover all the ailments of the people and provide an alternative to those cases which you cannot now touch, namely, the conservative part of the populace that objects to the “new Medicine”—the “Tibb-i-Jadid.”
The more I protested the impossibility of such a combination, the component parts of which were too antagonistic to be possibly considered together, the more he pressed his point, affirming that I was a fool to let professional jealousy thus spoil my chances; to which I replied, that I was not even a doctor—an assertion they both laughed to scorn, and pointed to the bottles above their heads as incontrovertible proof. The “doctor” absolutely failed to understand why I should not join him, and exhibited very considerable chagrin at my consistent refusal, waving aside all my excuses—that I did not perform, even if I knew anything about medicine; that I had too small a stock; that I was very shortly leaving Sulaimania; and so on.
A QUACK DOCTOR