CHAPTER XL
It was strange how, with her broken spirit, she regained a kindly interest in all around her. She had found the keynote of harîm existence—resignation; not merely passive, but exultant as an act of worship. The gross, full-blooded speech, the something cruel in these women, which in the day of sentimental pride had seemed intolerable, was but the natural outcome of relentless vision. In the first fervour of her self-abasement she stood beside the deathbed of Murjânah Khânum, watched her last struggle, and endured the death-room orgies without flinching. Thenceforth she took up the old Muslim standpoint, denouncing all the fallacies of Europe. Having won from Yûsuf the confession that he kept three other women, she had them brought to the old Pasha’s palace, where she lived thenceforward, to rid his dealings of the surreptitiousness which smacks of vice. She received them sometimes in her rooms, and took benignant notice of their children, but remained aloof. They called her “the great lady,” and deferred to her.
When the festivals of visitation of the dead came round, she would withdraw into the tomb for days together, but showed no mournfulness at other seasons. When Englishwomen called on her (as sometimes happened, for Yûsuf held a high position in the Government), she spoke in stilted French, and never hinted that she knew their language, or was other than the thing she seemed—a Turkish lady. She felt assured that, had she carried out her plan and fled to Europe after her son’s death, she would have gone mad in that sentimental atmosphere with all her memories. More than the English, she disliked some French and German ladies who, without renouncing their religion or their nationality, had married Muslims. These, in their visits, showed a curiosity, and used a tone of patronage, which was offensive. Of races less exclusive than the English, they kept their European friends, maintained their liberty. They had no real conception of the harîm life.
She was angry with her daughter when the latter told her:
“At marriage I shall make my husband promise to have me alone before I yield to him. It is become the fashion in the noblest houses. Of course, if I should fail to bear a son, I should release him.”
“Endeavour to retain him by thy charms,” the mother scolded. “O foolish one, to make him promise is to make him sin. In following the madness of the Frankish women, thou dost but court deception in the Frankish manner. It all comes of the reading of French stories without knowledge or intelligence.”
It vexed her soul to see young girls forsaking the old stately way to hanker for the trash of Europe, which they misconceived. Afîfah had no notion of that mutual love and comradeship which is the sole excuse for monogamic marriage; she merely thought it fine to be an only wife. When harîm ladies talked of feminine emancipation, they understood it to involve licentiousness. Their genius was at once too indolent and too direct ever to harbour European vapours.
But these vagaries were restricted to a score of wealthy houses, and even there the harîm life went on the same. There were the lattices, the veils, the eunuchs, and some few slaves in spite of many edicts; the ladies still had their old interests and rules and customs; the same old women hawked the news and bawdy tales from house to house; and superstition flourished more than ever. Young wives who had been bred up in the Frankish culture, and insisted on the husband talking French in private, consulted witches when the baby ailed, or sent a portion of his clothing to be blood-stained at a zâr.
Afîfah married in due course a high official, and Barakah spent half the year with her. The mother had her little circle of old friends, and many protégés—in particular the house of Ghandûr, whose first-born, Ali, she regarded always as her son. Her age seemed not unhappy.
On a summer evening, she was sitting on the roof of the old Pasha’s palace, watching the sunset with Gulbeyzah, Na´imah, and two of Yûsuf’s sisters who had come to visit her. Red light as of a conflagration shone around them. The shadow cast towards them by the parapet was vastly elongated and as black as ink. A tray with fruit and sherbet rested on the ground, and a slave-girl, squatting on her heels before them, awaiting their good pleasure to remove it, followed their conversation with an eager smile.