Bubbles of the Foam | Page 8

nothing else to do, for hours, watching his own image that seemed to offer him reciprocally worship as he watched it, as if it were doubtful which of the two, the reality or its reflection, was the deity, and which the devotee.
And gradually the world with all its objects came to appear in his eyes as nothing but a playground, and all its men and women merely his own animated toys. And from being utterly indifferent to everything but his own momentary pleasure and caprice, he became, little by little, first callous to the sufferings of others, and finally positively cruel, finding his amusement in making others victims to his own peremptory desires. And his appetite, like a fire, grew with the fuel that it fed upon, till it resembled voracity, and an intolerable thirst for more. But as long as he remained still a child, the fire, remaining as it were without its proper aliment, lay hidden: till he grew into a man. And then, all at once, it blazed out furiously like a very conflagration, striking terror into all the subjects of the kingdom, and threatening to consume them all, like forest trees and grass.
For whereas, till then, the fury of his self-will had been scattered, for want of concentration[19] on one object only, manhood, like a flash of lightning, suddenly revealed to him that very object, in the form of woman: and he discovered, in the storm of his delight, that women were the very victims for whom he had been blindly groping in the darkness all his life. And he threw himself upon them, like a prey, finding with intoxication that the Creator had framed him as a weapon constructed wholly for their destruction. And he said to himself, in triumph: I am, as it seems, a magnetic gem, omnipotent and irresistible, to whose attraction the entire sex succumbs inevitably, like grass. And this opinion was justified by the conduct of the women themselves. For every woman that set eyes on him, no matter who she was, fell instantly, like a stone dropped into a well without a bottom, into the abyss of infatuation, and utterly forgot not only her relations and her home, but her honour and herself and everything in the three worlds, seized as it were by the very frenzy of devotion, and anxious only to immolate herself as a victim on the altar of his divinity. And strange! though he treated them all as more worthless than grass, throwing them away almost in the instant that he saw them, not one of them all ever took warning by the fate of her predecessors: and so far were they from shunning him as the common enemy of their entire sex, that on the contrary, they seemed to struggle with one another for the prize of his momentary affection, the more, the more openly he derided them; as if even his derision and the cheapness in which he openly held them, increased the power of his charm. Ha! very wonderful is the contradiction in the heart of a woman, and bitter the irony of the Creator that fashioned it out of so curious an antagonism! For she flies to the man who makes light of her, as if pulled by a cord; while she utterly despises the man who thinks himself nothing in comparison with her: saying as it were, by her own behaviour, that she is absolutely worthless in her own esteem.
[Footnote 19: Yoga. The germ of truth, and it is a large one, in the philosophy of Yoga is the doctrine, which is proved by all experience, that concentration is the secret of mastery.]
IV
So then, after a while, the heart of King Jaya broke within him. For he became odious in the eyes of all his subjects by reason of the behaviour of his son, who paid no more regard to his admonitions than a mad elephant does to a rope of grass. And he died, consumed by the two fires of a burning fever and a devouring grief: and his wife followed him through the flames of yet another fire, as if to say: I will die no other death than his own.
And when the funeral obsequies had been completed, there came a day, soon after, when Atirupa was sitting in his palace, with some of his attendants round him, gazing at his own image, that was reflected in a tiny mirror set on his finger in a ring. And he was plunged in the contemplation of himself, shadowed by a melancholy that arose, not from grief at the loss of his parents, but dejection caused by the gloom of the period of mourning: and as he sat, he said within himself: I am losing time, and growing old, and letting