Out of the Ashes

Old Troy reaped rue in the womb of years
For stolen Helen’s sake;
Till tenfold retribution rears
Its wreck on embers slaked with tears
That mended no heart-ache.
The wail of the women sold as slaves
Lest Troy breed sons again
Dreed o’er a desert of nameless graves,
The heaps and the hills that are Trojan graves
Deep-runneled by the rain.
 

But Troy lives on. Though Helen’s rape
And ten-year hold were vain;
Though jealous gods with men conspire
And Furies blast the Grecian fire;
Yet Troy must rise again.
Troy’s daughters were a spoil and sport,
Were limbs for a labor gang,
Who crooned by foreign loom and mill
Of Trojan loves they cherished still,
Till Homer heard, and sang, 
 

They told, by the fire when feasters roared
And minstrels waited turns,
Of the might of the men that Troy adored,
Of the valor in vain of the Trojan sword,
With the love that slakeless burns,
That caught and blazed in the minstrel mind
Or ever the age of pen.
So maids and a minstrel rebuilt Troy,
Out of the ashes they rebuilt Troy
To live in the hearts of men. 

Yasmini

“Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth the pesa.”
 

The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the
Princess Yasmini’s early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here;
but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way
in love with her, and that led to opportunity.
 

She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those
who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with
limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare
men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat
her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of
sex. Men’s passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and
as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the
second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that
succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that
in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity,
and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing
in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse
that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her
almost daily in a room—her holy of holies—where the gods of ancient
India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over
the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already
again devising plans to set the world on fire.

There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke,
she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she
was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather
melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to
muse she grew indignant.

"Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts
not yours," she insisted, "if your tale is to be worth the pesa."

By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at
the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country’s smallest
copper coins before finishing the tale. But the reference was double-edged.
A penny for my thoughts, a penny for the West’s interpretation of the
East was what she had in mind.

Nevertheless, as it is to the West that the story must appeal it has seemed
wiser to remove it from her lips and so transpose that, though it loses
in lore unfortunately, it does gain something of directness and simplicity.
Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it,
would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears.

This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini’s years have not yet done more
than ripen her. In a land where most women shrivel into early age she
continues, somewhere perhaps a little after thirty, in the bloom of health
and loveliness, younger in looks and energy than many a Western girl
of twenty-five. For she is of the East and West, very terribly endowed
with all the charms of either and the brains of both.

Her quick wit can detect or invent mercurial Asian subterfuge as swiftly
as appraise the rather glacial drift of Western thought; and the wisdom
of both East and West combines in her to teach a very nearly total
incredulity in human virtue. Western morals she regards as humbug,
neither more nor less.

In virtue itself she believes, as astronomers for example believe in the
precession of the equinox; but that the rank and file of human beings,
and especially learned human beings, have attained to the very vaguest
understanding of it she scornfully disbelieves. And with a frankness
simply Gallic in its freedom from those thought-conventions with which
so many people like to deceive themselves she deals with human nature
on what she considers are its merits. The result is sometimes very
disconcerting to the pompous and all the rest of the host of self-deceived,
but usually amusing to herself and often profitable to her friends.

Her ancestry is worth considering, since to that she doubtless owes a
good proportion of her beauty and ability. On her father’s side she is
Rajput, tracing her lineage so far back that it becomes lost at last in
fabulous legends of the Moon (who is masculine, by the way, in Indian
mythology). All of the great families of Rajputana are her kin, and all
the chivalry and derring-do of that royal land of heroines and heroes is
part of her conscious heritage.

Her mother was Russian. On that side, too, she can claim blood royal,
not devoid of at least a trace of Scandinavian, betrayed by glittering
golden hair and eyes that are sometimes the color of sky seen over
Himalayan peaks, sometimes of the deep lake water in the valleys. But
very often her eyes seem so full of fire and their color is so baffling that
a legend has gained currency to the effect that she can change their
hue at will.

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.