Sing me a ditty, sweet singer I sue
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew;
Sing of the wine cup the red roses brew
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew.
Sing of my sweetheart close claspt to my side
Love's lips to her lips in secret confide
Kisses to credit that still remain due
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew.
Cup bearer, Saki! Boy! Silver-limbed, slim,
Cross thou, I pray thee, my poor threshold's rim,
Fill up my goblet and fill my soul too
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew.
How shall the guerdon of Love's life be mine
When thou deniest me the red rose's wine?
Fill up! and in thought my Beloved one I'll view
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew!
Breeze of the morning that flyest so fleet,
Haste thee! Ah haste thee, to her happy feet
Tell her the tale of her lover so true
Afresh and afresh, anew and anew.
Siyah Yamin paused, ending the song--which echoes and re-echoes
through every harlot's house in India--with a gay flourish of her
small fingers on the drum which had been throbbing a monotonous
accompaniment.
She looked more like a piece of confectionery than ever in saffron and
white and silver, and her indifferent laugh rang through the arches of
her balconied room and out into the wickedest alley in Satanstown
without a hint of anything in it save pure contentment. Contentment at
being set free from unwelcome trammellings, contentment at being once
more the Darling of the Town.
As for Ato, serious old Ato, with her mock heroics, she, Siyala, bore
her no grudge for having supplied an excellent opportunity for
dramatic effect. Of course the "memory of tears" had precipitated
matters somewhat, but the denouement was foreordained. Had not she
come prepared for it with her dancing clothes, her dancing feet?
Thus she lay lazily, contentedly, among her cushions and watched Mirza
Ibrahim and Khodadad smoking their drugged pipes in her balcony. Her
house was the rendezvous of all evil things and scarcely a plot was
hatched without her knowing something of it. So, after a time she
rose, silently as a carpet snake, and crept behind their backs. Then
she laughed.
"Hast not hit on payment yet for thy scarred cheek, Khodadad?" she
asked derisively. "Lo! it spoils thy beauty, friend, and I have a mind
to pass thee off as damaged goods to Yasmeena over the way. She is not
bad as a mistress, though somewhat too stout. But there! 'When the
stomach's full the eye sees God.'"
"Daughter of the devil!" muttered Khodadad succinctly.
Siyah Yamin's childish face grew hard and clear as if it were carved
in crystal. "Bandy no names, O Gift of God," she said disdainfully,
"Who made me, made thee. Are there not ever two splits in a pea? Yet
would not I sit still with a firebrand in my face." She pointed at the
red mark left by Akbar's polo stick.
"Neither do we!" broke in Ibrahim angrily. "Leave us to our talk,
fool. We will hit, this time, on some plan with which no woman's lack
of good faith can interfere."
Siyah Yamin yawned imperturbably. "What would you?" she replied. "I am
better as I am, as the rat said when the cat invited him out of his
hole. Thy party purpose did not suit me. But blame me not with the
luck that lies ever with the King."
"Curse him!" muttered Khodadad sullenly, and the courtesan gave
another evil little laugh.
"Yea! even at _chaugan_ thou hast no chance," she went on maliciously.
"'Tis a pity he was not killed. Lo! being so stunned thou couldst not
realise what the mere rumour of his death meant, or thou wouldst
regret thy failure still more. The bazaar rang with the news for
half-an-hour, half groaning, half cheering. _Then_ was the time for
action, not now, when the blind giant of India, formed of fools like
my friends here, is ready once more to drive home Akbar's javelin head
where it lists to go! God! did you but hate him as I, Woman, hate him
the Man!"
"What wouldst thou do, harlot?" asked Ibrahim turning on her sharply.
"What couldst thou do?"
She half-closed her sleepy-looking eyes, and stared out into the
sunshine in which the lane below lay festering. Not a hundred yards
away, in the sunshine also, lay the high road from the great stretches
of fields where the peasants toiled uncomplainingly, to the palace
where the King dreamt his dream that was born out of due time, and
along it the workers were passing bringing in the fruits of their
labour. Piled baskets of green-skinned melons, red earthenware pots of
milk, creaking wains of corn. For them life was simple, untouched by
the imagination of either evil or good. For them even the gossip of
their town-bred neighbours was unreal, fantastic.
"What would I do, pandar," replied the courtesan slowly, her eyes
brightening in measure with her words, her voice gaining strength from
her evil fancies, "If I believed that the Luckstone of Akbar brought
luck as thou dost, it should be _mine!_ Stay! It should be mine and
bring discredit on the beast Birbal to whose charge 'tis given. Hold!
interrupt me not! I see further--such thoughts come with the thinking.
Aye! I would make Prince Salim the thief, and so force him to revolt!
See you not? See you not? Akbar's every thought of empire is bound up
in the boy--that would be revenge indeed! There is no tie so strong as
the tie of blood; loose that and the ship of a man's mind may go
adrift. Make his son the thief I say, by guile if thou willst; but
make Salim the thief!"
Her large eyes had grown larger with her evil dreamings. They sate and
looked at her as the fascinated bird looks at the snake.
"Impossible!" murmured the Lord Chamberlain, feeling nevertheless an
answering quiver of assent.
"Naught is impossible to ultimate guile," she went on, every atom of
her seeming to gain in vitality as her dream of deceit unfolded itself
to her ready mind. "Where is the diamond kept--dost know?"
Khodadad spoke then; he was gathering initiative from her malice. "He
knows," he said, nodding his head at Ibrahim, "as Chamberlain he must
know."
"Where it cannot be touched," retorted the palace official, sullenly.
"In the Hall of Labour, guarded, besentinelled, day and night. No
chance of theft--save by deep treachery. And there is none to bribe.
Shall I offer a price to virtue-ridden Budaoni, court preacher, who
works there at his translations? Or blazon our attempt abroad by
approaching the Rajput soldiery or the King's paid artizans?"
Khodadad's face fell. In truth bribery in such a stronghold of the
King's as the Hall of Labour where the best workmen were employed at
fabulous wages, seemed hopeless. But Siyah Yamin's took on a sudden
expression of amused contempt.
"So!" she began, "but they are men; that is enough for me. And one of
them is Diswunt--Diswunt the King's crippled painter----"
"Aye!" assented the Lord Chamberlain still more sullenly. "Diswunt who
is devoted to his master. 'Tis next his studio the Englishman's lathe
is set up; farthest therefore from the door, farthest from treachery."
Siyah Yamin stretched her beautiful arms in an all-embracing gesture
and leant back against the wall that was grimed by a hundred, a
million such contacts with vicious humanity.
"What wilt give me for the diamond, Ibrahim?" she said suddenly, "a
thousand golden pieces? I will not take a dirrhm less. 'Twill serve to
pay the crazy painter for his likeness of me. Hast seen it? No?" She
clapped her hands, and sate up with an odd expression of doubt,
dislike, and desire on her small, childish face. "Then thou shalt see,
and--and condemn it. What? Drum-banger?" she went on sharply as
Deena's wicked old face showed at the stair-head in answer to her
call. "How now? Where is Nargiz?"
"Gone out, Princess, leaving me the while devising a new devil's dance
for my Lord Chamberlain's delectation this evening. He entertains the
King's friends!"
Siyah Yamin interrupted a malicious leer at Ibrahim with scant
courtesy.
"Peace, fool! Go fetch the portrait of me Diswunt painted, these
gentlemen would see it."
"Well?" she added when, a minute or two afterward four pairs of
Eastern eyes were gazing at a picture which offended every canon of
Eastern art. Here were no tiny smooth surfaced stipplings, no delicate
dottings of jewellery no faultless complexion, no plastered hair. Even
its size, its composition were unconventional. This was a life-sized
face--the face and no more--peering out of a white swathing veil which
filled up the small oval panel on which it was painted. But it stood
there, propped against the humanity-grimed wall, a veritable marvel in
the fierce determination to be quit of all convention which showed in
its every touch.
The fighting quails called from their shrouded cages below, the sounds
of the bazaar drifted upward, and on these sounds came Ibrahim's
sudden contemptuous laugh.
"Thou shouldst keep it as a scarecrow for unwelcome lovers," he said
idly. "By God! Even hot lust would fly from such a _churail_."[11]
---------------------
[Footnote 11: A very dreadful female ghost.]
---------------------
Siyah Yamin flushed angrily and bent forward to look at the picture
more closely. Something there was even in its outrageous originality
which she, as woman, recognised as true.
"The lad meant well, being my lover," she murmured softly, then her
eyes turned to Mirza Ibrahim with a whole world of malice in them.
"Thou shouldst get him to paint such an one for thee of Atma Devi,
friend; it might serve to heal thee of--of her scant courtesy--to say
nothing of her bruises!"
The Lord Chamberlain grew purple with rage. "Curses on her!" he cried.
"How didst hear? Did the jade dare to tell----"
The courtesan interrupted him with absolute contempt. "Truly thou hast
a poor purblind brain concerning women, Mirza. Couldst not see, man,
with half an eye that Ato is not of those who speak of insult? Nay!
'Twas old Deena yonder--who spends half his time with vice and half
with virtue--who, when thou wast attempting to thrust thyself upon
her, saw thee put through the door, and trundled down the stair like a
bad baby! Fie upon thee, sonling!"
The raillery of her voice matched the derisive shaking of her jewelled
finger as he rose sullenly, muttering curses and swearing to stop the
old drum-banger's loose lip. "Aye! Thou canst do it with a handful of
gold," yawned Siyah Yamin. "Deena's mouth just holds twenty good gold
pieces. I have had to gag him myself ere now. Farewell then,
conspirator! I will take a thousand of those same myself for the
King's Luck, not one dirrhm less!"
Mirza Ibrahim stood arrested at the stair head. Angry as he was, he
knew her wit, and a glance at Khodadad's face showed that he knew it
also.
"How wilt thou compass it?" he asked sullenly.
She looked at him jeeringly. "By my wits, friend. Have I not all the
vice of all India at my finger tips? Is not Pahlu the subtlest thief
in Hindustan amongst my brethren? Do not the stranglers, and
poisoners, and beguilers rub shoulders with virtuous gentlemen as ye,
in this my house? Nay! Leave it to me, Mirza, leave it to me, the
courtesan!"
She lay softly laughing to herself when they had gone, until Deena the
drum-banger coming up the stairs with laboriously secret creakings
whispered: "Mistress Atma Devi hath been waiting below for a private
interview this hour past. Shall she come?"
Then she sate up, suddenly serious.
"Ato!" she said. "Yes! let her come--let her come!"
There was an almost malicious content in her tone, for she realised
that here was metal worthy of her steel, that in the coming interview
she would have no crass, heavy man's brain and heart to deal with, but
a woman's. Dull they might be, it is true, yet would they be full of
intuitions, of sudden unexpected grip on motive, and sudden clarities
of vision. Yet for this alone, Atma Devi might be useful to her in the
immediate future; since she would need every atom of knowledge, every
possible fulcrum, ere she could lay hands on the King's Luck. Aye!
Atma might help, though she was for the King; but that made it all the
more imperative, all the more worthy skill, that she should be bent
from her purpose, and be made unconsciously to work for the King's
disadvantage.
So once more the whole vitality of the courtesan leapt up toward evil.
Woman against Woman! Aye! That was it! Woman glorying in her
serpent-bruised heel against Woman treading on the serpent's head.
Woman the Temptress, against Woman the Saviour.
Dimly she saw this--the unending conflict of the World--as she gave
greeting with a mysterious smile on her baby-face to the tall somewhat
gaunt figure with the harassed, perturbed look in its great grave dark
eyes.
In truth, no imagination could have conceived a more subtle antagonism
than lay between those two women as they sate for a second in silence,
looking at each other across Diswunt the crippled painter's picture
which still stood against the wall.
Something there seemed to be, indeed, in this man's ideal of the woman
he loved, of his endeavour to solve the mystery of woman's dual nature
which jarred upon the nerves of both these types of Womanhood; for as
their eyes met, Siyah Yamin laughed hurriedly and pointed. "Dost
recognise it?" she asked.
Atma Devi's straight brows showed level and steady as she looked.
"Aye!" she answered, then added swiftly: "Lo! Siyah, with that before
thee, I marvel thou canst be so unkind--to a poor lad who loves thee."
The last words came softly, lingeringly, for love was still to Atma
the one thing worth having in the world, though she denied it
strenuously. The craving for it lay behind all her claims to
Charanship. Vaguely she knew it, vaguely she was ashamed of it.
"Not more unkind than he who would fain thrust deformity upon _my_
love," retorted the courtesan airily. "Lo! Ato! even thou, with all
thy fine feelings, couldst not love crooked legs and a hunchback--the
King hath neither! Then wherefore should I be kind?"
"Wherefore indeed," assented Atma, disdaining her own flush. "So why
not give him dismissal instead of keeping him, as thou dost, on the
rack? See you, I speak warmly, in that he had his food from my
father's house for service done before the King found him drawing dogs
upon a white wall with a burnt bone, and reft him from us for
teaching. Thus it grieved me to see him, but now, so distraught,
so----"
"But now?" echoed Siyah Yamin sharply. "What! Hast been at the Hall of
Labour?"
Atma's face fell. "Nay! Not there. No woman finds entry there! Else
had I seen for myself and not come to thee, seeking news." Her
troubled eyes sought Siyah Yamin's almost resentfully.
"News?" echoed the latter, craft growing to her face. "What news?
Somewhat that Diswunt would not tell thee? Out with it Ato? Tell me
thy end--God knows but it may fit mine, since, so they say,
extremities meet."
"Aye," assented Atma sombrely. "That is why I seek thee. Hate and love
are not far distant with us womenkind."
Then, suddenly she reached out a tense, nervous hand to lay upon Siyah
Yamin's smooth round arm.
"Lo! Sister! thou hearest all things here, and I--I hear nothing! What
news is there of the King's Luck? Hath he in truth yielded it to the
Englishman?"
Siyah Yamin stared for a second, then burst into a perfect cascade of
high-pitched laughter.
"Said I not truly," she gurgled, "that extremes meet! See! I will send
for a cooling sherbet, and I will tell thee all!"
It was not all, it did not even approach the truth, but it served her
purpose. So she sate, watching the effect of each word, and Atma Devi
listened, weighing each word, both with the same indescribable
intuitions of their sex, appraising this, discounting that, until at
last the latter rose, tall, dark, menacing, to look down on the other,
crouching like a coiled snake among her cushions.
"Yea! as thou hast said, Siyal, true loyalty would lend itself even to
theft, or rather to the snatching of luck from ill luck, and the
protection of the King from evil magic; and so I will tell Diswunt--I,
his mistress by inheritance. And to give it to the keeping of the
Beneficent Ladies as I have said were well done. The Lady Hamida, the
King's mother, carries his honour close day and night, even as she
once carried him. And Khanzada Gulbadan Begum hath wit more than most
men, so I will aid if I can, being bound also to the King's honour.
But hearken, Siyah! Lo! draw thy veil so--let me have it." She sank to
her knees and leaning forward caught the loose end of the courtesan's
tinsel veil and flung it round her own head also. "Now let us swear
once more, as sisters of the veil, to be true to each other until the
death--until the death--dost hear?"
Taken by surprise Siyah Yamin shrank back from those blazing eyes,
paled, faltered; finally, compelled thereto by the grip of a nature
stronger than her own, muttered faintly:
"I swear."
"Till the death?"
"Till--death."
After Atma had gone the courtesan sate for a while as if
half-paralysed; she had gone further than was safe, seeing that she
was to use Atma as a tool; a half-crazed tool. Then she looked about
her. The heat of the day was waxing. Below her the bazaar, becoming
drowsy, was leaving a thousand wickednesses to welter and fester under
the noon-tide sun while it slipped from them for a while in sleep;
leaving them restlessly active, ceaselessly on the move like molecules
in a sunray; thought hustling thought, intention seeking desire,
making evil ready for the awakening of men to find a new stimulus to
wrongdoing in the coolness of the afternoon. It was always so. Evil
grew day by day. There was nothing else alive in the whole world.
So by degrees courage and confidence returned.
"Send for Pahlu, the prince of thieves," she said "and bid Pooru, the
false gem-maker, be here when I awaken. Meanwhile, let Deena take this
to Diswunt at the Hall of Labour."
She sate for a second, pen in hand, cogitating half amusedly; then
with a sudden smile wrote in delicate curvings a verse from Sa'adi's
"Lamp and the Moth":
Oh! fearful tearful lover! Cease to sigh,
Passion's worst pangs thou knowest not--as I.
Leave pining, leave lamenting and be bolder
Woman yields readiest to those who hold her.
So, swallowing a perfumed pill of opium all sugar coated and silvered,
she, too, slept in her balcony.