“What did you say to him, my dear?” she asked. “Did you refuse him something? That is the look he wears when you say ‘no.’ Nasty temper, you see.”
I did not like her. I did not like any of the people. They seemed … how shall I say it? … a little unreal, a little wanting.
Then I wondered. Was it the pearl? Had I forgotten to wear or even to bring his pearl? Was it something significant in India? I did not know. I was rather alarmed, for no definite reason.
There was music, and that then new invention, cocktails, and whisky for the officers. I retreated to one side of the great room and seated myself, very ill at ease, on a low divan and watched the people. I felt “let down.” I had expected … Heaven knows what, but not this.
Then a voice spoke to me. It was a soft, cultured voice.
“Tired?” it said. “Or just bored?”
I looked up. A tall young Hindu, in European clothes but wearing a turban, was standing beside my divan. He was unusually handsome for a man of any race, and he had a haughtiness in his features that commanded both attention and respect.
“Just a little out of place, I’m afraid,” I said. “Your ways are all new to me. I’m just a tourist in your country.”
“Tourist?” He seemed genuinely astonished. “But then how did you get here? Forgive my curiosity, but it isn’t usual, you know.”
“I am the Rajah’s guest,” I said, thinking of nothing better.
“The Rajah? What? … Ah, yes, of course.” He seemed very puzzled. In fact, he seemed so interested that he sat beside me in just as European a fashion as I sat myself and stared at me in a very queer way.
“Would it be impolite if I asked you if you have known the Rajah long? Perhaps you met him in England …?”
I was rather embarrassed. I was not sure of myself, and felt uneasy about telling him the true story. He saw it, too, and helped me out.
“You seem to hesitate,” he said. “May I suggest that it might be better to tell me … not that it matters. You can trust me perfectly of course, and … well, please do.”
Terribly Oxonian. Terribly nice. Terribly handsome.
I told him.
First he frowned. Then he laughed as one seldom sees an Eastern laugh.
“Shikapur, eh?” he echoed, still laughing. “Would you mind pointing him out to me in the crowd? You see, I’ve only just returned from England. I’m a little … you know.”
I saw the Rajah, towering over everybody else, and being the Green Gallant in person with three pretty young English girls and their chaperon. When I indicated him, my new acquaintance practically roared. He started up, then sat down again, and finally stood to his feet. I must have looked as bewildered as I felt, for he said:
“My dear young lady” (he was perhaps one year older than I, mind you), “yours is the most romantic story I have ever heard in India, except the ones out of cheap novels. I think it only fair to tell you that you have been the victim of a joke.”
“Joke?”
“Yes. You see … oh, it scarcely matters. But actually, I myself am, not the Rajah, but the Maharajah of Shikapur. And I am very glad you have come.”
He bowed low and charmingly.
I was covered with embarrassment.
“But …”
“Naturally you want to know all about it. Well, the gigantic devil who decoyed you is … my very good friend, Bhurlana.”
“But why …?”
“Oh, you don’t know Bhurlana. He likes the ladies and he is sensitive about them. I can just see his disappointment when you came without the pearl (my pearl, by the way, and you are very welcome to it) … so he went off and pouted. You see, we were at Oxford together, and I know him. Every time I go away on business, he rather lords it. We are true Hindus, but both of us have spent so much of our time away that we have rather the European sense of humor. Not a bad sort of chap. I shall have to talk to him.”
And with this he walked off into the crowd.
All these events seemed totally unreal. You may picture, if you will, a very dazed and very embarrassed young woman. Every burst of laughter I heard as I sat there alone waiting for Shikapur to come back … or hoping he would … I felt was about me and my disillusion. And I could see no reason why he (meaning the false Shikapur) should have done it.
Well, he came back.
In fact, the two of them came back together, and my embarrassment grew.
“We have come to beg your pardon,” said the real Maharajah, by the way of opening the subject. “You will find Bhurlana very humble.”
He did not look it.
“Dear lady,” he said, bowing, “you were the victim of circumstances over which we none of us have control, and I come to ask your kind forgiveness for my part in those circumstances. May I have the pleasure of taking you through Shikapur’s elegant palace and into his picturesque gardens?”
Before I could answer, the Maharajah himself answered.
“Not at all. Shikapur himself will have that pleasure.” And stepping forward he offered me his arm in a manner so assured that I took it, and we went through the hall into another large room which, in contrast to the reception room, was entirely Hindu in decoration.
Once across the threshold, having left his friend staring and speechless, Shikapur suddenly changed his character.
“Miss Crocker,” he said, “there is a certain frankness in your face which inspires confidence. It makes me want to trust you in a way which perhaps I ought not. Will you … and I mean this very seriously … give me your word as an American gentlewoman that anything I say to you within the next few minutes will never be repeated? And will you please promise not to try to draw any conclusions of your own – and even if you do, never to pass them on?”
Mystery, mystery, mystery!
Adventure, adventure, adventure!
I was in my element. Would I promise? Of course I would. Would I keep a secret? I’d keep a million secrets, even if they involved the total destruction of India and the fall of the British Dominion.
I promised. He led me through divers passages into a garden. He brought me to a lawn of rich and perfectly trimmed turf hidden behind hedgerows. He gestured me to be seated on the grass and sat down beside me.
“You see, I have no choice,” he said. “If I pretend that this is merely a joke, you will repeat it as a joke and somebody will learn what they should not. I must tell you frankly and trust you …”
He looked sharply at me as he said this, and spoke very coldly and sharply.
“We are not bloody people. We may be idealists, but not that sort.”
I showed my puzzlement. He came to the point.
“You see, you were mistaken for some one else. Some one else should have been on the steps of the American Consulate at that moment, and should have smiled. It was all prearranged. Well … no matter what the reason … you were mistaken for that person, and until you came this evening, we did not realize the mistake.”
“Political?” I inquired, now regaining a little of my native aplomb.
He darted a sharp look at me. He had power, that young man.
“Naturally I will not answer any such question,” he said. “Let us call the whole incident closed.”
“In spite of a woman’s curiosity?”
“Because of it …”
“Oh …”
“And, Miss Crocker, may we now be really friends?”
“Have you a harem?” I countered ironically.
He laughed.
“I’m afraid not,” he admitted. “I’m too British, I expect. But Bhurlana has.”
He paused a moment. Then:
“And about being friends?”
I was beaten. I was really pleased by this charming young man. It was a page out of a romance that brought in maharajahs and slaves and dark, mysterious things and handsome princes, and I was as happy as a schoolgirl.
Could we be friends? How could we miss it?
Indeed, Shikapur and I did becom
e excellent friends, which we are to this day. He became my key to India and the haunting spirit of her in which I had come there to bathe myself.
From Bombay to Benares to Agra to Amber to Calcutta, he was my guide and my interpreter and my companion. He explained to me those things that the foreign eye and mind could never understand about the mingled, yet separate races of the Orient, and the mysteries and the symbols. And if I have ever drawn into my life some of that beauty, some of the peace and rest that is India’s soul, then I have him to thank for it.
But I wanted adventure and I got it.
You will remember how my friend had mentioned that Bhurlana had a harem. Well, I saw something of that tall, handsome man, for his good friend and I had arrived at a basis of courtship, and one day I taxed him on the subject.
He laughed.
“I suppose I ought to put you in your place for such a suggestion,” he said. “But as you are as un-Indian as possible” (I resented that) “you are already forgiven for all the gaucheries of that sort you may make.”
“Why is that gauche? You have one, haven’t you?”
“Certainly. But that is not a thing we mention with outsiders.”
“But I want to see it.”
“Ah? Why?”
“I mean, really see it. Live in it for a few days.”
That floored him. He couldn’t believe I was serious. And after some discussion he began, I was sure, to think I was completely mad.
Nevertheless I won. He eventually challenged me to spend an entire week in his mysterious assemblage of beauties (such, I supposed, they were) … as his guest. He declared that I would ask to be released in a day or two. He insisted that no woman but an Easterner could possibly adapt herself to the life. He even implied that I might be shocked.
Naturally, this sealed the bargain.
Headstrong as usual, I left with him and Shikapur for a settlement outlying Bombay where the harem was. On the way I learned a little about what I was getting into and it was far less glamorous than it had been in the abstract.
The fact is that harems do not exist in India as they do in Turkey or in other purely Mohammedan countries. They are not a national institution, and they are not a large lodging house for the legal wives of the richer men. As a matter of fact, they are rather devoted to the mistresses of the richer nobility, and have no place in organized society at all. Had I realized this, I doubt if I would have been so free to accept Bhurlana’s challenge.
But I had “made my bed” … and so forth.
We arrived. I shall not name the place, because it enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety, and Bhurlana came in for a great deal of criticism from the British Civil Servants and their wives. Nor am I going into the splendors of an Eastern potentate’s harem, for you have all seen your cinemas, and read your romances, and you probably therefore know as much about the subject as I do.
Well, I took my disillusionment fairly well.
I was first introduced – if that be the word – to a gorgeous, fat, and really very beautiful mountain of a woman who was the dominating spirit of the establishment. She had the power that comes of priority, and if the owner himself had grown tired of her charms, or had passed on to other blandishments, it was only contributory to the authority she wielded in her own palace.
But there was real beauty there. I soon learned to distinguish between the confined inmates of this woman-colony and the innumerable little dancers, mostly very young girls, who were employed there for entertainment. I found that many of the former were women of considerable culture, and that many had traveled or had lived in Europe. In fact my English and what I remembered of my French was quite sufficient to get me on a friendly basis with most of them.
But hardly had I been given my sumptuous apartments and my attendants, than I realized how completely in the power of the tall Hindu nobleman I had gotten myself. He was God here. They kissed the ground before him. They prostrated themselves as he passed. He was their religion and their idol. It was slavery and despotism, and it was wonderful.
But … you cannot put some forty-odd women into one fairly confined space and expect no tension. And tension there certainly was.
First I made friends with a charming girl called Radipurtha. She had been “sold” into the service of the maharajah (although she called it by a nicer name) by her lordly parents who owed his father a considerable sum of money. Banal story. This little girl took the trouble to warn me and finally to protect me. A warning may not have seemed necessary, but actually it was. If the masks could have been lifted from the faces of Bhurlana’s favorites, the whiskers of the feline would have been the first things to appear. I will give an example.
You should know that I was the “guest” of the master, and not a regular inmate of the harem. This did little to inspire popularity for me, especially as I was privileged to sit at the right when he deigned to dine in state in the enormous dome-covered hall in the center of the main palace, while at my right sat the young and handsome Shikapur, even more fascinating in his Oriental costume.
The Mountain Woman, whose name I cannot remember, never took her eyes off me that first night. I made no effort to cover the blondness of my hair nor to color my skin, and I know that I was far more red than white during that first dinner.
The little dancers noticed me, too. I could feel it rather than see it.
Well, that night things happened. I suppose my attitude towards Panya, my attendant, was a little different from that taken by the other women. She was a charming and trembling little thing, and I tried to be kind to her. It paid, apparently.
I went to bed … really a matter of considerable ceremony, perfuming and oiling … and promptly went to sleep from the sheer exhaustion of nerves that the day had brought me. Suddenly I was awakened by a scream. I started up and saw my little Panya writhing on the floor. For an instant paralyzed with fear, I did not understand what it was. Then I could see that she was struggling with a snake about ten feet long and whose flat, triangular head told even me that it was a cobra.
Other women and a fat negro broke into my apartment. There was a moment of mad excitement during which I remained useless in bed. Then the eunuch, with a simple movement which I could never explain to myself, lifted the snake near the head and calmly walked off with him.
Panya had fainted. I had, nearly. But I felt no little shame for myself when I learned that it was a fangless, aged cobra belonging to the Mountain Woman, incapable of harm. Still, it was not a nice visitor, and little Panya, who doubtless should have known better, did not recognize it. She would have risked her life to save mine.
Some of the beautiful ladies had played me a rather terrifying joke.
That practical joke … with its rather mean twist … will serve to illustrate for you the jealousy and suspicion which reigned in that colony of women.
I have one story to tell which is really odd. I did not witness it, but it is typical, and ought to be written. Some years before my visit to the place there was a murder. The loveliest girl who ever found her way into that questionable paradise was killed by a jealous inmate in a manner that is worthy of mention.
She was taken gravely ill one day, suffered all the tortures of the damned, and died in exquisite pain and agony, in spite of every effort of Hindu art and British medicine. Bhurlana, really fond of the girl, was beside himself. He had an autopsy performed, and the British army doctor in charge discovered that she died … not of any strange poisoning, as had been suspected, but of millions of tiny perforations of the stomach and intestinal tract by short hairs. Some of those she-devils had put chopped tiger hair in her food.
I need not tell you that I was very careful about my own food after hearing that story.
Another thing I recall was the strange devotion of the women to snakes. I had later in life a chance to observe this from a more personal point of view, but it was first brought to my attention here.
Snakes, when they are big enough, are fascinating even to a woma
n of my Western culture, but to the Oriental they assume an importance and significance we can hardly conceive. And there is a certain sexual side of the attraction, too, which I am not able to explain but which, I hear, has been recognized by modern psychologists.
There was a sort of feast day. It had a religious meaning, but its purport missed me altogether, as I never fully understood the many strange rituals of the Hindu doctrine and their symbolic meaning. Part of this ceremony was dancing, and very exotic and exciting it was, too. I sat with Bhurlana and young Shikapur and some of the favorites, while the paid dancing-girls went through their movements.
At the end of the ceremonies, came the famous snake dance which, I understand, was suppressed by Queen Victoria. Personally I fail to see why she should care whether her Indian subjects dance with snakes or not, but I suppose that is none of my business. However, whatever it meant, a naked girl – and not an Indian, either, but a pure negress – appeared with a basket. From it she took a long sleepy python and let him coil on the floor. Then she began a series of movements which were carefully calculated to rouse the sleepy monster to attention. He lifted his head and watched her, fascinated. At the end of the dance, as she reached a point of something like madness, she picked him up in both hands and allowed him to coil himself about her body while she moved in a slow, undulating rhythm.
Closer and closer the coil gripped her. His head peered over hers. He seemed to peer into her face, his tongue darting like a whiplash. Gradually her movements became less and less pronounced until at last she stopped altogether, standing still with her arms outstretched.
It seemed to me that she was growing pale, if that were possible. Then suddenly, before anyone realized what was happening, she toppled over. Guards and women rushed to her. The coils were gripping her with a vise-like grip. She was being stifled. But the extraordinary thing was that she seemed to want to be stifled. She was in a state of ecstasy while her entire body was being crushed. And when they tried to tear the serpent from her, she opened her eyes and screamed to them in protest.
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