There are two great ways, however, in which we have become too modern for Lady Mary’s book. In costume we are on a level with Paris, seeing we buy our clothes there; and as regards culture, we are perhaps more advanced than is the West, since we have so much leisure for study, and are not hampered with your Western methods. And yet how little we are known by the European critics!
The people of the West still think of us women as requiring the services of the public letter-writer! They think of us also—we, who have so great an admiration for them, and interest ourselves in all they are doing—as one amongst many wives. Yet Polygamy (and here I say a Bismillah[5] or prayer of thankfulness) has almost ceased to exist in Turkey.
I know even you are longing to make the acquaintance of a harem, where there is more than one wife, but to-day the number of these establishments can be counted on five fingers. We knew intimately the wife of a Pasha who had more than one wife. He was forty years old, a well-known and important personage, and in his Palace beside his first wife were many slave-wives; the number increased from year to year. But again I repeat this is an exception.
We used often to visit the poor wife, who since her marriage had never left her home, her husband being jealous of her, as he was of all the others; they were his possessions, and in order to err on the safe side, he never let them out.
Our friend, the first wife, was very beautiful, though always ailing. Every time we went to see her, she was so grateful to us for coming, thanked us over and over again for our visit, and offered us flowers and presents of no mean value. And she looked so happy, continually smiling, and was so gentle and kind to all her entourage.
She told our mother, however, of the sorrow that was gnawing at her heart-strings, and when she spoke of the Pasha she owned how much she had suffered from not being the favourite. She treated her rivals with the greatest courtesy. “It would be easy to forgive,” she said, “the physical empire that each in turn has over my husband, but what I feel most is that he does not consult me in preference to the others.”
She had a son fifteen years old, whom she loved very dearly, but she seemed to care for the fourteen other children of the Pasha quite as much, and spoke of them all as “our children.” Although her husband had bought her as a slave, she had a certain amount of knowledge too, and she read a great deal in the evenings when she was alone, alas! only too often.
The view of the Bosphorus, with the ships coming and going, was a great consolation to her, as it has been to many a captive. And she thanked Allah over and over again that she at least had this pleasure in life.
I have often thought of this dear, sweet woman in my many moments of revolt, as one admires and reverences a saint, but I have never been able to imitate her calm resignation.