Caves of Terror | Page 7

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