The Charmed Life | Page 2

matter, American habit. But he dropped hat
and stick on the first handy chair, left the room with a hurried "be back
in a jiffy, old man," and, a moment later I heard somewhere in the
upper story of the house his deep mellow voice, quickly followed by a
tinkling, silvery burst of laughter--the unmistakable, low-pitched
laughter of the native woman which starts on a minor key and is
accompanied by strange melodious appoggiatures an infinitesimal
sixteenth below the harmonic tones to which the Western ear is attuned.
So I felt surprised, also disappointed and a little disgusted. The usual.
sordid shop-worm romance--I said to myself--the usual, useless
pinchbeck tale of passion of some fool of a young, rich American and a
scheming native woman, doubtless aided and abetted by a swarm of
scheming, greasy, needy relations--the old story; the sort of thing that
used to be notorious in Japan and in the Philippines.
Impatient, rather soured with my new-found friend, I looked about the
room--and my surprise grew, but in another direction,
For the room was not furnished in the quick, tawdry, thrown-together
manner of a man who lives and loves and nests with the impulses of a
bird of passage. That I could have understood. It would have been in
keeping with the tinkly laugher which had drifted down the stairs. Too,
I could have understood if the appointments had been straight European
or American, a sort of cheap, sentimental link with the home selfrespect
which he had discarded--temporarily-- when he started light
housekeeping with his native-born Pgryne.

The room, complete from the ceiling to the floor and from window to
door, was furnished in the native style; not in the nasty, showy, ornate
native style of the bazaars which cater to tourists--and it is in Indian's
favor that the "Oriental wares" sold there are mostly made in
Birmingham, Berlin and Newark, N. J.--but in that solid, heavy, rather
somber native style of the well-to-do high-caste Hindu to whom every
piece--each chair and table and screen--is somehow fraught with eternal,
racial tradition. It was a real home, in other words and a native home;
and there was nothing--if I except a rack of bier pipes and a humidor
filled with a certain much-advertised brand of Kentucky burley
tobacco--which spoke of America.
A low divan ran around the four sides of the room. There were three
carved saj-wood chairs, a Kashmir walnut table of which the surface
was deeply undercut with realistic chenar leaves, and a large water-pipe
made of splendid Lucknow enamel. A huge, reddish-brown
camel's-hair rug covered the floor, and on tabourets distributed here
and there were niello boxes filled with the roseleaf-and-honey
confections beloved by Hindu women, pitchers and basins of that
exquisite damascening called bidri, and a soft-colored silken
scarf--coiled and crumpled, as if a woman had dropped it hurriedly.
The walls were covered with blue glazed tiles; and one the one facing
the outer door an inscription in inlaid work caught my attention. They
were just a few words, in Sanskrit, and, somehow, they affected me
strangely. They were the famous words from the Upanishad:
"Recall, O mind, thy deeds--recall, recall!" The answer was clear. I said
to myself, with a little bitter pang for remember that I liked the
man--that here was one who had gone fantee, who had gone native; a
man who had dropped overboard all the traditions, the customs, and
decencies, the virtues, the blessed, saving prejudices of his race and
faith to mire himself hopelessly in the slough of a foreign race and faith.
For it is true that a man who goes fantee never acquires the good, but
only the bad of the alien breed with which he mingles and blends-- true,
moreover, that such a man can never rise again, that the doors of the
house of his birth shall be forever closed to him. He has blackened the

crucible of his life and he will never find a single golden bead at the
bottom of it; only hatred and despair and disgust, a longing for the
irreparably lost, a bitter taste in the mouth of his soul.
I started towards the door. Out into the free, open sunlight, I said to
myself. For I knew what would happen. The man would come
down-stairs, carrying a square bottle and glasses. Presently he would
become drunk--maudlin--he would pour his mean, dirty confidences
into my ear and weep on my neck and--
I reconsidered, quite suddenly. Why, this young American had not the
earmarks of a man who had gone fantee. There was not that look in his
eyes--that horrible, unbearable look, a composite of misery and lust,
bred of bad thoughts, bad dreams, and worse hashish-- The man--I had
seen him in the merciless rays of the Indian sun--was keen-eyed,