Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/78



In this story Rabindranath Tagore reveals the heart of Kusum by the slight interrogative touches which he often uses to give reality to his spiritual portraits of women. He is one of the very few tale-writers who can interpret women by intuitive art. The devotion and the heroism of the Hindu wife he paints are of a kind to explain to us that though the mortal rite of Suttee is ended, the spirit that led to it is not at all extinct. It lives re-embodied in a thousand acts of sacrifice, and in many a delivering up of the creature-self, and its pride of life and womanly desire.

Such a tale of the slow Suttee is told by Rabindranath in "The Expiation," in which the little Bengali wife of a splendid drone and do-nothing takes on her own head his guilt, when he turns thief in order to get money to go to England. While he lives there and casually picks up an English wife she pawns and sells her jewels to