THE BEAUTIES OF POLYGAMY

A Fable; perhaps a Dream.

"Bergeret"

I HAD been reading the war news from the Dardanelles. The British fleet was within rifle shot of the gleaming minarets of Stamboul. ... The Sultan's harem had taken flight to Asia. . . . Polygamy was on its last legs. . . . English dreadnoughts were cleaving the tranquil waters of the Bosphorus. I threw the newspapers across the room and picked up Robert W. Chambers' latest novel.

Romance, I felt, was what I needed. And Romance was what I got.

I read on, hour after hour, oblivious of a world gone mad. But at midnight a youthful and dark-eyed odalisque crept into my room.

She looked rather like Scheherezade in the illustrated editions of the "Thousand and One Nights." She was a very uncanny creature, for she had entered the room without opening the door. A strange blue light played around her; a light like the luminous flash in a moonstone. I had no idea who she was, but I noticed that the lower part of her flexible body was wrapped round and round with burlap; I could read the name of an importer of gramaphones printed on it in large, black letters. Then I knew that she must be a faithless Sultaness who had been drowned in the Boshporus by a jealous and outraged husband, for that is always the fate of the women of Stamboul who displease their masters.

HERE my visitor broke in to tell me the story of her mortal life.

She had been the third wife of a rich Turkish merchant, and had lived in a charming little house in Constantinople, on the shores of the

Bosphorus. She had entered her husband's harem accompanied by a maid-servant, a young girl not lacking in those simple charms that a well-born man, according to Horace, ought to appreciate without being ashamed of himself. And so, being an honest man, he promptly married my visitor—and the maid.

My friend, the third wife, was consumed with jealousy of her one time serving maid, and conceived the revengeful, the atrocious idea of an affaire with a rich Armenian. . . . Her treachery was of course discovered, and she was thrown into the Bosphorus and thoroughly drowned. She told me that she died serenely; quite content to sacrifice herself to a husband who had never deceived her.

"WTHAT?" I exclaimed. "Your husband, a polygamist, had never deceived you? ''

"A polygamist? But, my dear man, polygamy is the one state in which men seem able to live without deceiving their wives."

"But the harem? You lived in a cage and died in a burlap bag, a bag ornamented with a gramaphone advertisement. How can you condone a state of morals that permits such atrocities as these?"

"The harem," she answered seriously, "is woman's ideal home, as long as no silly books or contaminating conversations disturb the serenity of her existence. My imprisonment, you see, was not quite complete enough. If I had never read the novels of Mr. Chambers—" and here she pointed to the book on my knee, "I should have spurned the gay Armenian and still be happy in my husband's love."

"After all," she continued, "what is matrimony? Is it not fidelity in love? " And here she laughed a weird, unearthly laugh. "But love, as we all know, is fleeting, as elusive as a dragon-fly. Husbands and wives are not always capable of an enduring, unfaltering devotion. Love dies, and then ..."

"But," I protested, "knowing this why did you stoop to a flirtation with the Armenian?"

"AH!" she said. "That was the only Occidental, or American, moment of my life. I reasoned—and may Allah forgive me!—according to your Western logic. I 'flirted,' and—by that very act—I descended to the level of that novel there, bound in cloth and selling at $1.35 net! There was no treachery on my husband's part. He loved me, and married me. He loved my maid, and married her. There was no deception about him. It was only my vanity and my jealousy that had piqued me into a silly revenge. There is no reason why women should not share a man's love. The greatest mistake of your literature is its perpetual assertion that there is nothing so important in love as the winding of one man's arms around one woman's neck. An American wife has a terrible horror of sharing the love of a man with another woman. But in the Orient, we are wiser, we are—"

But here, like a puff of smoke, she disappeared from the room. The strange blue light had vanished, but in my ears there echoed again the weird, unearthly laughter of the lady in the burlap shroud.