Yasmini

"Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth the pesa."

The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the

Princess Yasmini's early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here;

but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way

in love with her, and that led to opportunity.

She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those

who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with

limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare

men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat

her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of

sex. Men's passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and

as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the

second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that

succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that

in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity,

and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing

in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse

that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her

almost daily in a room--her holy of holies--where the gods of ancient

India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over

the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already

again devising plans to set the world on fire.

There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke,

she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she

was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather

melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to

muse she grew indignant.

"Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts

not yours," she insisted, "if your tale is to be worth the pesa."

By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at

the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country's smallest

copper coins before finishing the tale. But the reference was double-edged.

A penny for my thoughts, a penny for the West's interpretation of the

East was what she had in mind.

Nevertheless, as it is to the West that the story must appeal it has seemed

wiser to remove it from her lips and so transpose that, though it loses

in lore unfortunately, it does gain something of directness and simplicity.

Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it,

would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears.

This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini's years have not yet done more

than ripen her. In a land where most women shrivel into early age she

continues, somewhere perhaps a little after thirty, in the bloom of health

and loveliness, younger in looks and energy than many a Western girl

of twenty-five. For she is of the East and West, very terribly endowed

with all the charms of either and the brains of both.

Her quick wit can detect or invent mercurial Asian subterfuge as swiftly

as appraise the rather glacial drift of Western thought; and the wisdom

of both East and West combines in her to teach a very nearly total

incredulity in human virtue. Western morals she regards as humbug,

neither more nor less.

In virtue itself she believes, as astronomers for example believe in the

precession of the equinox; but that the rank and file of human beings,

and especially learned human beings, have attained to the very vaguest

understanding of it she scornfully disbelieves. And with a frankness

simply Gallic in its freedom from those thought-conventions with which

so many people like to deceive themselves she deals with human nature

on what she considers are its merits. The result is sometimes very

disconcerting to the pompous and all the rest of the host of self-deceived,

but usually amusing to herself and often profitable to her friends.

Her ancestry is worth considering, since to that she doubtless owes a

good proportion of her beauty and ability. On her father's side she is

Rajput, tracing her lineage so far back that it becomes lost at last in

fabulous legends of the Moon (who is masculine, by the way, in Indian

mythology). All of the great families of Rajputana are her kin, and all

the chivalry and derring-do of that royal land of heroines and heroes is

part of her conscious heritage.

Her mother was Russian. On that side, too, she can claim blood royal,

not devoid of at least a trace of Scandinavian, betrayed by glittering

golden hair and eyes that are sometimes the color of sky seen over

Himalayan peaks, sometimes of the deep lake water in the valleys. But

very often her eyes seem so full of fire and their color is so baffling that

a legend has gained currency to the effect that she can change their

hue at will.

How a Russian princess came to marry a Rajput king is easier to understand

if one recalls the sinister designs of Russian statecraft in the days when

India and "warm sea-water" was the great objective. The oldest, and

surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been to send

a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very consciences

of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the veil and the

rustling curtain and religion hide woman's hand without in the least

suppressing her, that was a plan too easy of contrivance to be overlooked.

In those days there was a prince in Moscow whose public conduct so

embittered his young wife, and so notoriously, that when he was found

one morning murdered in his bed suspicion rested upon her. She was

tried in secret, as the custom was, found guilty and condemned to death.

Then, on the strength of influence too strong for the czar, the sentence

was commuted to the far more cruel one of life imprisonment in the

Siberian mines. While she awaited the dreaded march across Asia in

chains a certain proposal was made to the Princess Sonia Omanoff,

and no one who knew anything about it wondered that she accepted

without much hesitation.

Less than a month after her arrest she was already in Paris, squandering

paper rubles in the fashionable shops. And at the Russian Embassy

in Paris she made the acquaintance of the very first of the smaller Indian

potentates who made the "grand tour." Traveling abroad has since

become rather fashionable, and is even encouraged by the British-Indian

Government because there is no longer any plausible means of preventing it;

but Maharajah Bubru Singh was a pioneer, who dared greatly, and had

his way even against the objections of a high commissioner. In addition

he had had to defy the Brahman priests who, all unwilling, are the strong

supports of alien overrule; for they are armed with the iron-fanged laws

of caste that forbid crossing the sea, among innumerable other things.

Perhaps there was a hint of moral bravery behind the warrior eyes that

was enough in itself and she really fell in love at first sight, as men said.

But the secret police of Russia were at her elbow, too, hinting that only

one course could save her from extradition and Siberian mines. At any

rate she listened to the Rajah's wooing; and the knowledge that he had

a wife at home already, a little past her prime perhaps and therefore

handicapped in case of rivalry, but never-the-less a prior wife, seems

to have given her no pause. The fact that the first wife was childless

doubtless influenced Bubru Singh.

They even say she was so far beside herself with love for him that she

would have been satisfied with the Gandharva marriage ceremony sung

by so many Rajput poets, that amounts to little more than going off alone

together. But the Russian diplomatic scheme included provision for the

maharajah of a wife so irrevocably wedded that the British would not be

able to refuse her recognition. So they were married in the presence

of seven witnesses in the Russian Embassy, as the records testify.

After that, whatever its suspicions, the British Government had to admit

her into Rajputana. And what politics she might have played, whether

the Russian gray-coat armies might have encroached into those historic

hills on the strength of her intriguing, or whether she would have seized

the first opportunity to avenge herself by playing Russia false,--are matters

known only to the gods of unaccomplished things. For Bubru Singh,

her maharajah, died of an accident very shortly after the birth of their

child Yasmini.

Now law is law, and Sonia Omanoff, then legally the Princess Sonia

Singh, had appealed from the first to Indian law and custom, so that

the British might have felt justified in leaving her and her infant daughter

to its most untender mercies. Then she would have been utterly under

the heel of the succeeding prince, a nephew of her husband, unenamored

of foreigners and avowedly determined to enforce on his uncle's widow

the Indian custom of seclusion.

But the British took the charitable view, that covering a multitude of sins.

It was not bad policy to convert the erstwhile Sonia Omanoff from secret

enemy to grateful friend, and the feat was easy.

The new maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an

ancient palace for the Russian widow's use; and there, almost within

sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini had

her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western outrage

and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her Eastern heritage

by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and livelihood it is to

fish the troubled waters of the courts of minor kings.

All these things Yasmini told me in that scented chamber of another

palace, in which a wrathful government secluded her in later years for

its own peace as it thought, but for her own recuperation as it happened.

She told me many other things besides that have some little bearing

on this story but that, if all related, would crowd the book too full. The

real gist of them is that she grew to love India with all her heart and India

repaid her for it after its own fashion, which is manyfold and marvelous.

There is no fairer land on earth than that far northern slice of Rajputana,

nor a people more endowed with legend and the consciousness of

ancestry. They have a saying that every Rajput is a king's son, and every

Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere

that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and

women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped

precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when

it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when

those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a

ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead oftenest is

unexpectedness. And now to the story.