Unlike our grandmothers, who accepted without criticism their “written fate,” we analysed our life, and discovered nothing but injustice and cruel, unnecessary sorrow. Resignation and culture cannot go together. Resignation has been the ruin of our country. There never would have been all this suffering, this perpetual injustice, but for resignation; and resignation was no longer possible for us, for our Faith was tottering.
But I am not really pitying women more than men under the Hamidian régime. A man’s life is always in danger. Do you know, the Sultan was informed when your friend Kathleen came to see us? Every time our mother invited guests to the house, she was obliged to send the list to his Majesty, who, by every means, tried to prevent friends from meeting. Two or three Turks meeting together in a café were eyed with suspicion, and reported at head-quarters, so that rather than run risks they spent the evenings in the harems with their wives. One result, however, of this awful tyranny, was that it made the bonds which unite a Turkish family together stronger than anywhere else in the world.
Can you imagine what it is to have detectives watching your house day and night? Can you imagine the exasperation one feels to think that one’s life is at the mercy of a wretched individual who has only to invent any story he likes and you are lost? Every calumny, however stupid and impossible, is listened to at head-quarters. The Sultan’s life-work (what a glorious record for posterity!) has been to have his poor subjects watched and punished. What his spies tell him he believes. No trial is necessary, he passes sentence according to his temper at the moment—either he has the culprit poisoned, or exiles him to the most unhealthy part of Arabia, or far away into the desert of Tripoli, and often the unfortunate being who is thus punished has no idea why he has been condemned.
I shall always remember the awful impression I felt, when told with great caution that a certain family had disappeared. The family consisted of the father, the mother, son and daughter, and a valet. They were my neighbours—quiet, unobtrusive people—and I thought all the more of them for that reason.
One morning, when I looked out of my window, I saw my neighbour’s house was closed as if no one lived there. Without knowing what had happened to them, I became anxious, and discreetly questioned my eunuch, who advised me not to speak about them. It appeared, however, that in the night the police had made an inspection of the house, and no one has since then heard of its occupants, or dared to ask, for fear of themselves becoming “suspect.”
I found out long after, from a cutting sent me from a foreign friend in Constantinople, that H. Bey’s house had been searched, and the police—and this in spite of the fact that he had been forbidden to write—had found there several volumes of verses, and he was condemned to ten years’ seclusion in a fortified castle at Bassarah.
This will perhaps give you some idea of the conditions under which we were living. Constant fear, anguish without hope of compensation, or little chance of ever having anything better.
That we preferred to escape from this life, in spite of the terrible risks we were running, and the most tragic consequences of our action, is surely comprehensible.
If we had been captured it would only have meant death, and was the life we were leading worth while? We had taken loaded revolvers with us, to end our lives if necessary, remembering the example of one of our childhood friends, who tried to escape, but was captured and taken back to her husband, who shut her up till the end of her days in a house on the shores of the Marmora.
You have paid a very pretty compliment to our courage. Yet, after all, does it require very much to risk one’s life when life is of so little value? In Turkey our existence is so long, so intolerably long, that the temptation to drop a little deadly poison in our coffee is often too great to withstand. Death cannot be worse than life, let us try death.—Your affectionate