A Draught of the Blue, together with An Essence of the Dusk

by F. W. Bain

Then Aja laughed, and he said: O beauty, who remembers his former birth? For like every other man, and like my ancestor the sun, I have risen up into light out of the sea of dark oblivion, into which I must sink again at last. And then she looked at him with a deep sigh. And she said: Alas! This is a punishment indeed, and worse by far than all the rest, if after having endured so long the state of a stone upon a wall, I am again become a woman, only to find myself repudiated and all forgotten, by him, on whose account I suffered all. Listen, then, and I will tell thee the story of thy former birth. It may be that, in the hearing, some scattered reminiscences will be as it were awakened, to stir again in the dark lethargy of thy sleeping soul.

[[1]] It is a wonderful thing to see a cobra move. Nothing can describe it.

[[2]] That is, the Beauty of the arched eyebrows. (Pronounce Nat- to rhyme with but.)

IV

And then she began to speak. And as she spoke, she leaned forward, as she sat upon the fallen pillar, and fastened her great eager eyes like magnets on his own. And as Aja watched them, they played as it were upon his heart. For their colour wavered and changed and faltered, shifting ever from hue to hue, turning golden and ruddy amber, and emerald-green and lotus-blue; and over her eyes her arching brows lifted and fell and played and flickered, fixing his troubled soul like nails, and rivetting his attention, till her singing voice sounded in his head like a distant tune crooned in the ear of a sleepy man. And she waved slowly her long round arms, all the while she spoke. And she said: Far away, over the sea, lies thy own forgotten land, and presently I will tell thee, and even show thee, where it is. And there it was, in our former birth, that thou and I were boy and girl. But thou wert the son of a mighty King, and I was only a Brahmani, a poor man's daughter, and my father was an old ascetic, far below thee in everything else but caste. And I lived alone with my old father, in the very heart of a great forest, in a little hut of bark, over which the málati creeper grew so thick that nothing was visible of that little hut, except its door. And then one day I was seen by thee, standing still in that very door, with my pitcher on my head: as thou wert passing through the wood to hunt upon thy horse. And that moment was like a sponge, that blotted from the mind of each everything but the other's image. And I made of thee my deity, and forgot everything in the three great worlds, for thee alone. And thou, that day, didst clean forget thy hunting: or rather, the God of Love showed thee game of another kind,[[1]] and from pursuing thou didst fall to wooing a quarry that wished for nothing so much as to be thy prey. And we married each other that very day, which ah! thou hast all forgotten. What! dost thou not remember how I used to meet thee every day in the little hut, when my father was away in the wood engaged in meditation? What! hast thou really all forgotten how it was thy supreme delight to bring me garments and costly jewels, which I put on for thy amusement, thy forest-queen of the little hut? Has thy memory cast away every vestige of reminiscence of thy old sweet love in the little hut? So then it happened that on a day we were together, blind and drunk with each other's presence, shut within the little hut like a pair of bees in a nectared lotus. And I was standing like an idol, dressed like the queen of a chakrawarti,[[2]] loaded with gold on wrists and feet, with great pearls wound about my neck; and thou wert contemplating me, thy creature,[[3]] with intoxication, and hard indeed it was to tell which of us two was the idol, and which was the devotee. And as we woke up from a kiss that lasted like infinity, lo! my father stood before us. And he said slowly: Abandoned daughter, that hast forgot thy duty in thy passion for this King's son, become what thou hast represented, an idol[[4]] of stone on the wall of a ruined temple far away: and thou, her guilty lover, fall again into another birth, and be separated from thy guilty love. Then being besought by us, to fix some period to the curse, he said again: When ye two shall meet again, and thy husband in his curiosity shall touch thee with his finger, she shall regain her woman's state, and be as she was before. And now all this has come about, exactly as he said. And I have found thee once again, only to find alas! alas! that thou hast left thy heart behind thee in that old delicious birth.

[[1]] In Sanskrit, hunting and wooing can be mixed up together by plays on words.

[[2]] An emperor. Hindoo idols are dressed and undressed, like dolls, by their officiating priests.

[[3]] She means, he was her Creator.

[[4]] The Hindoos have no word, because they have not the idea, of an idol. They call it a god or an image. Our word idol implies the antagonism to paganism involved in Christianity, and no two books are more alike than S. Augustine's City of God and Ward's Hindoo Mythology.