“At the back of the shop there was a pair of double doors of bright vermilion lacquer framed by exquisitely embroidered panels. I’d often wondered what lay behind them. Then one day I found out! It was a rainy afternoon and I’d dropped into The Light as much to escape getting wet as to shop. There was no other customer in the place, and no one seemed in attendance, so I just wandered about, admiring the little bits of virtu in the cabinets and noting new additions to the stock, and suddenly I found myself at the rear of the shop, before the doors that had intrigued me so. There was no one around, as I told you, and after a hasty glance to make sure I was not observed, I put my hand out to the nearer door. It opened to my touch, as if it needed only a slight pressure to release its catch, and there in a gilded niche sat the ugliest idol I had ever seen.
“It seemed to be carved of some green stone, not like anything I’d ever seen before—almost waxen in its texture—and it had four faces and eight arms.”
“Qu’est-ce-donc?”
“I said four faces. One looking each way from its head. Two of the faces seemed as calm as death masks, but the one behind the head had a dreadful sneering laugh, and that which faced the front had the most horrible expression—not angry, not menacing, exactly, but—would you understand me if I said it looked inexorable?”
“I should and do, ma chère. And the eight arms?”
“Every hand held something different. Swords, and sprays of leafy branches, and daggers—all but two. They were empty and outstretched, not so much seeming to beg as to demand an offering.
“There was something terrible—and terrifying—about that image. It seemed to be demanding something, and suddenly I realized what it was. It wanted me! I seemed to feel a sort of secret, dark thrill emanating from it, like the electric tingle in the air before a thunderstorm. There was some power in this thing, immense and terrifying power that gave the impression of dammed-up forces waiting for release. Not physical power I could understand and combat—or run from, but something far more subtle; something uncanny and indescribable, and it was all the more frightening because I was aware of it, but could not explain nor understand it.
“It seemed as if I were hypnotized. I could feel the room begin to whirl about me slowly, like a carousel when it’s just starting, and my legs began to tremble and weaken. In another instant I should have been on my knees before the green idol when the spell was broken by a pleasant voice: ‘You are admiring our latest acquisition?’
“It was a very handsome young man who stood beside me, not more than twenty-two or -three. I judged, with a pale olive complexion, long brown eyes under slightly drooping lids with haughty brows, and hair so sleek and black and glossy it seemed to fit his head like a skullcap of patent leather. He wore a well-cut morning coat and striped trousers, and there was a good pearl in his black poplin ascot tie.
“He must have seen the relief in my face, for he laughed before he spoke again, a friendly, soft laugh that reassured me. ‘I am Kabanta Sikra Roy,’ he told me. ‘My dad owns this place and I help him out occasionally. When I’m not working here I study medicine at N.Y.U.’
“‘Is this image—or idol, or whatever you call it—for sale?’ I asked him, more to steady my nerves by conversation than anything else.
“The look he gave me was an odd one. I couldn’t make out if he were angry or amused, but in a moment he laughed again, And when he smiled his whole face lighted up. ‘Of course, everything in the shop’s for sale, including the proprietors—at a price,’ he answered, ‘but I don’t think you’d be interested in buying it.’
“‘I should say not. But I just wondered. Isn’t it some sort of god, or something?’
“‘Quite so. It is the Great Mahadeva, third, but by far the most important member of the Hindu Triad, sometimes known as Siva the Destroyer.’
“I looked at the thing again and it seemed even more repulsive than before. ‘I shouldn’t think you’d find a quick sale for it,’ I suggested.
“‘We don’t expect to. Perhaps we’ll not sell it at all. In case we never find a buyer for it, we can put in our spare time worshiping at its shrine.’
“The utter cynicism of his reply grated on me, then I remembered having heard that many high caste Hindus have no more real faith in their gods than the educated Greeks and Romans had in theirs. But before I could be rude enough to ask if he really believed such nonsense, he had gently shepherded me away from the niche and was showing me some exquisitely carved amethysts. Before I left we found we had a dozen friends in common and he’d extended and I’d accepted an invitation to see Life With Father and go dancing at the Cotillion Room afterward.
“That began the acquaintance that ripened almost overnight into intimacy. Kabanta was a delightful playfellow. His father must have been enormously rich, for everything that had come to him by inheritance had been given every chance to develop. The final result was this tall, slender olive complexioned man with the sleek hair, handsome features and confident though slightly deferential manner. Before we knew it we were desperately in love.
“No”—her listless manner gathered animation with the recital—“it wasn’t what you could call love; it was more like bewitchment. When we met I felt the thrill of it; it seemed almost to lift the hair on my head and make me dizzy, and when we were together it seemed as if we were the only two people in the world, as if we were cut off from everyone and everything. He had the softest, most musical voice I had ever heard, and the things he said were like poetry by Laurence Hope. Besides that, every normal woman has a masochistic streak buried somewhere deep in her nature, and the thought of the mysterious, glamorous East and the guarded, prisoned life of the zenana has an almost irresistible appeal to us when we’re in certain moods. So, one night when we were driving home from New York in his sports roadster and he asked me if I cared for him I told him that I loved him with my heart and soul and spirit. I did, too—then. There was a full moon that night, and I was fairly breathless with the sweet delirium of love when he took me in his arms and kissed me. It was like being hypnotized and conscious at the same time. Then, just before we said good night, he asked me to come to The Light of Asia next evening after closing time and plight our troth in Eastern fashion.
“I had no idea what was coming, but I was fairly palpitant with anticipation when I knocked softly on the door of the closed shop shortly after sunset the next evening.
“Kabanta himself let me in, and I almost swooned at sight of him. Every shred of his Americanism seemed to have fallen away, for he was in full Oriental dress, a long, tight-waisted frock coat of purple satin with a high neck and long, tight sleeves, tight trousers of white satin and bright red leather shoes turned up at the toes and heavily embroidered with gold, and on his head was the most gorgeous piece of silk brocade I’d ever seen wrapped into a turban and decorated with a diamond aigret. About his neck were looped not one nor two but three long strands of pearls—pink-white, green-white and pure-white—and I gasped with amazement at sight of them. There couldn’t have been one in the three strands that was worth less than a hundred dollars, and each of the three strands had at least a hundred gems in it. The man wore twenty or thirty thousand dollars worth of pearls as nonchalantly as a shop girl might have worn a string of dime store beads.
“‘Come in, White Moghra Blossom,’ he told me. ‘All is Prepared.’
“The shop was in total darkness except for the glow of two silver lamps that burned perfumed oil before the niche in which the Green God crouched. ‘You’ll find the garments of betrothal in there,’ Kabanta whispered as he led me to a door at the rear, ‘and there’s a picture of a Hindu woman wearing clothes like those laid out for you to serve as a model. Do not be long, O Star of My Delight, O Sweetly Scented Bower of Jasmine. I swoon for the sight of you arrayed to vow love undying.’
“In the little anteroom was a long, three-paneled mirror in which I could see myself from all sides, a dressing-table set with toilet articles and cosmetics, and my costume
draped across a chair. On the dressing-table was an exquisite small picture of a Hindu girl in full regalia, and I slipped my Western clothes off and dressed myself in the Eastern garments, copying the pictured bride as closely as I could. There were only three garments—a little sleeveless bodice like a zouave jacket of green silk dotted with bright yellow discs and fastened at the front with a gold clasp, a pair of long, tight plum-colored silk trousers embroidered with pink rosebuds, and a shawl of thin almost transparent purple silk tissue fringed with gold tassels and worked with intricate designs of lotus buds and flowers in pink and green sequins. When I’d slipped the bodice and trousers on I draped the veil around me, letting it hang down behind like an apron and tying it in front in a bow knot with the ends tucked inside the tight waistband of the trousers. It was astonishing how modest such a scanty costume could be. There was less of me exposed than if I’d been wearing a halter and shorts, and not much more than if I’d worn one of the bare-midriff evening dresses just then becoming fashionable. For my feet there was a pair of bell toe rings, little clusters of silver bells set close together like grapes in a bunch that tinkled with a whirring chime almost like a whistle each time I took a step after I’d slipped them on my little toes, and a pair of heavy silver anklets with a fringe of silver tassels that flowed down from the ankle to the floor and almost hid my feet and jingled every time I moved. On my right wrist I hung a gold slave bracelet with silver chains, each ending in a ball of somber-gleaming garnet, and over my left hand I slipped a heavy sand-moulded bracelet of silver that must have weighed a full half pound. I combed my hair straight back from my forehead, drawing it so tightly that there was not a trace of wave left in it, and then I braided it into a queue, lacing strands of imitation emeralds and garlands of white jasmine in the plait. When this was done I darkened my eyebrows with a cosmetic pencil, raising them and accenting their arch to the ‘flying gull’ curve so much admired in the East, and rubbed green eye-shadow upon my lids. Over my head I draped a long blue veil sewn thickly with silver sequins and crowned it with a chaplet of yellow rosebuds. Last of all there was a heavy gold circlet like a clip-earring to go into my left nostril, and a single opal screw-earring to fasten in the right, giving the impression that my nose had been pierced for the jewels, and a tiny, star-shaped patch of red court plaster to fix between my brows like a caste mark.
“There is a saying clothes don’t make the man, but it’s just the opposite with a woman. When I’d put those Oriental garments on I felt myself an Eastern woman who had never known and never wished for any other life except that behind the purdah, and all I wished to do was cast myself prostrate before Kabanta, tell him he was my lord, my master and my god, and press my lips against the gold-embroidered tips of his red slippers till he gave me leave to rise. I was shaking as if with chill when I stepped from the little anteroom accompanied by the silvery chiming of my anklets and toe rings.
“Kabanta had set a fire glowing in a silver bowl before the Green God, and when I joined him he put seven sticks of sandalwood into my hands, telling me to walk around the brazier seven times, dropping a stick of the scented wood on the fire each time I made a circuit and repeating Hindu invocations after him. When this was done he poured a little scented water from a silver pitcher into my cupped hands, and this I sprinkled on the flames, then knelt across the fire from him with outstretched hands palm-upward over the blaze while I swore to love him, and him only, throughout this life and the seven cycles to come. I remember part of the oath I took: ‘To be one in body and soul with him as gold and the bracelet or water and the wave are one.’
“When I had sworn this oath he slipped a heavy gold ring—this!—on my finger, and told me I was pledged to him for all time and eternity, that Siva the Destroyer was witness to my pledge and would avenge my falseness if I broke my vow. It was then for the first time I heard of the pisacha, bhirta and preta, shahini and rakshasha. It all seemed horrible and fantastic as he told it, but I believed it implicitly—then.” A little rueful smile touched her pale lips. “I’m afraid that I believe it now, too, sir; but for a little while I didn’t, and so—so my poor lover is dead.”
“Pauvre enfant,” de Grandin murmured. “Ma pauvre belle créature. And then?”
“Then came the war. You know how little pretense of neutrality there was. Americans were crossing into Canada by droves to join up, and everywhere the question was not ‘Will we get into it?’ but ‘When?’ I could fairly see my lover in the gorgeous uniform of a risaldar lieutenant or captain in the Indian Army, leading his troop of wild Patans into battle, but Kabanta made no move. When our own boys were drafted he was deferred as a medical student. At last I couldn’t stand it any longer. One evening at the shore I found courage to speak. ‘Master and Lord,’ I asked him—we used such language to each other in private—‘is it not time that you were belting on your sword to fight for freedom?’
“‘Freedom, White Blossom of the Moghra Tree?’ he answered with a laugh. ‘Who is free? Art thou?’
“‘Thou art my lord and I thy slave,’ I answered as he had taught me.
“‘And are the people of my father’s country free? You know that they are not. For generations they have groaned beneath the Western tyrant’s lash. Now these European dogs are at each other’s throats. Should I take sides in their curs’ fight? What difference does it make to me which of them destroys the others?’
“‘But you’re American,’ I protested. ‘The Japanese have attacked us. The Germans and Italians have declared war on us—’
“‘Be silent!’ he commanded, and his voice was no longer the soft voice that I loved. ‘Women were made to serve, not to advise their masters of their duty.’
“‘But, Kabanta—’
“‘I told you to be still!’ he nearly shouted. ‘Does the slave dare disobey her master’s command? Down, creature, down upon your knees and beg my pardon for your insolence—’
“‘You can’t be serious!’ I gasped as he grasped me by the hair and began forcing my head down. We’d been playing at this game of slave and master—dancing girl and maharajah—and I’d found it amusing, even thrilling after a fashion. But it had only been pretense—like a ‘dress-up party’ or the ritual of a sorority where you addressed someone you’d known since childhood as Queen or Empress, or by some other high-sounding title, knowing all the while that she was just your next door neighbor or a girl with whom you’d gone to grammar school. Now, suddenly, it dawned on me that it had not been play with him. As thoroughly Americanized as he appeared, he was still an Oriental underneath, with all the Oriental’s cynicism about women and all an Eastern man’s exalted opinion of his own importance. Besides, he was hurting me terribly as he wound his fingers in my hair. ‘Let me go!’ I demanded angrily. ‘How dare you?’
“‘How dare I? Gracious Mahadeva, hear the brazen Western hussy speak!’ he almost choked. He drew my face close to his and asked in a fierce whisper, ‘Do you know what you vowed that night at The Light of Asia?’
“‘I vowed I’d always love you, but—’
“‘You’d always love me!’ he mocked. ‘You vowed far more than that, my Scented Bower of Delight. You vowed that from that minute you would be my thing and chattel—vowed yourself to Siva as a voluntary offering, and accepted me—as the God’s representative. As Gods are to humanity, so am I to you, O creature lower than the dust. You’re mine to do with as I please, and right now it pleases me to chastise you for your insolence.’ Deliberately, while he held my head back with one band in my hair, he drew one of his moccasins off and struck me across the mouth with its heel. I could feel a thin trickle of blood between my lips and the scream I was about to utter died in my throat.
“‘Down!’ he commanded. ‘Down on your face and beg for mercy. If you are truly penitent perhaps I shall forgive your insolence.’
“I might have yielded finally, for flesh and blood can stand only so much, and suddenly I was terribly afraid of him, but when I was almost beyond resistance w
e heard voices in the distance, and saw a light coming toward us on the beach. ‘Don’t think that I’ve forgiven you,’ he told me as he pushed me from him. ‘Before I take you back you’ll have to walk barefoot across hot coals and abase yourself lower than the dust—’
“Despite the pain of my bruised lips I laughed. ‘If you think I’ll ever see you again, or let you come within speaking distance—’ I began, but his laugh was louder than mine.
“‘If you think you can get away, or ever be free from your servitude to me, you’ll find that you’re mistaken,’ he jeered. ‘You are Siva’s, and mine, for all eternity. My shadow is upon you and my ring is on your finger. Try to escape the one or take the other off.’
“I wrenched at the ring he’d put on my hand. It wouldn’t budge. Again and again I tried to get it off. No use. It seemed to have grown fast to the flesh; the more I tried to force it off the tighter it seemed to cling, and all the time Kabanta stood there smiling at me with a look of devilish, goading derision on his dark handsome features. At last I gave up trying and almost fainting with humiliation and the pain from my bruised mouth I turned and ran away. I found my car in the parking lot and drove home at breakneck speed. I suppose Kabanta managed to get a taxi. I don’t know. I never saw him again.”
“Très bon,” de Grandin nodded approval as she completed her story. “That is good. That is very good, indeed, ma oisillone.”
“Is it?” the irony of her reply was razor-thin.
“Is it not?”
“It is not.”
“Pourquoi? Nom d’un chameau enfumé! For why?”
“Because he kept his word, sir. His shadow is upon me and his ring immovably upon my finger. Last year I met Wade Hardison, and it was love at first sight. Not fascination nor physical attraction, but love, real love; the good, clean, wholesome love a man and woman ought to have for each other if they expect to spend their lives together. Our engagement was announced at Christmas, and—”
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