THE PALACE OF YASMINI
Nobody saw us walk up to Yasmini's palace gate and knock; for whoever
was abroad in the heat was down by the ghat admiring the Mahatma.
The bearded giant who had admitted us stood staring at King, his long,
strong fingers twitching. In his own good time King turned and saw fit
to recognize him.
"Oh, hullo Ismail!"
He held a hand out, but the savage flung arms about him that were as
strong as the iron gate-clamps, and King had to fight to break free from
the embrace.
"Now Allah be praised, he is father of mercies! _She_ warned me!" he
croaked. "She knows the smell of dawn at midnight! She said, 'He cometh
soon!' and none believed her, save only I. This very dawn said she,
'Thou, Ismail,' she said, 'be asleep at the gate when he cometh and
thine eyes shall be thrown to the city dogs!' Aye! Oho!"
King nodded to lead on, and Ismail obeyed with a deal of pantomime
intended to convey a sense of partnership with roots in the past and its
fruition now.
The way was down a passage between high, carved walls so old that
antiquarians burn friendship in disputes not so much about the century
as the very era of that quiet art--under dark arches with latticed
windows into unexpected gardens fresh with the smell of sprinkled
water--by ancient bronze gateways into other passages that opened into
stone-paved courts with fountains in the midst--building joining on to
building and court meeting court until, where an old black panther
snarled at us between iron bars, an arch and a solid bronze door
admitted us at last into the woman's pleasance--a wonderland of jasmine,
magnolia and pomegranates set about a marble pool and therein mirrored
among rainbow-colored fishes.
Beyond the pool a flight of marble steps rose fifty feet until it passed
through a many-windowed wall into the _panch mahal_--the quarters of the
women. At their foot Ismail halted.
"Go thou up alone! Leave this elephant with me!" he said, nudging me and
pointing with his thumb toward a shady bower against the garden wall.
Without acknowledging that pleasantry King took my arm and we went
straight forward together, our tread resounding strangely on steps that
for centuries had felt no sterner shock than that of soft slippers and
naked, jeweled feet.
We were taking nobody entirely by surprise; that much was obvious.
Before we reached the top step two women opened a door and ran to meet
us. One woman threw over King's head such a prodigious garland of
jasmine buds that he had to loop it thrice about his shoulders. Then
each took a hand of one of us and we entered between doors of
many-colored wood, treading on mat-strewn marble, their bare feet
pattering beside ours. There were rustlings to right and left, and once
I heard laughter, smothered instantly.
At last, at the end of a wide hall before many-hued silken curtains our
two guides stopped. As they released our hands, with the always
surprising strength that is part of the dancing woman's stock-in-trade,
they slipped behind us suddenly and thrust us forward through the
curtains.
There was not much to see in front of us. We found ourselves in a
paneled corridor, whose narrow windows overlooked the river, facing a
painted door sixty paces distant at the farther end. King strode down
the corridor and knocked.
The answer was one word that I did not catch, although it rang like a
suddenly struck chord of music, and the door yielded to the pressure of
King's hand.
I entered behind him and the door swung shut of its own weight with a
click. We were in a high-ceilinged, very long room, having seven sides.
There were windows to right and left. A deep divan piled with scented
cushions occupied the whole length of one long wall, and there were
several huge cushions on the floor against another wall. There was one
other door besides that we had entered by.
We stood in that room alone, but I know that King felt as uneasy as I
did, for there was sweat on the back of his neck. We were being watched
by unseen eyes. There is no mistaking that sensation.
Suddenly a voice broke silence like a golden bell whose overtones go
widening in rings into infinity, and a vision of loveliness parted the
curtains of that other door.
"My lord comes as is meet--spurred, and ready to give new kingdoms to
his king! Oh, how my lord is welcome!" she said in Persian.
Her voice thrilled you, because of its perfect resonance, exactly in the
middle of the note. She looked into King's eyes with challenging
familiarity that made him smile, and then eyed me wonderingly. She
glanced from me to a picture on the wall in blue of the
Elephant-god--enormous, opulent, urbane, and then back again at me, and
smiled very sweetly.
"So you have brought Ganesha with you? The god of good luck! How
wonderful! How does one behave toward a real god?"
And while she said that she laid her hands on King's arms as naturally
as if he were a lover whom she had not seen perhaps since yesterday.
Plainly, there was absolutely nothing between him and her except his own
obstinate independence. She was his if he wanted her.
She took King's hand with a laugh that had its roots in past
companionship and led him to the middle, deepest window-seat, beneath
which the river could be heard gurgling busily.
Then, when she had drawn the silken hangings until the softened light
suggested lingering, uncounted hours, and had indicated with a nod to me
a cushion in the corner, she came and lay on the cushions close to King,
chin on hand, where she could watch his eyes.
King sat straight and square, watching her with caution that he did not
trouble to conceal. She took his hand and raised the sleeve until the
broad, gold, graven bracelet showed.
"That link forged in the past must bind us two more surely than an
oath," she said smiling.
"I used it to show to the gatekeeper."
He sat cooly waiting for her next remark. And with almost unnecessary
candor began to remove the bracelet and offer it back to her. So she
unmasked her batteries, with a delicious little rippling laugh and a
lazy, cat-like movement that betokened joy in the danger that was
coming, if I know anything at all of what sign-language means.
"I knew that very day that you resigned your commission in the army, and
I laughed with delight at the news, knowing that the gods who are our
servants had contrived it. I know why thou art here," she said; and the
change from you to thou was not haphazard.
"It is well known, Princess, that your spies are the cleverest in
India," King answered.
"Spies? I need no spies as long as old India lives. Friends are better."
"Do all princesses break their promises?" he countered, meeting her eyes
steadily.
"Never yet did I break one promise, whether it was for good or evil."
"Princess," he answered, looking sternly at her, "in Jamrud Fort you
agreed to take no part again in politics, national or international in
return for a promise of personal freedom and permission to reside in
India."
"My promise was dependent on my liberty. But is this liberty--to be
forced to reside in this old palace, with the spies of the Government
keeping watch on my doings, except when they chance to be outwitted?
Nevertheless, I have kept my promise. Thou knowest me better than to
think that I need to break promises in order to outwit a government of
Englishmen!"
"Quibbles won't help, Princess," he answered. "You promised to do
nothing that Government might object to."
"Well; will they object to my religion?" she retorted, mocking him. "Has
the British _raj_ at last screwed up its courage to the point of
trespassing behind the purdah and blundering in among religious
exercises?"
No man in his senses ever challenges a woman's argument until he knows
the whole of it and has unmasked its ulterior purpose. So King sat still
and said nothing, knowing that that was precisely what she did not want.
"You must make terms with me, heaven-born!" she went on, changing her
tone to one of rather more suggestive firmness. "The _Kali-Yug_ (age of
darkness) is drawing to a close, and India awakes! There is froth on the
surface--a rising here, an agitation there, a deal of wild talk
everywhere, and the dead old government proposes to suppress it in the
dead old ways, like men with paddles seeking to beat the waves down
flat! But the winds of God blow, and the boat of the men with the
paddles will be upset presently. Who then shall ride the storm? Their
gunners will be told to shoot the froth as it forms and rises! But if
there is a wise man anywhere he will make terms with me, and will set
himself to guide the underlying forces that may otherwise whelm
everything. I think thou art wise, my heaven-born. Thou wert wise once
on a time."
"Do you think you can rule India?" King asked her; and he did not make
the mistake of suggesting ridicule.
"Who else can do it?" she retorted. "Do you think we come into the world
to let fate be our master? Why have I royal blood and royal views,
wealth, understanding and ambition, while the others have blindness and
vague yearnings? Can you answer?"
"Princess," he answered, "I had only one object in coming here."
"I know that," she said nodding.
"I have simply come to warn you."
"_Chut!_" she answered with her chin between her hands and her elbows
deep in the cushions. "I know how much is known. This man--what is his
name? Ramsden? Pouff! Ganesha, here, is far better! Ganesha is from
America. Those fools who went to prepare the American mind for what is
coming, because they were altogether too foolish to be anything but in
the way in India, have been found out, and Ganesha has come like a big
bull-buffalo to save the world by thrusting his clumsy horns into things
he does not understand! I tell you, Athelstan, that however much is
known there is much more that is not known. You would better make terms
with me!"
"What you must understand, Princess, is that your plan to overthrow the
West and make the East the world's controlling force, is known by those
who can prevent you," he answered quietly. "You see, I can't go away
from here and tell whoever asks me that you are observing your promise
to----"
"No," she interrupted with a ringing merry laugh of triumph. "You speak
truth without knowing it! You can not go away!"
Princess Yasmini's boast was good. But we had come to solve a problem,
not to run away with it, and she looked disconcerted by our rather
obvious willingness to be her prisoners for a while.
"Do you think I can not be cruel?" she asked suddenly.
"I have seen you at your worst, as well as at your best!" King answered.
"You act like a man who has resources. Yet you have none," she answered
slowly, as if reviewing all the situation in her mind. "None knows where
you are--not even Mulji Singh, with whom you left your other clothes
before putting on that uniform the better to impress me! The bag that
you and Ganesha share between you, like two mendicants emerging from the
jail, is now in a room in this palace. You came because you saw that if
I should be arrested there would be insurrection. You said so to Ommony
sahib, and his butler overheard. But not even Ommony knows where you
are. He said to you: 'If you can defeat that woman without using
violence, you'll stand alone in the world as the one man who could do
it. But if you use violence, though you kill her, she will defeat you
and all the rest of us.' Is not that what your Friend Ommony said?"
"What kind of terms do you want me to make with you, Princess?" King
answered.
"I can make you ruler of all India!" she said. "Another may wear the
baubles, but thou shalt be the true king, even as thy name is! And
behind thee, me, Yasmini, whispering wisdom and laughing to see the
politicians strut!"
King leaned back and laughed at her.
"Do you really expect me to help you ruin my own countrymen, go back on
my color, creed, education, oath and everything, and----"
"Deluded fools! The East--the East, Athelstan, is waking! Better make
terms with me, and thou shalt live to ride on the arising East as God
rides on the wind and bits and governs it!"
"Very well," he said. "Show me. I'll do nothing blindfold."
"Hah! Thou art not half-conquered yet," she laughed. "And what of
Ganesha? Is this mountain of bones and thews a person to be trusted, or
shall we show him how much stronger than him is a horsehair in a clever
woman's fingers?"
"This man Ramsden is my friend," King said.
"Are you _his_ friend?" she retorted.
He nodded.
"You are going to see the naked heart of India!" she said. "Better to
have your eyes burned out now than see that and be false to it
afterward!"
Then, since we failed to order red-hot needles for our eyes, she cried
out once--one clear note that sounded almost exactly as if she had
struck a silver gong. A woman entered like the living echo to it.
Yasmini spoke, and the woman disappeared again.
Below us the river swallowed and gurgled along the palace wall, and we
caught the occasional thumping of a boat-pole. The thumping ceased
exactly underneath us, and a man began singing in the time-hallowed
language of Rajasthan. I think he was looking upward as he sang, for
each word reached its goal.
"Oh warm and broad the plow land lies,
The idle oxen wait!
We pray thee, holy river, rise,
Nor glut thy fields too late!
The year awakes! The slumbering seed
Swells to its birth! Oh river, heed!"
"Strange time of year for that song, Princess! Is that one of your
spies?" asked King, not too politely.
"One of my friends," she answered. "I told you: India awakes! But
watch."
It was growing dark. Two women came and drew the curtains closer. Other
women brought lamps and set them on stools along one wall; others again
brought tapers and lit the candles in the hydra-headed candelabra.
"It is really too light yet," Yasmini grumbled, as if the gods who
marshal in the night had not kept faith with her. But even so, the
shadows danced among India's gods on the wall facing the row of stools.
Then there began wood-wind music, made by musicians out of sight, low
and sweet, suggesting unimaginable mysteries, and one by one through the
curtains opposite there came in silently seven women on bare feet that
hardly touched the carpet; and all the stories about nautch girls, all
the travelers' tales of how Eastern women dance with their arms, not
feet, vanished that instant into the kingdom of lies. This was
dancing--art absolute. They no longer seemed to be flesh and blood women
possessed of weight and other limitations; their footfall was hardly
audible, and you could not hear them breathe at all. They were like
living shadows, and they danced the way the shadows of the branches do
on a jungle clearing when a light breeze makes the trees laugh.
It had some sort of mystic meaning no doubt, although I did not
understand it; but what I did understand was that the whole arrangement
was designed to produce a sort of mesmerism in the beholder.
However, school yourself to live alone and think alone for a quarter of
a century or so, meeting people only as man to man instead of like a
sheep among a flock of sheep, and you become immune to that sort of
thing.
The Princess Yasmini seemed to realize that neither King nor I were
being drawn into the net of dreaminess that those trained women of hers
were weaving.
"Watch!" said Yasmini suddenly. And then we saw what very few men have
been priviliged to see.
She joined the dance; and you knew then who had taught those women.
Theirs had been after all a mere interpretation: of her vision. Hers was
the vision itself.
She was _It_--the thing itself--no more an interpretation than anything
in nature is. Yasmini became India--India's heart; and I suppose that if
King and I had understood her we would have been swept into her vortex,
as it were, like drops of water into an ocean.
She was unrestrained by any need, or even willingness to explain
herself. She was talking the same language that the nodding blossoms and
the light and shadow talk that go chasing each other across the
hillsides. And while you watched you seemed to know all sorts of
things--secrets that disappeared from your mind a moment afterward.
She began singing presently, commencing on the middle F as every sound
in nature does and disregarding conventional limitations just as she did
when dancing. She sang first of the emptiness before the worlds were
made. She sang of the birth of peoples; of the history of peoples.
She sang of India as the mother of all speech, song, race and knowledge;
of truths that every great thinker since the world's beginning has
propounded; and of India as the home of all of them, until, whether you
would or not, at least you seemed to see the undeniable truth of that.
And then, in a weird, wild, melancholy minor key came the story of the
_Kali-Yug_--the age of darkness creeping over India, condemning her for
her sins. She sang of India under the hoof of ugliness and ignorance and
plague, and yet of a few who kept the old light burning in secret--of
hidden books, and of stuff that men call magic handed down the centuries
from lip to lip in caves and temple cellars and mountain fastnesses,
wherever the mysteries were safe from profane eyes.
And then the key changed again, striking that fundamental middle F that
is the mother-note of all the voices of nature and, as Indians maintain,
of the music of the spheres as well. Music and song and dance became
laughter. Doubt vanished, for there seemed nothing left to doubt, as she
began to sing of India rising at last, again triumphant over darkness,
mother of the world and of all the nations of the world, awake,
unconquerable.
Never was another song like that one! Nor was there ever such a climax.
As she finished on a chord of triumph that seemed like a new spirit
bursting the bonds of ancient mystery and sank to the floor among her
women, there stood the Gray Mahatma in their midst, not naked any
longer, but clothed from head to heel in a saffron-colored robe, and
without his paste of ashes.
He stood like a statue with folded arms, his yellow eyes blazing and his
look like a lion's; and how he had entered the room I confess I don't
know to this hour, nor does Athelstan King, who is a trained observer of
unusual happenings. Both doors were closed, and I will take oath that
neither had been opened since the women entered.
"Peace!" was his first word, spoken like one in authority, who ordered
peace and dared to do it.
He stood looking for more than a minute at King and me with, I think,
just a flicker of scorn on his thin lips, as if he were wondering
whether we were men enough to face the ordeal before us. Then
indefinably, yet quite perceptibly his mood changed and his appearance
with it. He held his right hand out.
"Will you not shake hands with me?" he asked smiling.
Now that was a thing that no sanctimonious Brahman would have dreamed of
doing, for fear of being defiled by the touch of a casteless foreigner;
so he was either above or below the caste laws, and it is common
knowledge how those who are below caste cringe and toady. So he
evidently reckoned himself above it, and the Indian who can do that has
met and overcome more tyranny and terrors than the West knows anything
about.
I wish I could make exactly clear what happened when I took his
outstretched hand.
His fingers closed on mine with a grip like marble. There are few men
who are stronger than I am; I can outlift a stage professional; yet I
could no more move his hand or pull mine free than if he had been a
bronze image with my hand set solid in the casting.
"That is for your own good," he said pleasantly, letting go at last.
"That other man knows better, but you might have been so unwise as to
try using violence."
"I'm glad you had that experience," said King in a low voice, as I went
back to the window-seat. "Don't let yourself be bewildered by it.
There's an explanation for everything. They know something that we
don't, that's all."