Bee was not conscious, because she was ashamed of the reality; to which men have given a bad name, calling it Satan; and so it has to steal into the garden of paradise in the guise of a snake, and whisper secrets into the ears of man’s chosen consort and make her rebellious; then farewell to all ease; and after that comes death!
My poor little Queen Bee is living in a dream. She knows not which way she is treading. It would not be safe to awaken her before the time. It is best for me to pretend to be equally unconscious.
The other day, at dinner, she was gazing at me in a curious sort of way, little realizing what such glances mean! As my eyes met hers, she turned away with a flush. “You are surprised at my appetite,” I remarked. “I can hide everything, except that I am greedy! Anyhow, why trouble to blush for me, since I am shameless?”
This only made her colour more furiously, as she stammered: “No, no, I was only …”
“I know,” I interrupted. “Women have a weakness for greedy men; for it is this greed of ours which gives them the upper hand. The indulgence which I have always received at their hands has made me all the more shameless. I do not mind your watching the good things disappear, not one bit. I mean to enjoy every one of them.”
The other day I was reading an English book in which sex-problems were treated in an audaciously realistic manner. I had left it lying in the sitting-room. As I went there the next afternoon, for something or other, I found Bee seated with this book in her hand. When she heard my footsteps she hurriedly put it down and placed another book over it—a volume of Mrs. Hemans’s poems.
“I have never been able to make out,” I began, “why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry. We men—lawyers, mechanics, or whatnot—may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva15 must have practised the divine art seated at His feet.”
Bee made no reply, but only blushed uncomfortably. She made as if she would leave the room. Whereupon I protested: “No, no, pray read on. I will just take a book I left here, and run away.” With which I took up my book from the table. “Lucky you did not think of glancing over its pages,” I continued, “or you would have wanted to chastise me.”
“Indeed! Why?” asked Bee.
“Because it is not poetry,” said I. “Only blunt things, bluntly put, without any finicking niceness. I wish Nikhil would read it.”
Bee frowned a little as she murmured: “What makes you wish that?”
“He is a man, you see, one of us. My only quarrel with him is that he delights in a misty vision of this world. Have you not observed how this trait of his makes him look on Swadeshi as if it was some poem of which the metre must be kept correct at every step? We, with the clubs of our prose, are the iconoclasts of metre.”
“What has your book to do with Swadeshi?”
“You would know if you only read it. Nikhil wants to go by made-up maxims, in Swadeshi as in everything else; so he knocks up against human nature at every turn, and then falls to abusing it. He never will realize that human nature was created long before phrases were, and will survive them too.”
Bee was silent for a while and then gravely said: “Is it not a part of human nature to try and rise superior to itself?”
I smiled inwardly. “These are not your words,” I thought to myself. “You have learnt them from Nikhil. You are a healthy human being. Your flesh and blood have responded to the call of reality. You are burning in every vein with life-fire—do I not know it? How long should they keep you cool with the wet towel of moral precepts?”
“The weak are in the majority,” I said aloud. “They are continually poisoning the ears of men by repeating these shibboleths. Nature has denied them strength—it is thus that they try to enfeeble others.”
“We women are weak,” replied Bimala. “So I suppose we must join in the conspiracy of the weak.”
“Women weak!” I exclaimed with a laugh. “Men belaud you as delicate and fragile, so as to delude you into thinking yourselves weak. But it is you women who are strong. Men make a great outward show of their so-called freedom, but those who know their inner minds are aware of their bondage. They have manufactured scriptures with their own hands to bind themselves; with their very idealism they have made golden fetters of women to wind round their body and mind. If men had not that extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves in meshes of their own contriving, nothing could have kept them bound. But as for you women, you have desired to conceive reality with body and soul. You have given birth to reality. You have suckled reality at your breasts.”
Bee was well read for a woman, and would not easily give in to my arguments. “If that were true,” she objected, “men would not have found women attractive.”
“Women realize the danger,” I replied. “They know that men love delusions, so they give them full measure by borrowing their own phrases. They know that man, the drunkard, values intoxication more than food, and so they try to pass themselves off as an intoxicant. As a matter of
