A Soldier and a Gentleman/Chapter 5

HE fireflies danced like a myriad fairy lights; the jungle beside them whispered weird night sounds through the steaming dark, and their footfalls on the rotted leaves were like the creeping of conspirators, as Boileau and his servant took the ax-cleared, winding path that led to Yasmini’s. The servant went ahead, swinging the lantern to betray the tree roots.

Boileau, a dozen yards behind, felt guilty; and the sense of guilt brought him a thrill he had not experienced since Aurang Zeb, his charger, ran away with him and brought up all standing on the railway line in front of the Bombay Mail Express. He knew too much of Indian caste and custom to expect to be received, even where the men of his own troop might lounge; but he vaguely guessed that Yasmini and Adventure and himself were all three mates that night.

Abdullah, grinning, set the lantern down on the courtyard tiles and went to scrabbling with his fingers on a narrow door. It was newer than the carved stone niche it fitted, and looked like one of Yasmini’s pre- cautions, for it was strongly reinforced with bars of iron and big, flat-headed nails. No more than one man could have entered through it at a time. Soon Abdullah started whispering, and Boileau—with a strange impatience in his veins, and a stranger sense of standing on the edge of every thing—looked up and watched the shadows flitting by the window. There seemed to be excitement up above, if nothing else.

“What’s happening, Abdullah?” he asked, after many minutes of hissed argument through a little hole that opened in the panel. The hole was not square; no lance could have been thrust through it, and its outer end was too small for an eye to look through it over a pistol barrel. It closed, like a bunghole, with a peg.

“Patience a little, sahib. She is considering.”

“Is that the famous Yasmini beyond that hole?”

“Nay, sahib, but her maid. She went once and returned again, and now she is gone for the second time.”

“What’s all the trouble?”

“No trouble, sahib. Yasmini would know.”

“Know what?”

“Whether she confers an honor or receives one.”

“’Pon my soul, I’d give a month’s income to know the same thing!” laughed Boileau to himself. And then the door opened grudgingly and Abdullah beckoned to him and bowed him through, and squatted on the step outside with the dog- like patience of the Indian native servant.

Inside were darkness, and the smell of musk—black darkness, made blacker yet by a curtain at the stair head. Some one whom he could not see replaced the peg in the peephole; and an unseen soft hand that trembled at his touch but did not draw away, took his.

“Lead on, McDuff!” said Boileau, throwing off his sense of helplessness, and kicking out to find the bottom step. But his dress spur caught in gauzy drapery and something ripped. He stood on one leg, and tried to free himself, but the wearer of the gauze pulled, too, to free it. He felt his balance going and kicked out again, and fell. A second later he was struggling on the ground with a giggling woman, laughing from sheer appreciation of the unforeseen, but expecting every second to feel a long knife in his ribs.

Then before he could regain his feet the curtain parted at the stair top and a radiance appeared in the middle of it—Yasmini herself. There was no doubt—she must be Yasmini. He had thought of her as black, or dull olive color at the best. He saw an ivory and old rose tinted damsel, who might or might not be twenty years of age. He had thought of black hair, drawn back in straight lined waves. He saw a mass of burnished copper-gold, that fell in curling cataracts from crown to knees. He had thought of thin, cruel lips, dyed blue perhaps, and even of a nose ring. What he saw were features that would be May-crowned in the West, and lips—red lips, uncarmined; lips that a shaven anchorite would have fought half the world to kiss.

She stood forward on the step and smiled down at him, framed in an aura of gold light between black curtains. He could see her feet, pale pink and ivory, encased in gilded slippers. Above them, some pale-blue filmy stuff encircled her as mist enfolds the morning, hinting at loveliness and making it far lovelier—by concealment. He could neither speak nor laugh now, nor find his feet. He lay spellbound, looking upward at her, until his eyes met hers. And he had thought of almond eyes, brown or perhaps hazel!

No man that ever lived could tell the secret of the color of her eyes. Few dared look into them longer than to bear away a memory of smoldering loveliness—of molten jewels, lovelit under drooping lids. But Boileau was a man whose every breath of life was daring, and he stared—and stared—and forgot the power of speech.

Yasmini spoke first and what she said, in a velvet voice that sounded vaguely like the love call of a nightingale, was in a language Boileau did not understand. But the maid understood it and found her feet at once; and Boileau guessed. However purred, through lips however sweet, the tongues of the ancient East are apt at framing comment on such matters as a man and a maiden in the dark.

“What did she say?” asked Boileau, feeling the blushes rise from somewhere down his neck and race beneath his hair until his ears glowed crimson. But the girl only giggled and pushed him toward the stairs.

So up went Boileau, swaggering to get his self-possession back, letting his spurs clank handsomely and twirling at his waxed mustache. And Yasmini made way for him, bowing before him mockingly—half, he suspected, to let him realize her supple grace, and half because she really was amused. Eight maids—all dark- skinned contrasts to the queen of this strange jungle bower—attended her, and seemed to know her thoughts. They piled the cushions high on a long, low divan by the window, and motioned Boileau to it; and, feeling like an idiot, he sat on it, and sank deep down among the soft embroidery. It was impossible to sit; he sprawled, and felt more like an idiot than ever.

But Yasmini herself came over and sat near him on a pile of cushions, pushing out one slippered foot so that he could see the greenish veins under the transparent skin. And he began to forget his awkwardness in amazed contemplation of what the curtained East could lay bare when it chose.

A maid extinguished most of the lamps, and left only half a dozen hanging, jeweled lights that glowed mysteriously, multicolored, through faint blue sandal smoke. Two maids sat near her. One fanned her, for the heat was stifling; one watched. Another maid bent over the divan and wafted air at Boileau with a fan of peacock feathers. Yasmini, showing little even pearls of teeth, smiled like the soul of early morning, leaned on her elbow and began to talk.

She spoke now in Hindustani, which Boileau understood. For all its other qualities that is a language that can sound, and be, like honey on the lips of loveliness.

“What ails my lord?”

She purred it, as though it were an overture to love itself.

“Nothing ails me. I think I am singularly favored.”

“You seem displeased. Is aught lacking?”

“Miss Yasmini, I think there is nothing lacking when you are at hand!”

He could not for the life of him bring himself to call her Yasmini without some prefix. It sounded ridiculous, but he, too, felt ridiculous—until he looked into her eyes again. Then he forgot himself and everything except her eyes.

“My lord is pleased to joke with me?”

“’Pon my soul!”

English was the only tongue that suited his dilemma. With her eyes on him, he could not think unless he thought aloud, and he had a foolish notion that if his thoughts were in English she might not understand.

“Does anybody ever joke with you?” he asked in Hindustani.

Her eyes changed—not in color, but as if the light behind them glowed a little more.

“Not often. One did—once. My lord has not yet deigned to tell the cause of the honor that he pays me.”

That was a stumper. She waited for his answer as a suppliant waits, pillowed at his feet and looking up at him. There was not a hint of laughter in her eyes, nor the vaguest, least suggestion that she thought him an intruder or a boor, or anything except what he had thought himself an hour ago—a spurred and righteous lord of what he looked at.

“I had heard of you, that’s all.”

“And came to see me? Why? Why at this hour?”

“’Pon my soul, I”

“To laugh at me?”

“On my honor, no!”

“To order me away?”

She looked at his spurs and at his military mess jacket; and if she were not afraid she gave a very good imitation of concern.

“I don’t suppose there’s a man living who would order you away from anywhere!”

“Then I have leave to stay on here?”

“So far as I can give it you have leave to stay here till the crack of doom. I’d hate to see you go. I want to see a lot more of you. I—”

He cursed the unresisting pillows that prevented him from sitting upright. No white man—least of all a soldier—can collect his wits and fence with words reclining in a nest of scented clouds. Besides, a soldier’s garments are not made for it; he looks ridiculous.

“Then why at this hour, Heavenborn?”

The last thing that Boileau had expected was to be snubbed for breach of etiquette.

“It isn’t so late as all that, is it?” he stammered awkwardly. He felt for his watch, but had none. He did not want to go, but for the life of him he could think of no excuse for staying. And Yasmini continued to look up at him like a little girl suppliant, awaiting explanations.

“Why—ah—” he twirled at his mustache and tried to seem at ease—“I was busy all day long and—ah—my native servant said—”

“What did he say?”

“Said that he knew the way here and that you might receive me—said he wasn’t sure, but he thought you might.”

“And is that your servant—he who sits below there at the door?”

There was a world of wonder in her voice, and she watched him now through eyelids almost closed; he could no longer see the pools of fire that glowed behind them.

“Yes.”

“Then the way of the sahib log is to ask questions of their-low caste servants—” she shuddered, but even that movement was all suppleness and grace, “and to follow their advice in matters pertaining to their visits?”

“Abdullah isn’t a low caste man. He’s—”

“No?”

Boileau remembered then that there are castes within castes, and that even Mohammedans are not without a caste law of their own, so he said nothing.

“And that man—that creature of the devil—said that I would receive you? No wonder that you came! Will the Heavenborn partake of sherbet?”

“No thanks,” said Boileau. “I’m sorry you’ve gathered such a false impression. I—ah—wouldn’t have offended you for worlds—ah—I’ll take my leave now and ah—call—again, perhaps to-morrow, at a more reasonable hour. Didn’t want to meet my own troopers here, you know,” he added, as an afterthought, by way of mild retaliation.

“Have your troopers, too, said strange things of me?”

“Not to me, at all events. We—ah don’t discuss—ah—ladies.”

Yasmini smiled, and he might take her smile to mean exactly what he chose. He rose, and she rose languidly, taking her maid’s hand. She might have been smiling at his tight-kneed effort to escape with dignity from the embracing divan. Whatever the cause of it, her smile bewildered him exactly as his first sight of her had done, and he could not find words as she bowed in front of him, with the same mock worship, and the same lithe grace and led him to the stair.

He went down the stair feeling like an idiot—glad of the darkness—going sidewise to prevent his spurs from catching in the carpet; but in spite of it his spurs did catch and he fell down nearly to the bottom. And his feelings were still further tortured by the sound of peal on peal of tinkling, silvery laughter from the room above, that started immediately the maid opened the narrow door for him. A chorus of laughter from the maids was the last sound that he heard as the door slammed tight behind him.

He walked back like a man in a stupor, stumbling once or twice in spite of Abdullah’s care to hold the lamp over each protruding tree root. He could see Yasmini’s eyes in the dark, but every time he tried to gaze at them, they moved and when he tried to follow them they moved again.

“I’ve not been drinking,” he muttered to himself. “It must be liver. Yes, it’s liver. But ye gods and little fishes, what a woman!”

“Been trying to get cool, Boileau?” said a voice, as he passed down the lines to his own quarters, and he nearly jumped. It was only by a miracle that he recalled his nerve in time. He turned into the tent whence the voice came, and saw his Colonel sitting in a camp chair smoking.

“Didn’t expect you back so soon, sir. Any luck with Gopi Lall?”

“No. Found his nest. Got him on the run, that’s all. The troops are after him. Any cooler out in the jungle there?”

Boileau laughed. “I got a cool reception, sir,” he answered. “I called on Yasmini.”

“The very deuce you did! What’s she like?”

“She’s a wonder, sir. Couldn’t describe her—no man living could.”

“Beautiful?”

“Have to find a new word, sir.”

“Gave you a cool reception did she? I wonder she admitted you. Did you get the least idea as to why she’s here?”

“None whatever.”

“Is she—ah—I mean—what about her morals?”

“Judging by the way she treated me, sir, I would say she was—”

“Well, what?”

“That she belies her reputation. She’s a native, of course, and there’s no means of judging them, any more than a man can tell how the stories about her started. But she’s chaperoned more thoroughly than a seventeen year old débutante at home, and she’s as dignified—for all her witchery—as the deuce himself.”

“Um-m-m! I’d keep away if I were you. I’m not giving orders, but—well—it’s good advice. If trouble came of it—she’s a native woman, mind—you’d run the risk of being neither officer nor gentleman. A deuce of a nasty risk to run! Turning in? Good night.”