Bubbles of the Foam | Page 8

followed their example: and became as it
were the devotee at the shrine of his own beauty, making it a deity to
which every other thing or body was only fitted to be sacrificed. And
he filled his rooms with mirrors of many colours, made of crystal and
lapiz-lazuli, and polished gold and silver, and the water of tanks whose
slabs were of marble of every variety of hue; and he used to sit alone,
when he had 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