by Talbot Mundy
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, and surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been to send a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very consciences of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the veil and the rustling curtain and religion hide woman’s hand without in the least suppressing her, that was a plan too easy of contrivance to be overlooked.
In those days there was a prince in Moscow whose public conduct so embittered his young wife, and so notoriously, that when he was found one morning murdered in his bed suspicion rested upon her. She was tried in secret, as the custom was, found guilty and condemned to death. Then, on the strength of influence too strong for the czar, the sentence was commuted to the far more cruel one of life imprisonment in the Siberian mines. While she awaited the dreaded march across Asia in chains a certain proposal was made to the Princess Sonia Omanoff, and no one who knew anything about it wondered that she accepted without much hesitation.
Less than a month after her arrest she was already in Paris, squandering paper rubles in the fashionable shops. And at the Russian Embassy in Paris she made the acquaintance of the very first of the smaller Indian potentates who made the “grand tour.” Traveling abroad has since become rather fashionable, and is even encouraged by the British-Indian Government because there is no longer any plausible means of preventing it; but Maharajah Bubru Singh was a pioneer, who dared greatly, and had his way even against the objections of a high commissioner. In addition he had had to defy the Brahman priests who, all unwilling, are the strong supports of alien overrule; for they are armed with the iron-fanged laws of caste that forbid crossing the sea, among innumerable other things.
Perhaps there was a hint of moral bravery behind the warrior eyes that was enough in itself and she really fell in love at first sight, as men said. But the secret police of Russia were at her elbow, too, hinting that only one course could save her from extradition and Siberian mines. At any rate she listened to the Rajah’s wooing; and the knowledge that he had a wife at home already, a little past her prime perhaps and therefore handicapped in case of rivalry, but never-the-less a prior wife, seems to have given her no pause. The fact that the first wife was childless doubtless influenced Bubru Singh.
They even say she was so far beside herself with love for him that she would have been satisfied with the Gandharva marriage ceremony sung by so many Rajput poets, that amounts to little more than going off alone together. But the Russian diplomatic scheme included provision for the maharajah of a wife so irrevocably wedded that the British would not be able to refuse her recognition. So they were married in the presence of seven witnesses in the Russian Embassy, as the records testify.
After that, whatever its suspicions, the British Government had to admit her into Rajputana. And what politics she might have played, whether the Russian gray-coat armies might have encroached into those historic hills on the strength of her intriguing, or whether she would have seized the first opportunity to avenge herself by playing Russia false, — are matters known only to the gods of unaccomplished things. For Bubru Singh, her maharajah, died of an accident very shortly after the birth of their child Yasmini.
Now law is law, and Sonia Omanoff, then legally the Princess Sonia Singh, had appealed from the first to Indian law and custom, so that the British might have felt justified in leaving her and her infant daughter to its most untender mercies. Then she would have been utterly under the heel of the succeeding prince, a nephew of her husband, unenamored of foreigners and avowedly determined to enforce on his uncle’s widow the Indian custom of seclusion.
But the British took the charitable view, that covering a multitude of sins. It was not bad policy to convert the erstwhile Sonia Omanoff from secret enemy to grateful friend, and the feat was easy.
The new maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an ancient palace for the Russian widow’s use; and there, almost within sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini had her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western outrage and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her Eastern heritage by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and livelihood it is to fish the troubled waters of the courts of minor kings.
All these things Yasmini told me in that scented chamber of another palace, in which a wrathful government secluded her in later years for its own peace as it thought, but for her own recuperation as it happened. She told me many other things besides that have some little bearing on this story but that, if all related, would crowd the book too full. The real gist of them is that she grew to love India with all her heart and India repaid her for it after its own fashion, which is manyfold and marvelous.
There is no fairer land on earth than that far northern slice of Rajputana, nor a people more endowed with legend and the consciousness of ancestry. They have a saying that every Rajput is a king’s son, and every Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead oftenest is unexpectedness. And now to the story.
Chapter One
Royal Rajasthan
There is a land where no resounding street
With babel of electric-garish night
And whir of endless wheels has put to flight
The liberty of leisure. Sandaled feet
And naked soles that feel the friendly dust
Go easily along the never measured miles.
A land at which the patron tourist smiles
Because of gods in whom those people trust
(He boasting One and trusting not at all);
A land where lightning is the lover’s boon,
And honey oozing from an amber moon
Illumines footing on forbidden wall;
Where, ‘stead of pursy jeweler’s display,
Parading peacocks brave the passer-by,
And swans like angels in an azure sky
Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way.
No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing,
Whose royal women tread with conscious grace
The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race,
Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king,
And every Rajput son so royal born
And conscious of his age-long heritage
He looks askance at Burke’s becrested page
And wonders at the new-ennobled scorn.
I sing (for this is earth) of hate and guile,
Of tyranny and trick and broken pledge,
Of sudden weapons, and the thrice-keen edge
Of woman’s wit, the sting in woman’s smile,
But also of the heaven-fathomed glow,
The sweetness and the charm and dear delight
Of loyal woman, humorous and right,
Pure-purposed as the bosom of the snow.
No tale, then, this of motors, but of men
With camels fleeter than the desert wind,
Who come and go. So leave the West behind,
And, at the magic summons of the pen
Forgetting new contentions if you will,
Take wings, take silent wings of time untied,
And see, with Fellow-friendship for your guide,
A little how the East goes wooing still.
“Gold is where you find it.”
Dawn at the commencement of hot weather in the hills if not the loveliest of India’s wealth of wonders (for there is the moon by night) is fair preparation for whatever cares to follow. Th
ere is a musical silence cut of which the first voices of the day have birth; and a half-light holding in its opalescence all the colors that the day shall use; a freshness and serenity to hint what might be if the sons of men were wise enough; and beauty unbelievable. The fortunate sleep on roofs or on verandas, to be ready for the sweet cool wind that moves in advance of the rising sun, caused, as some say, by the wing-beats of departing spirits of the night.
So that in that respect the mangy jackals, the monkeys, and the chandala (who are the lowest human caste of all and quite untouchable by the other people the creator made) are most to be envied; for there is no stuffy screen, and small convention, between them and enjoyment of the blessed air.
Next in order of defilement to the sweepers, — or, as some particularly righteous folk with inside reservations on the road to Heaven firmly insist, even beneath the sweepers, and possibly beneath the jackals — come the English, looking boldly on whatever their eyes desire and tasting out of curiosity the fruit of more than one forbidden tree, but obsessed by an amazing if perverted sense of duty. They rule the land, largely by what they idolize as “luck,” which consists of tolerance for things they do not understand. Understanding one another rather well, they are more merciless to their own offenders than is Brahman to chandala, for they will hardly let them live. But they are a people of destiny, and India has prospered under them.
In among the English something after the fashion of grace notes in the bars of music — enlivening, if sharp at times — come occasional Americans, turning up in unexpected places for unusual reasons, and remaining — because it is no man’s business to interfere with them. Unlike the English, who approach all quarters through official doors and never trespass without authority, the Americans have an embarrassing way of choosing their own time and step, taking officialdom, so to speak, in flank. It is to the credit of the English that they overlook intrusion that they would punish fiercely if committed by unauthorized folk from home.
So when the Blaines, husband and wife, came to Sialpore in Rajputana without as much as one written introduction, nobody snubbed them. And when, by dint of nothing less than nerve nor more than ability to recognize their opportunity, they acquired the lease of the only vacant covetable house nobody was very jealous, especially when the Blaines proved hospitable.
It was a sweet little nest of a house with a cool stone roof, set in a rather large garden of its own on the shoulder of the steep hill that overlooks the city. A political dependent of Yasmini’s father had built it as a haven for his favorite paramour when jealousy in his seraglio had made peace at home impossible. Being connected with the Treasury in some way, and suitably dishonest, he had been able to make a luxurious pleasaunce of it; and he had taste.
But when Yasmini’s father died and his nephew Gungadhura succeeded him as maharajah he made a clean sweep of the old pension and employment list in order to enrich new friends, so the little nest on the hill became deserted. Its owner went into exile in a neighboring state and died there out of reach of the incoming politician who naturally wanted to begin business by exposing the scandalous remissness of his predecessor. The house was acquired on a falling market by a money-lender, who eventually leased it to the Blaines on an eighty per cent. basis — a price that satisfied them entirely until they learned later about local proportion.
The front veranda faced due east, raised above the garden by an eight-foot wall, an ideal place for sleep because of the unfailing morning breeze. The beds were set there side by side each evening, and Mrs. Blaine — a full ten years younger than her husband — formed a habit of rising in the dark and standing in her night-dress, with bare feet on the utmost edge of the top stone step, to watch for the miracle of morning. She was fabulously pretty like that, with her hair blowing and her young figure outlined through the linen; and she was sometimes unobserved.
The garden wall, a hundred feet beyond, was of rock, two-and-a-half men high, as they measure the unleapable in that distrustful land; but the Blaines, hailing from a country where a neighbor’s dog and chickens have the run of twenty lawns, seldom took the trouble to lock the little, arched, iron-studded door through which the former owner had come and gone unobserved. The use of an open door is hardly trespass under the law of any land; and dawn is an excellent time for the impecunious who take thought of the lily how it grows in order to outdo Solomon.
When a house changes hands in Rajputana there pass with it, as well as the rats and cobras and the mongoose, those beggars who were wont to plague the former owner. That is a custom so based on ancient logic that the English, who appreciate conservatism, have not even tried to alter it.
So when a cracked voice broke the early stillness out of shadow where the garden wall shut off the nearer view, Theresa Blaine paid small attention to it.
“Memsahib! Protectress of the poor!”
She continued watching the mystery of coming light. The ancient city’s domed and pointed roofs already glistened with pale gold, and a pearly mist wreathed the crowded quarter of the merchants. Beyond that the river, not more than fifty yards wide, flowed like molten sapphire between unseen banks. As the pale stars died, thin rays of liquid silver touched the surface of a lake to westward, seen through a rift between purple hills. The green of irrigation beyond the river to eastward shone like square-cut emeralds, and southward the desert took to itself all imaginable hues at once.
“Colorado!” she said then. “And Arizona! And Southern California!
And something added that I can’t just place!”
“Sin’s added by the scow-load!” growled her husband from the farther bed.
“Come back, Tess, and put some clothes on!”
She turned her head to smile, but did not move away. Hearing the man’s voice, the owners of other voices piped up at once from the shadow, all together, croaking out of tune:
“Bhig mangi shahebi! Bhig mangi shahebi!” (Alms! Alms!)
“I can see wild swans,” said Theresa. “Come and look — five — six — seven of them, flying northward, oh, ever so high up!”
“Put some clothes on, Tess!”
“I’m plenty warm.”
“Maybe. But there’s some skate looking at you from the garden. What’s the matter with your kimono?”
However the dawn wind was delicious, and the night-gown more decent than some of the affairs they label frocks. Besides, the East is used to more or less nakedness and thinks no evil of it, as women learn quicker than men.
“All right — in a minute.”
“I’ll bet there’s a speculator charging ’em admission at the gate,” grumbled
Dick Blaine, coming to stand beside her in pajamas. “Sure you’re right,
Tess; those are swans, and that’s a dawn worth seeing.”
He had the deep voice that the East attributes to manliness, and the muscular mold that never came of armchair criticism. She looked like a child beside him, though he was agile, athletic, wiry, not enormous.
“Sahib!” resumed the voices. “Sahib! Protector of the poor!” They whined out of darkness still, but the shadow was shortening.
“Better feed ’em, Tess. A man’s starved down mighty near the knuckle if he’ll wake up this early to beg.”
“Nonsense. Those are three regular bums who look on us as their preserve. They enjoy the morning as much as we do. Begging’s their way of telling people howdy.”
“Somebody pays them to come,” he grumbled, helping her into a pale blue kimono.
Tess laughed. “Sure! But it pays us too. They keep other bums away.
I talk to them sometimes.”
“In English?”
“I don’t think they know any. I’m learning their language.”
It was his turn to laugh. “I knew a man once who learned the gipsy bolo on a bet. Before he’d half got it you couldn’t shoo tramps off his door-step with a gun. After a time he grew to like it — flattered him, I suppose, but decent folk forgot to ask him to their corn-roasts. C
areful, Tess, or Sialpore’ll drop us from its dinner lists.”
“Don’t you believe it! They’re crazy to learn American from me, and to hear your cowpuncher talk. We’re social lions. I think they like us as much as we like them. Don’t make that face, Dick, one maverick isn’t a whole herd, and you can’t afford to quarrel with the commissioner.”
He chose to change the subject.
“What are your bums’ names?” he asked.
“Funny names. Bimbu, Umra and Pinga. Now you can see them, look, the shadow’s gone. Bimbu is the one with no front teeth, Umra has only one eye, and Pinga winks automatically. Wait till you see Pinga smile. It’s diagonal instead of horizontal. Must have hurt his mouth in an accident.”
“Probably he and Bimbu fought and found the biting tough. Speaking of dogs, strikes me we ought to keep a good big fierce one,” be added suggestively.
“No, no, Dick; there’s no danger. Besides, there’s Chamu.”
“The bums could make short work of that parasite.”
“I’m safe enough. Tom Tripe usually looks in at least once a day when you’re gone.”
“Tom’s a good fellow, but once a day — . A hundred things might happen.
I’d better speak to Tom Tripe about those three bums — he’ll shift them!”
“Don’t, Dick! I tell you they keep others away. Look, here comes Chamu with the chota hazri.”
Clad in an enormous turban and clean white linen from head to foot, a stout Hindu appeared, superintending a tall meek underling who carried the customary “little breakfast” of the country — fruit, biscuits and the inevitable tea that haunts all British byways. As soon as the underling had spread a cloth and arranged the cups and plates Chamu nudged him into the background and stood to receive praise undivided. The salaams done with and his own dismissal achieved with proper dignity, Chamu drove the hamal away in front of him, and cuffed him the minute they were out of sight. There was a noise of repeated blows from around the corner.
“A big dog might serve better after all,” mused Tess. “Chamu beats the servants, and takes commissions, even from the beggars.”
