The Charmed Life | Page 2

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, clean morally and physically. His laughter was fresh. His complexion was healthy--and yes, I continued my thoughts, he seemed happy, supremely, sublimely, enviably happy!
"Sorry I kept you waiting," came his voice from the farther door as