Guns of the Gods | Page 2

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,