The Ten-foot Chain Part 1

The Ten-foot Chain.

by Achmed Abdullah and Max Brand and E. K. Means and P. P. Sheehan.

INTRODUCTION

Some time ago I was dining with four distinguished writers. Needless to say where two or three authors are gathered together with a sympathetic editor in their midst, the flood-gates of fancy are opened wide.

In an inspired moment, Dr. Means tossed this "tremendous trifle" into the center of the table: "What mental and emotional reaction would a man and a woman undergo, linked together by a ten-foot chain, for three days and nights?" The query precipitated an uproar.

Captain Abdullah stepped into the arena at once, and with that elan of the heart, which is bred only in the Orient, declared if the man and the woman really loved one another, no chain could be riveted too close or too enduring to render onerous its existence. For through this world and the next, love would hold these twain in ever deeper and tenderer embrace.

Then the doctor, who claims he cuts nearer to the realities, insisted no emotion could bear such a physical impact. The reaction from such an imposed contact would leave love bereft of life, strangled in its own golden mesh. Max Brand begged to differ with both of his fellow craftsmen. With the cold detachment of a mind prepared to see all four sides of an object and with no personal animus of either prejudice or prepossession, Mr. Brand averred no blanker conclusion covered the case in question but in any given instance, the multiple factors of heredity, environment, habit, and temperament, would largely determine the final state of both the man and the woman.

Hereupon, Perley Poore Sheehan, the fourth member of the writing fraternity present, insisted on a hearing. Mr. Sheehan, nothing daunted by the naturally polygamous instincts of the male heart, insisted a good man, once in love, would and could discount the handicap of a ten-foot chain, since love was after all, as others have contended, not the whole of a man's life. To be sure it was an integral need, a recurrent appet.i.te; the glamour and the glory, if you like, enfolding with its overshadowing wings his house of happiness. As for the woman--well, we will let Mr. Sheehan report, in person, his conviction as to the stability of her attachment.

The editor, whose business it is to keep an open mind, scarcely felt equal to the responsibility of pa.s.sing judgment, where experts differed.

But the discussion presented an opportunity which he felt called upon to develop. Therefore, each of the four authors was invited to present his conclusions in fiction form, the four stories to be published under the general caption "The Ten-Foot Chain." Herewith we are printing this unique symposium, one of the most original series ever presented.

Naturally, the stories are bound to provoke opinion and raise discussion. The thesis in the form presented by Dr. Means is quite novel, but the underlying problem of the stability of human affections, is as old as the heart of man. Wasn't it that prosaic but wise old poet, Alexander Pope, who compared our minds to our watches? "No two go just alike, yet each believes his own."

FIRST TALE

AN INDIAN JATAKA

BY ACHMED ABDULLAH

_This is the tale which Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in Tartary, and milk brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East and the North, and Captain General of the Golden Horde, whispered to the Foolish Virgin who came to him, bringing the purple, spiked flower of the Kadam-tree as an offering, and begging him for a love potion with which to hold Haydar Khan, a young, red-faced warrior from the west who had ridden into camp, a song on his lips, a woman's breast scarf tied to his tufted bamboo lance, a necklace of his slain foes' skulls strung about his ma.s.sive chest, and sitting astride a white stallion whose mane was dyed crimson in sign of strife and whose dainty, dancing feet rang on the rose-red marble pavement of the emperor's courtyard like crystal bells in the wind of spring._

_This is a tale of pa.s.sion, and, by the same token, a tale of wisdom. For, in the yellow, placid lands east of the Urals and west of harsh, sneering Pekin, it is babbled by the toothless old women who know life, that wisdom and desire are twin sisters rocked in the same cradle: one speaks while the other sings.

They say that it is the wisdom of pa.s.sion which makes eternal the instinct of love._

_This is the tale of Vasantasena, the slave who was free in her own heart, and of Madusadan, a captain of horse, who plucked the white rose without fearing the thorns._

_This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the trees bare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the land without destroying the d.y.k.es or drowning the lowing cattle and the little naked children who played at the river's bank; when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder brother, the Sun._

_LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!_

Vasantasena was the girl's name, and she came to young King Vikramavati's court on the tenth day of the dark half of the month Bhadra. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her henna-stained feet bound together by a thin, golden chain, her white hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the tamala flower, in sign of mourning for Dharma, her father, the king of the south, who had fallen in battle beneath the steel-shod tusks of the war elephants.

She knelt before the peac.o.c.k throne, and Vikramavati saw that her face was as beautiful as the moon on the fourteenth day, that her black locks were like female snakes, her waist like the waist of a she-lion, her arms like twin marble columns blue-veined, her skin like the sweetly scented champaka flower, and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as the young tinduka fruit.

He looked into her eyes and saw that they were of a deep bronze color, gold flecked, and with pupils that were black and opaque--eyes that seemed to hold all the wisdom, all the secret mockery, the secret knowledge of womanhood--and his hand trembled, and he thought in his soul that the bountiful hand of Sravanna, the G.o.d of Plenty, had been raised high in the western heaven at the hour of her birth.

"Remember the words of the Brahmin," grumbled Deo Singh, his old prime minister who had served his father before him and who was watching him anxiously, jealously. "'Woman is the greatest robber of all. For other robbers steal property which is spiritually worthless, such as gold and diamonds; while woman steals the best--a man's heart, and soul, and ambition, and strength.' Remember, furthermore, the words of--"

"Enough croakings for the day, Leaky-Tongue!" cut in Vikramavati, with the insolent rashness of his twenty-four years. "Go home to your withered beldame of a wife and pray with her before the altar of unborn children, and help her clean the household pots. This is the season when I speak of love!"

"Whose love--yours or the girl's?" smilingly asked Madusadan, captain of horse, a man ten years the king's senior, with a mocking, bitter eye, a great, crimson mouth, a crunching chest, ma.s.sive, hairy arms, the honey of eloquence on his tongue, and a mind that was a deer in leaping, a cat in climbing. Men disliked him because they could not beat him in joust or tournament; and women feared him because the purity of his life, which was an open book, gave the lie to his red lips and the slow-eddying flame in his hooded, brown eyes. "Whose love, wise king?"

But the latter did not hear.

He dismissed the soldiers and ministers and courtiers with an impatient gesture, and stepped down from his peac.o.c.k throne.

"Fool!" said Madusadan, as he looked through a slit in the curtain from an inner room and saw that the king was raising Vasantasena to her feet; saw, too, the derisive patience in her golden eyes.

"A fool--though a king versed in statecraft!" he whispered into the ear of Shivadevi, Vasantasena's shriveled, gnarled hill nurse who had followed her mistress into captivity.

"Thee! A fool indeed!" cackled the old nurse as, side by side with the captain of horse, she listened to the tale of love the king was spreading before the slave girl's narrow, white feet, as Kama-Deva, the young G.o.d of Pa.s.sion, spread the tale of his longing before Rati, his wife, with the voice of the cuckoo, the humming-bee in mating time, and the southern breeze laden with lotus.

"You came to me a slave captured among the crackling spears of battle,"

said Vikramavati, "and behold, it is I who am the slave. For your sake I would sin the many sins. For the sake of one of your precious eyelashes I would spit on the names of the G.o.ds and slaughter the holy cow. You are a light shining in a dark house. Your body is a garden of strange and glorious flowers which I gather in the gloom. I feel the savor and shade of your dim tresses, and think of the home land where the hill winds sweep.

"My love for you is as the soft sweetness of wild honey which the bees of the forest have gathered among the perfumed asoka flowers--sweet and warm, but with a sharp after-taste to p.r.i.c.k the tongue and set the body eternally longing. To hold you I would throw a noose around the far stars. I give you all I have, all I am, all I shall ever be, and it would not be the thousandth part of my love for you. See! My heart is a carpet for your little lisping feet. Step gently, child!"

Vasantasena replied never a word. With unwinking, opaque eyes, she stared beyond the king, at a slit in the curtain which separated the throne-room from the inner apartment. For through the embroidered folds of the brocade, a great, hairy, brown, high-veined hand was thrust, the broad thumb wagging mockingly, meaningly, like a shadow of fate.

And she remembered the huge star sapphire set in hammered silver that twinkled on the thumb like a cresset of pa.s.sion. She remembered how that hand had plucked her from amidst the horse's trampling feet and the sword-rimmed wheels of the war-chariots as she crouched low above her father's body. She remembered the voice that had come to her, clear through the clamor and din of battle, the braying of the conches, the neighing of the stallions, the shrill, angry trumpeting of the elephants--

A voice sharp, compelling, bitter--

"Captive to my bow and spear, little flower, but a slave for the king, my master. For such is the law of Hind. He will love you--not being altogether a fool. But perhaps you will not love him. Being but a stammering virgin boy, perhaps he will heap your lap with all the treasures in the world. Being an honest gentleman, perhaps he will treat you with respect and tenderness, with the sweet fairness of the blessed G.o.ds. And perhaps--even then--you will not love him, little flower.

"Perhaps you will turn to the captain of horse as the moon rises like a bubble of pa.s.sion from the deep red of the sunset. Perhaps you will read the meaning of the koel-bird's love-cry, the secret of the jessamine's scent, the sweet, throbbing, winglike call of all the unborn children in the heart and body and soul of Madusadan, captain of horse."

"A bold man, this captain of horse!" Vasantasena had smiled through her tears, through the savage clang of battle.

"A reckless man--yet a humble man, little flower. Reckless and humble as the moist spring monsoon that sweeps over the young shoots of bluish-white rice. For"--here he had put her in front of him, on the curve of the peaked, bossed saddle--"will the rice ripen to the touch of the savage, clamoring monsoon?"

And he had drawn slightly away from her. He had not even kissed her, though they were shielded from all the world by the folds of the great battle flag that was stiff with gold, stiffer with darkening gore. In the fluttering heart of Vasantasena rose a great longing for this insolent warrior who spoke of love--and touched her not.

_This is the tale of the grape that is never pressed, that never loses its sweetness, though white hands squeeze its pulp, day after day, night after night._

_This is the tale of the book that is never read to the end, though eyes, moist and smarting with longing, read its pages till the candles gutter out in the gray dawn wind and the young sun sings its cosmic song out of the East, purple and golden._

_This is the tale of love which rises like a mist of ineffable calm, then sweeps along on the red wings of eternal desire--the tale of love that is a chain forged of steel and scent, a chain of unbreakable steel mated to the pollen of the glistening areka-flower._

_LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!_

"See!" said Shivadevi, the old nurse, to Vasantasena, who shimmered among the green, silken cushions of her couch like a tiger-beetle in a nest of fresh leaves. "Vikramavati, the king, has bowed low before you.

He has removed from your hands and ankles the pearl and gold fetters. He has taken off your robe of mourning and has thrown about your shoulders a sari woven of moonbeams and running water. He has seated you beside him on the peac.o.c.k throne, as a free woman--not a slave."

"Yes," replied Vasantasena. "He has placed his head and his heart on the sill of the door of love. He brought me his soul as an offering. And I"--she yawned--"I love him not."