Disenchanted (Désenchantées)

Front matter

DISENCHANTED (DESENCHANTEES)

BY

Pie RE LOT!

II

Tue April sun, in that same April but a week later, fell, subdued by blinds and muslin curtains, into the room of a sleeping girl. The morning sun, bringing with it, even through curtains, shutters, and latticed screens, the ephemeral gladness, the perennial delusion of earthly renewal which, ever since the world began, has always ensnared the soul, complicated or simple, of every living creature — the soul of man, the soul of beasts, the tiny soul of piping birds.

Outside, the flutter and twitter of newly arrived swallows could be heard, and the hollow thud of a tambourine beaten to an Eastern thythm. Now and again a sound as of some monstrous, bellowing beast rent the air: the voice of the hurrying liners, the hoot of the steam-sirens, revealing the existence of a harbour somewhere near, a great harbour in frenzied stir; but these cries of the ships sounded very remote and came up from below, and this gave a sense of loftiness and peace, as of a hill-top far above the sea.

The room into which the sun shone on the sleeping girl was elegant and white; very modern, furnished with pretentious simplicity and the affectation of archaic taste, which at that date (1901) represented one of the latest refinements of French decadence, and was styled l’art nouveau. In a bed enamelled white — on which flowers were vaguely sketched with a mixture of primitive artlessness and Japanese freedom, by the hand of some fashionable London or Paris decorator — the girl was sleeping quietly; a very small face in the midst of a dishevelled tumble of fair hair, an exquisitely oval face, so perfect that it might have been modelled in wax, really too perfect to seem quite real; a small nose with nostrils almost too delicate and the faintest aquiline curve; large Madonna-like eyes, and very long eyebrows, curved down towards the temples like those of our Lady of Sorrows. Rather too much lace, perhaps, frilled the sheets and pillow-cases; too many sparkling rings were on the slender hands that lay lightly on the satin coverlet; too much magnificence, as we should think, for a child so young; but for that, everything about her was quite in harmony with the latest ideas of Western luxury. But there were iron bars to the windows, and besides these the chequered wooden screens — closely fastened, never to be opened — which gave a sense of restraint to all this elegance, the oppression almost of a prison.

In spite of the brilliant sunshine and the glad excitement of the swallows outside, the girl slept on late, with the heavy torpor that suddenly falls after a sleepless night, and there were dark lines under her eyes, as though she had yesterday shed many tears.

On a small, white-enamelled writing-table a forgotten taper was still burning, amid a litter of written papers and finished letters in envelopes with a gilt monogram. ‘There was music-paper too, on which notes were dotted down as in the fever of composition. Some books lay about, with fragile Dresden china ornaments; the last poems of the Comtesse de Noailles, side by side with those of Baudelaire and Verlaine, Kant’s Philosophy with Nietzsche’s. Evidently there was no mother here to weed the reading, and moderate the over-heating of this maiden brain.

And strange indeed in this room, where any spoilt and petted Parisienne would have found herself at home, a text in Arabic characters hung in the very place where, with us, the Crucifix might still be suspended; words embroidered in gold thread on bright green velvet, a passage from the book of Mahomet, the letters flourished and interlaced with antique and elaborate elegance.

The more excited chirping of two swallows, both at once, as they boldly clung to the very sill of the window, suddenly made the large eyes half-open in the small face — so small and infantine in its lines; eyes with a large greenish brown iris, at first seeming to crave mercy from life, to implore reality to come and quickly drive out some intolerable dream.

But reality and the hideous dream were apparently too intimately one, for the eyes grew darker and sadder as thought and memory came back; and they settled altogether into glooim, as if hopelessly resigned to the inevitable, when they n DISENCHANTED 9 fell on certain objects which brought irresistible evidence to her mind—a diadem sparkling in an open jewel-case, and spread out on chairs a white silk dress, a wedding dress, with orange flowers down the hem of the long train.

Like a gale of wind, and without knocking, a woman rushed into the room, thin, with eager, disappointed eyes, in a black dress and a shady black hat, elegantly simple, severe, yet with just a hint of extravagance. She was almost an old maid, but not quite —a governess as might be guessed, very highly educated and of a good but impoverished family.

‘I have it! We have it, dear child!’ she said in French, showing with childish triumph an unopened letter which she had just brought from the poste-restante.

And the little princess in bed replied in the same language without the slightest foreign accent:

“Not really !’

“Yes, yes, really. Who should it be from, child, but from him? Is this envelope addressed to Zaideh Hanum, or is it not? Well, then. Oh, if you have given the same password to others — then indeed!’

“You know I have not

“Well, then, you see

The girl was sitting up in bed, her eyes now very wide open and a faint flush in her cheeks — like a child who has been very unhappy and to whom such a wonderful toy has been given that for the moment all else is forgotten. The toy was the letter; she turned it about in her hands, fingering it hungrily, and yet afraid, as if it were a crime only to touch it. And then, just as she was about to tear the envelope, she paused to say in a coaxing tone:

“Dear Mademoiselle, sweet Mademoiselle, do not be vexed by my whim, but I want to be quite alone when I read it.’

‘Certainly, of all odd little creatures there is none more odd than you, my darling. But you will let me see it afterwards, all the same? ‘That is the least I deserve, it seems to me. Well, well! I will go to take off my hat and veil, and will come back.’

An odd little being no doubt, and, moreover, curiously coy, for she now felt that the proprieties necessitated her rising and putting on some clothes and covering her hair, before she could open a man’s letter, for the first time in her life. So hastily slipping on a light blue morning wrapper, made in the Rue de la Paix by the right maker, and covering her fair head in a gauze veil of old Circassian embroidery, with trembling hands she broke the seal.

A very short letter; ten very simple lines, with a touch of the unexpected that made her smile in spite of her disappointment at finding nothing more confidential, more fraught with meaning —a polite and friendly response, and thanks .which betrayed some weariness; that was all.

But at any rate there was his signature, very legible, very real — André Lhéry. ‘This name, in ' his own hand, went to her brain like a fit of

Il DISENCHANTED ri giddiness. And just as he, in the far West, on receiving the letter with the Stamboul post-mark, had felt as if something were beginning, so she here had a presentiment of some indefinable delight and disaster as the outcome of his answer, arriving on such a day —the eve of the great event of her whole life. This man, who had for so long reigned supreme in her dreams, this man, as far sundered from her, as inaccessible as if they were the inhabitants of different planets, had this morning really come into her life, by the mere fact of these few lines written and signed by him for her.

Never had she so keenly felt herself imprisoned, and rebellious, and longing for freedom, and space, and flight into the unknown world. It was but a step to the window where she was wont to rest on her elbows and gaze out; but no, there were the carved lattices, the iron bars, which exasperated her. She turned away towards a door that stood ajar — kicking the train of the weddinggown out of her way, where it lay on the handsome carpet — the door of her dressing-room, all lined with white marble, a larger room than the bedroom, and with windows unscreened and very wide, opening on the garden with its patriarchal plane-trees. The letter still in her hand, she rested her arms on the sill of one of these windows to see the open sky, the trees, the splendour of the first roses, to feel on her cheeks the soft touch of the air and sun. But ah! what high walls enclosed the garden! _ Why such high walls, like those built round the yard of prisons

12 DISENCHANTED II for solitary confinement? With buttresses at intervals to prop them up, they were so enormously high! their height contrived expressly to hinder any one in the tallest house in the neighbourhood from ever seeing who might be walking in that secret enclosure.

In spite of its dismal seclusion the garden was very lovable, because it was very old, with moss and lichen growing on its stones, and because its walks were invaded by grass between the boxedges; a jet of water danced in a marble basin of antique fashion, and it had a little kiosque, much the worse for time, to dream in under the shade of the gnarled and knotted planes crowded with birds’ nests. All these had this garden of old; and above all it held a soul, a sweet, homesick spirit, a soul breathed into it little by little in the course of years, the sadly exhaled repining of cloistered women, of youth and beauty here kept captive.

This morning four or five men, beardless negroes, were there in their shirt-sleeves, working at the preparations for the great event of to-morrow, one stretching an awning between the trees, another spreading splendid Asiatic rugs on the ground. Catching sight of the girl at the window, they greeted her with a twinkle of the eye full of covert meaning, and a ‘Good day’ at once familiar and respectful, which by an effort she returned with a frank smile, not at all scared by their gaze; till suddenly she started back in dismay at the aspect of a young peasant with a fair moustache, who came in loaded with baskets of flowers, and who must almost have seen her face.

But the letter! She had in her hands a letter from André Lhéry —a real letter. For the moment this alone mattered. Last week she had committed the audacious freak of writing to him, so completely had the dread of this marriage, fixed for to-morrow, thrown her off her balance. Four pages of innocent self-betrayal, things which to her had seemed quite terrible; and to conclude, a request, an entreaty, that he would reply at once, poste-restante, to an assumed name. She had sent this off forthwith, for fear lest reflection should bring hesitancy, sent it off more or less at the mercy of good luck, having no exact address, with the complicity and assistance of her former governess, Mademoiselle Esther Bonneau — Bonneau de Saint-Miron, if you please, holding the diploma of the University and a qualification of Public Instruction — the lady who had taught her French, and added, for the fun of it, as a crowning accomplishment, a little slang studied in the works of ‘Gyp.

It had reached its ies that child’s cry of distress, and the poet had replied, with a little undercurrent of suspicion and irony, but on the whole quite nicely, in a letter which could be ‘shown to the most sarcastic of her friends, and would be enough to make them jealous. And then, all of a sudden, she was fired with impatience to make her cousins read it — cousins who were like sisters, — for they had declared that he would not answer. Their home was quite close, in the same high, lonely quarter of the city, so she could go in her wrapper without wasting time in dressing; and at once, in the languid imperious tone of a child addressing some over-indulgent old nurse, she called to some unseen attendant, ‘Cadine!’ And again, more sharply, ‘Cadine!’ evidently being accustomed to know that some one was always waiting to serve her caprices; then, as Cadine did not appear, she pressed the knob of an electric bell.

Finally Cadine came, a figure even more incongruous in such a room than the text from the Koran in gold embroidery above the bed: a perfectly black face, a head wrapped in a veil spangled with silver — an Ethiopian slave, whose name was Kondjé-Gul (Rosebud). Her young mistress addressed her in some far-away tongue, an Asiatic language, amazing surely to the hangings, the furniture, and the books.

“Kondjé-Gul, you are never on the spot!’ but the reproof was spoken in a tone of affectionate melancholy which greatly mitigated it. And it was indeed a base reproach, for Kondjé-Gul was, on the contrary, always a great deal too much on the spot, like a tiresomely faithful dog, and her mistress was, in fact, rather the victim of the custom of the country which allows no bolts to the doors; permitting the women of the household to walk in at any hour, as if all the rooms were theirs, so that no one is ever sure of an instant of solitude. Kondjé-Gul, entering on tip-toe, had come certainly twenty times that morning to be at hand when her young mistress should

II DISENCHANTED 15 wake. And how strongly she had been tempted to blow out the burning taper. But then! It was on the writing-table, and she was forbidden ever to touch anything there; it was to her a shrine of dangerous mysteries, and she feared lest by extinguishing that little flame she might break who knows what spell.

“Kondjé-Gul, my tcharchaf,' quick. I want to go to see my cousins.’

And Kondjé-Gul proceeded to wrap the girl in black. Black was the skirt she put on over the wrapper made by the right maker, black the long cape she threw over her shoulders, and black the thick veil fastened by pins to the hood she pulled down over her face to hide it as under a cowl. As she trotted to and fro to shroud her young mistress, she murmured sentences in her Asiatic tongue, talking to herself, as it seemed, or chanting a song — childish, lulling things, as not taking a serious view of the little bride’s melancholy.

“He is fair, he is handsome, is the young Bey who will come to-morrow to carry away my sweet mistress. And how happy we shall be in the fine palace to which he will take us both!’

“Be silent, Cadine; ten times have I told you I will not hear him mentioned!’

And the next moment: ‘Cadine, you were there, you must have heard his voice the day when he came to talk to my father. Tell me, what is the Bey’s voice like? At all soft?’

“As soft as the music of your piano, the music

1 Enveloping veils worn on the street.

16 DISENCHANTED I you make with your left hand, you know, at the end where the notes cease. As sweet as that — oh, and he is so fair and handsome, that young Bey {

“Well, well; so much the better,’ interrupted the girl in French, with a mocking accent that was almost Parisian.

And she added in the Asiatic tongue:

‘Is my grandmother up, do you know?’

“No, the Lady said she would stay in bed late to look the fresher to-morrow.’

‘Well, when she wakes, let her be told I have gone to my cousins. Go and tell old Ismail to escort me — you and he — I will take you both.’

Meanwhile Mademoiselle Esther Bonneau (de Saint-Miron), upstairs in her own room — the room she had had in former days when she lived in the house, and that she had come back to now to be present at to-morrow’s high function — Mademoiselle Esther Bonneau had some prickings of conscience. It was not she, of course, who had brought Kant’s works to find a place on the white writing-table, nor Nietzsche’s, nor Baudelaire’s even. For eighteen months past, since her pupil’s education was regarded as finished, she had been settled under the roof of another Pasha to teach his little girls, and not till then had her first charge emancipated herself in the matter of reading, since there was nobody to check her vagaries. Still, all the same, the governess felt herself to a certain extent responsible for the erratic flight taken by that youthful mind. And this correspondence with André Lhéry to which

I DISENCHANTED 17 she had lent herself — to what might it not lead? Two persons, to be sure, who would never meet; that, at least, was quite certain; custom and barred windows would hinder that. And yet

When she presently went downstairs again, she found herself face to face with a little figure bundled up like a black bogey to go out in the street, very excited and in a great hurry.

“And where are you off to, my dear?’

“To see my cousins and show them this.’ This was the letter. ‘You must come too, of course. We will all read it together there. Come, let us be trotting.’

“To your cousins? By all means —I will get my hat and veil again.’

“Your hat! That means an hour — Drat it!’

‘Come, my child, come!’

‘Come? Where, what? Even if you don’t - say it you “drat it” too, when you are in a temper. Drat the hat! and drat the veil, and drat the young Bey — drat the future, drat life — death — drat everything!’

Mademoiselle Bonneau had a suspicion that a flood of tears was threatening, and to effect a diversion she clasped her hands, bowed her head in the attitude sacred on the stage to tragic remorse, and said:

“And to think that your unhappy grandmother paid and kept me for seven years for such a result !’

The black bogey, in fits of laughter under her veil, in the twinkling of an eye had thrown a lace kerchief over Mademoiselle Bonneau’s head, and

c now dragged her off with her arm round her waist.

“That I should be bundled up is one thing; I must, it is the law. But you, who are not compelled — and to go two yards — and in this part of the city, where you never see even a cat.’

They ran downstairs two steps at a time. Kondjé-Gul and old Ismail, an Ethiopian eunuch, waited for them at the bottom to attend them; Kondjé-Gul muffled from head to foot in a green shroud spangled with silver, and the man buttoned and belted into a black European frock coat, in which, but for his fez, he might have been a country attorney.

The heavy door was thrown open; they were outside on the hill, in the bright sunshine of eleven o'clock, looking down on a wooded cemetery, thick-set with cypresses and tombs with tarnished gilding, which sloped gently down to the deep bay crowded with shipping.

And beyond the inlet of the sea at their feet, on the other side, half-hidden by the cypress trees in the sad, peaceful wood, high up against the sky in the clear, limpid air, the mass stood outlined of the city which for twenty years had haunted André Lhéry with longing. Stamboul sat enthroned, not dim in twilight, as in the poet’s dreams, but sharp, luminous, and real.

Real —though veiled in a diaphanous blue mist, in remote silence and splendour, Stamboul was there, Stamboul the immemorial, still the same as when the old Khalifs had looked out on it; as when Suleyman the Great had imagined

II DISENCHANTED 19 and created its noble outline by adding the finest of the cupolas. Of all this vast number of minarets and domes standing up in the morning air none seemed to be in ruins, and yet over all there was an indescribable impression of Time. In spite of distance and the rather dazzling light, it could be seen that it was very, very old. The eye was not deceived; a ghost, a magnificent ghost of the past, is this city, still standing, with its endless spindles of stone, so slender, so light, that how they have lasted is a marvel. Minarets and mosques have faded in the course of years to various tints of whiteness streaked with neutral greys; and as to the myriad wooden houses crouching in their shadows, they are yellow ochre, russet brown, subdued by the almost unceasing haze exhaled from the all-surrounding sea. And the vast prospect was mirrored in the glassy waters of the gulf.

The two women, the one veiled and the other with the lace kerchief tied anyhow on her head, walked quickly, followed by their negro attendants, and scarcely glancing at the wonderful view which was the background to all their days. They took a path with paving stones in wild disorder along the hill, between old and aristocratic mansions mummified behind their gates on one hand, and on the other the hillside cemetery of Kassim Pacha, the fairy magnificence of the view gleaming between its gloomy trees. The swallows, which had built their nests everywhere under the barred and shuttered balconies, were chirping deliciously, the cypresses exhaled a good smell of resin, the ancient earth, full of the bones of the dead, exhaled a fresh smell of spring.

They did not, in fact, meet a creature in their short walk, no one but a water-carrier in his oriental dress, who had come to fill his water-skin at a very old cistern by the roadside, of ancient marble sculptured with exquisite arabesques.

On arriving at a house with closely barred windows, a pasha’s house, a tall, moustachioed porter, dressed in red and gold with pistols in his sash, opened the door without uttering a word; and they, as intimates and privileged, without a word on their part, went upstairs to the harem.

A vast white room on the first floor, whence, through the open door, came the voices and laughter of young women. They were amusing themselves by talking French, no doubt because they were discussing dress. ‘The point in question was whether a certain bunch of roses on a bodice would look best placed on this side or on that. ‘Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other,’ said one.

‘Much of a muchness, only more so,’ asserted another, a little red-haired damsel with a skin like milk, and saucy eyes, whose governess had been past mistress of slang.

This was the bedroom of the cousins, two sisters of eighteen and twenty-one, for whom the bride of the morrow had reserved the privilege of first reading the great man’s letter. There were two white enamel bedsteads for the two girls, each with its Arabic text, embroidered in gold on a

Il DISENCHANTED at velvet panel, hanging above it against the wall. On the floor, other beds had been improvised, mattresses with coverlets of blue or pink satin, for four girls invited to the wedding festivities. On the chairs — white enamelled chairs with Pompadour flowered silk —their dresses for the great event but just arrived from Paris, lay in light masses of gay colour, all the usual disorder of a day before a function; an encampment it might have been — an encampment of little gipsy maidens, but very fashionable and very rich. As the Moslem rule prohibits women from going out of doors after dark, the pleasant custom has grown up of their remaining in each other’s houses for days or even weeks together, with or without any reason, sometimes merely to pay a visit; and dormitories are arranged, with much chat and laughter. Oriental veils were lying about, wreaths of flowers, and jewels by Lalique. ‘The window bars and carved wood lattices gave a sort of clandestine note to all this strewn luxury, all intended to charm or dazzle other women, but which no eye of moustachioed man might ever be allowed to gaze on. And in one corner two negress slaves, seated at their ease, were singing their native songs, beating out the time on a little muffled drum. Our vehement democrats of the West might learn lessons of fraternity in this easygoing land, where, in practice, caste and social differences are not recognised, and the humblest servants of either sex are always treated as members of the family.

The arrival of the bride-elect startled and amazed them all. She was certainly not expected

22 DISENCHANTED II that morning. What could have brought her? Black, entirely in her street wrappings, how mysterious and ominous she appeared in the midst of all this white and pink and pale blue, all these silks and muslins. Why had she come in this unexpected way, to see her bridesmaids at home?

She threw back her mournful veil, showing her dainty features, and in an airy, uninterested way she explained in French—a language evidently familiar in the harems of Constantinople:

‘A letter I want to show you.’

‘A letter — from whom ?’

‘Ah! guess now.’

‘From the aunt at Adrianople, I wager, promising you a set of brilliants.’

O.

“Then from the aunt at Erivan, who is sending you a pair of Angora cats as a wedding present.’

‘No, again. Itisfromastranger. It is — from a gentleman

‘A gentleman! How dreadful! A _ gentleman, you little wretch !’

And she held out the letter, satisfied with the effect she had produced; two or three pretty golden heads — real gold and artificial gold —came together at once to see the signature.

“André Lhéry!— No! Has he answered you? —TIs it from him? Impossible!’

All the little circle had been taken into con-: fidence as to the letter to the author. There is such a consentaneous spirit of revolt among the Turkish women of to-day against the severe rule

II DISENCHANTED 23 of the harem, that they never betray each other; if the delinquency were ever so serious, instead of quite innocent as in this case, there would be the same secrecy, the same silence.

They crowded up to read it together, head against head, including Mademoiselle Bonneau de Saint-Miron, all holding on to the paper. At the third sentence they shouted with laughter.

‘Oh, do you see? He will not believe you are Turkish. That is too good! He knows all about us so well, it would seem, that he is quite sure you are not.’

‘But that really is a triumph, my dear,’ said Zeyneb, the elder of the cousins. ‘That shows how keen your wit is and the elegance of your style. :

‘A triumph!’ retorted the red-haired girl, with a pert nose and an expression of comic mockery. ‘A triumph! If he takes you to be a Perote, thank you for nothing, I say.’

The tone in which the word Perote was said (an inhabitant of Pera) was a thing to hear. In the mere pronunciation of it she had infused all her scorn as a pure-bred daughter of the Osmanli for the Levantines — Armenians, Greeks, and Jews — of which the Perote is the prototype.’

“Poor Lhéry,’ added Kerimeh, one of the young visitors; ‘he is behind the times. He must be still in the Turkey of the novels of 1830 — narghilehs, sweetmeats, and the divan all day.’

1 While heartily agreeing with the Osmanlis as to the Perotes in general, I must admit that I have known many amiable exceptions to the rule; men of perfect respectability and breeding, women who would be exquisite in any country and any society. —P. L

24 DISENCHANTED II “Or even,’ added Melek, the saucy, red-haired maiden, ‘merely in the Turkey of his own youth. He must be getting a little wrinkled, you know, must your poet.’

It was certainly true, indisputably true, that André Lhéry could no longer be young. And this fact intruded itself for the first time on the fancy of his little unknown adorer, who had never thought about it; a rather disappointing fact, disturbing her dream, and casting pale melancholy on her worship of him.

But in spite of their pretence at laughter and irony they were all in love with the man, so remote and almost disembodied — all who were there; they loved him for having loved their Turkey and spoken with respect of their Islam. A _ letter written by him to one of them was an event in their cloistered lives, in which nothing ever happens till the great annihilating catastrophe of marriage. It was read aloud. Each one was eager to hold the sheet of paper on which his hand had rested. And then, all being students of character from writing, they tried to unveil the mystery of his handwriting.

But a mamma appeared, the mamma of the two sisters, and at once the subject was changed and the letter was conjured away. Not that this was a very strict mamma with her placid face, but she would have scolded all the same, and, above all, she would not have understood, she was of another generation, spoke but little French, and had read nothing since Alexandre Dumas pére. A wide gulf lay between her and her daughters, an abyss of at least two centuries, so fast does the world progress in Turkey nowadays. Even physically she was a different being; her fine eyes were soft, with a rather vacant calm which was far from the admirers of André Lhéry; she had, in fact, restricted her part on earth to being a tender mother and a blameless wife, and had asked no more. Besides this she wore her European clothes badly, and was awkward in over-trimmed dresses; while her daughters, on the contrary, already understood how to be elegant and refined in very simple materials.