Bubbles of the Foam

by F. W. Bain

And then, those two deities disappeared suddenly from Heaven, and descended to be born as man and woman on the earth.[12]

III

Now just at that very moment, it happened, that there were living in the desert two Rajpoots of the race of the Moon; and the name of the one was Bimba, and that of the other, Jaya.[13] And Saraswati was born as the daughter of the wife of Bimba, while Kámadewa was born as the son of the wife of Jaya. Now Bimba was a king: and Jaya was his cousin on the mother's side. And very soon afterwards, Jaya set upon his cousin, laying claim to the throne, and driving him away, took his kingdom, and kept it for himself. And he caught the wife of Bimba, and put her to death, as he would have done also with her daughter and her husband. But Bimba succeeded in escaping with his daughter, and ran away and hid himself. So Jaya remained in triumph, reigning over the kingdom, whose capital stood on the very spot on which we are sitting now. For the kingdoms of the earth come and go upon it, like the shadows of the clouds: and they grow up suddenly like grass, and perish a little later, and vanish clean away, leaving behind them absolutely nothing but mounds, such as those now lying all about thee, and fragments of recollections, and half-forgotten names, like the dreams of the night which morning obliterates and drives away, vaguely hanging in its memory like wreaths of mist curling and twisting on the black still surface of a pool in some dark valley screened from the early sun by one of thy father's[14] peaks.

And of all the elements that made up Java's good fortune, there was not one which filled him with such pride and exultation as his son. And he looked upon him as the very fruit of his birth in visible form, little dreaming, that could he but have looked into the future, and seen what was coming, he would rather have deemed himself more fortunate to live and die without any son at all, than to have begotten such a son as he actually had. For sons resemble winds, which sometimes lift their families like clouds to heaven, and sometimes dash them to the earth, like hail.

For having waited so long to get a son at all, till hope was all but gone, the joy of both his parents, when he actually arrived, was so extravagantly great, that they could not make too much of him. And as he grew up, they spoiled him so completely, by the want of all discretion in their admiration and the flattery of their affectionate caresses, that after a while he became utterly intolerable, even to themselves. And this came about, not only by reason of their own foolishness, but also by the very disposition and qualities of that son himself. For he was so marvellously beautiful, that every time they saw him, they could hardly believe their own eyes, and were ready to abandon the body out of joy. And in the intoxication of delight they gave him the name of Atirupa,[15] which was no more than he deserved. And he became a byword and a wonder in the world, till the heart of his mother almost broke with the swelling of its own pride. For nothing like him had ever been seen by anybody, even in a dream, since his beauty did not in the least resemble that of other men, but hovered as it were half-way between one sex and the other, as if the Creator when he made him, unable to decide, whether to make of him a man or a woman, had combined, by some miracle of omnipotence and skill, the fascinations of the two. For though he was tall, and strong, yet strange! his body and his limbs were rounded, and delicately shaped, and slender, with soft and tender hands and feet that were almost too small, even for a girl: and as he moved, he fell as if by accident into attitudes that as it were imitated unconsciously the careless grace of Shrí[16], caught unaware when she thinks that there is nobody to look at her, and carved by a cunning sculptor in stone upon a temple wall; so that the eyes of all followed him as if against their will, drawn to him by an involuntary admiration that they could not understand, not realising that in his case only, the beauty of their own sex was reinforced, and as it were, reduplicated with the magic of a spell, by the mysterious and additional fascination of the other. And his face was so strange that whoever saw it, started, and fell, after a little while, into a kind of dream. And yet this was not merely by reason of its beauty, though that beauty was excessive, resembling a vision seen suddenly in the water by a Dryad, musing at midnight by a moonlit pool, with eyes that resembled the reflections of the shadows of the lotuses, and eyebrows that met together, in the middle of his brow, each drawn exactly in imitation of the other, like a lotus-fibre half in and half out of water, and lips that were almost too red, resembling that love-sick nymph's own pair of bimba lips, mirrored[17] in the clear black water, and dying to be kissed by others like themselves. But wonderful! the Creator had put into his face some ingredient of recollection, so that without knowing why, every beholder found himself plunged, as it were, into the agitation of dreamy reminiscence, and said within himself: Ha! now, somewhere or other, in this birth or another, I have seen that miracle of a face before. And each went away with a heart that was unwilling to depart, haunted as it were by dim desire for something he knew not what stirring in the depths of his memory, that he could not remember and yet had not forgotten, like the thirst for the repetition of the sweetness of a bygone dream.[18] And all the more, because his voice resembled a music that was playing a melody suggested by the theme of his face. For it was low and soft, like that of a woman, and yet deep, like that of a man: and it seemed to be made of sound stolen from the pipe of Krishna, in order to enable it itself to steal away the senses of the world: so that as he spoke, the listener gradually grew bewildered by its tone, resembling a tired traveller, falling little by little unconsciously to sleep as he sits in the murmur of a mountain stream. And whenever he chose, he could cajole his hearer, and make him do almost anything whatever, so hard was it to resist the irresistible persuasion that lurked, like the caressing touch of a gentle woman's hand, in the tone of that quiet and insinuating voice.

And yet, all this beauty was nothing but a mask, and a lie: and so far from expressing the nature of that soul which it covered and disguised, it actually added evil to its original defect; and he resembled a bamboo, looking like a very incarnation of loveliness and symmetry outside, and singing in the wind, and yet absolutely hollow and without a heart, within. For from the very moment he was born, he did exactly as he pleased, and nothing else, being as capricious as the breeze that blows only as it chooses. For beginning with his parents, nobody ever crossed him, or placed any obstacle whatever in the path of his desires, which grew up accordingly like a very rank jungle impervious to the light, in which his will wandered like a wild young tiger-cub, wayward, and passionate, and absolutely uncontrolled. And he gave in to others, and was guided by them, in one point only, and that was in their extravagant admiration of himself. For finding others worship him, he fell in with their opinion, and followed their example: and became as it were the devotee at the shrine of his own beauty, making it a deity to which every other thing or body was only fitted to be sacrificed. And he filled his rooms with mirrors of many colours, made of crystal and lapiz-lazuli, and polished gold and silver, and the water of tanks whose slabs were of marble of every variety of hue; and he used to sit alone, when he had nothing else to do, for hours, watching his own image that seemed to offer him reciprocally worship as he watched it, as if it were doubtful which of the two, the reality or its reflection, was the deity, and which the devotee.

And gradually the world with all its objects came to appear in his eyes as nothing but a playground, and all its men and women merely his own animated toys. And from being utterly indifferent to everything but his own momentary pleasure and caprice, he became, little by little, first callous to the sufferings of others, and finally positively cruel, finding his amusement in making others victims to his own peremptory desires. And his appetite, like a fire, grew with the fuel that it fed upon, till it resembled voracity, and an intolerable thirst for more. But as long as he remained still a child, the fire, remaining as it were without its proper aliment, lay hidden: till he grew into a man. And then, all at once, it blazed out furiously like a very conflagration, striking terror into all the subjects of the kingdom, and threatening to consume them all, like forest trees and grass.

For whereas, till then, the fury of his self-will had been scattered, for want of concentration[19] on one object only, manhood, like a flash of lightning, suddenly revealed to him that very object, in the form of woman: and he discovered, in the storm of his delight, that women were the very victims for whom he had been blindly groping in the darkness all his life. And he threw himself upon them, like a prey, finding with intoxication that the Creator had framed him as a weapon constructed wholly for their destruction. And he said to himself, in triumph: I am, as it seems, a magnetic gem, omnipotent and irresistible, to whose attraction the entire sex succumbs inevitably, like grass. And this opinion was justified by the conduct of the women themselves. For every woman that set eyes on him, no matter who she was, fell instantly, like a stone dropped into a well without a bottom, into the abyss of infatuation, and utterly forgot not only her relations and her home, but her honour and herself and everything in the three worlds, seized as it were by the very frenzy of devotion, and anxious only to immolate herself as a victim on the altar of his divinity. And strange! though he treated them all as more worthless than grass, throwing them away almost in the instant that he saw them, not one of them all ever took warning by the fate of her predecessors: and so far were they from shunning him as the common enemy of their entire sex, that on the contrary, they seemed to struggle with one another for the prize of his momentary affection, the more, the more openly he derided them; as if even his derision and the cheapness in which he openly held them, increased the power of his charm. Ha! very wonderful is the contradiction in the heart of a woman, and bitter the irony of the Creator that fashioned it out of so curious an antagonism! For she flies to the man who makes light of her, as if pulled by a cord; while she utterly despises the man who thinks himself nothing in comparison with her: saying as it were, by her own behaviour, that she is absolutely worthless in her own esteem.

IV

So then, after a while, the heart of King Jaya broke within him. For he became odious in the eyes of all his subjects by reason of the behaviour of his son, who paid no more regard to his admonitions than a mad elephant does to a rope of grass. And he died, consumed by the two fires of a burning fever and a devouring grief: and his wife followed him through the flames of yet another fire, as if to say: I will die no other death than his own.