Page:Oriental Stories Volume 02 Number 01 (Winter 1932).djvu/41

 mindful of her disdainful reluctance: "Yes, I shall help. I'll speak to the Sultan and you shall have your prince—but—oh, what's the use?—Nonna! Nonna, little girl!—Just once—for me" He broke down, thrusting the note into her hand, pleading, begging, conscienceless, utterly unmindful of anything now but her, her, her! His arm had swept around her slender waist, his lips sought her shrinking face

It had come, the lamentable truth! "Pheu!—Hypocrite! That talks kindly but art no better than die rest of them!—Djaga!" Nonna repulsed him disgustedly.

There was a swift rush in the bushes; then that white man seemed to melt away backward. The white body of him was swept kicking around the shrine, horizontally between four dark and struggling coolies. He cursed once or twice, but brown hands stopped his outcry. Nonna sprang out of the shrine, for the gleam of a kris had caught her eye.

"No! Yusuf! No!" she hissed, grabbing his arm. "The Tuan meant well, doubtless, but he -was too much for himself. He has done no evil—come!"

Taking his hand Nonna ran swiftly out of the garden. Behind them they heard a resounding splash but no outcry. The four coolies had hurled that white man unceremoniously into the Sultan's lily pond. It was a squidgy place, of vile and bottomless mud under the Victoria Regia lilies. Men sent in there to gather lotus blossoms floundered for hours in the slimy ooze of the bottom before reaching shore! The white man would not dare cry out for help. His dignity forbade that. He would get out of that pond alone and in silence, and sneak to his hotel, a loathsome thing of slime and mud.

Nonna chuckled softly. "A woman's revenge, my lord!" she murmured to Yusuf as they fled. The latter shook his head; the kris, if you asked him! But the whole grove seemed to whisper with the laughter of the Elder Gods, as Nonna and Yusuf left the garden and set their faces toward Life.

Oh, lovely flower, From thy sweet perfume The nightingale draws song. The stars themselves Reflect your sadness. When your head is bowed In grief over some tragedy In the garden They hide behind curtains Of gray fog. Oh, Rose, Perhaps in your fragile Loveliness You are but a ghost, The ghost of a slim young girl Whose passing Multiplied the sorrows Of the world.