Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “The soldier.”

  “‘Listen, all of you! Behold your king — a great king and a good one! Know ye not the nature of a king? Lo, ye should rally to him and support him! A realm is ruled by force of discipline, wherein is strength; and to the strong all things are possible! Rally to your king and bid him lead you to a war on foreigners, who nibble at our wealth like rats and give us no return.’”

  “A woman,” said the Lama.

  “‘Tell us first, whose sons shall fight this war!’”

  “Another woman.”

  “‘And who shall console the widows!’”

  The Saddhu: “‘The widows of the conquered nation will console them. They will naturally see the justice of the war!’”

  “The soldier,” said Maitraya. “He shakes his sword at the Saddhu.”

  “‘Peace, idiot! They will invade us, unless we first attack them. Then in which cave will you hide? If I had my way, I would send you in the front rank to the war to show us whether your sanctity isn’t really cowardice after all!’”

  “All laugh at the saddhu,” said the Lama. “Now the king.” And Maitraya postured splendidly.

  “ ‘Ye men and women, know ye not that I have neither will nor power to make war unless ye brew the war within you as a snake brews venom in its mouth?’”

  The Saddhu: “‘Yet a snake slays vermin!’”

  Maitraya read on: “‘Peace, Saddhu! There is merit everywhere. Am I not king? And how shall I please all, who so unfairly disagree? Ye see these lines that mark my worried brow; ye see this head that bends beneath the burden of your care; and ye upbraid me with more tribulations? What if I should wreak impatience on you all? Am I alone in travail? Is none among you, man or woman, who can offer me a counsel of perfection?’”

  “I!” It was Samding’s voice, resonant and splendid yet peculiarly unassertive. It was as if the tone included listeners in its embrace. All eyes turned to Samding instantly, but he sat motionless.

  “The crowd divides down the midst,” said the Lama. “San-fun-ho steps forward from beside the well beneath the pipul-tree. She speaks.”

  “‘O King!’” The chela’s voice was not unlike a woman’s, although its strength suggested it might ripen soon into a royal baritone. “‘I come from a far land where wisdom dwells and all the problems that can vex were worked to a solution in the birth of time. Well said, O King, that there is merit everywhere! Well said, ye men and women, that ye have no words nor wealth to offer to your king. Nor could he understand, nor could he listen, since the ears of kings are deaf to common murmurings, even as your ears are deaf to royal overtones. But lo! I bring a talisman — a stone enchanted by the all-wise gods — whose virtue is to change from dawn to dawn the rank, condition, raiment and degree of all who look on it! Avert thine eyes, O King! I would not change thy rank, not even while a day and night shall pass. Look, Saddhu — soldier — goatherd — women — all of you!’”

  “She holds up the stone,” said the Lama, “and they stare at it in superstitious awe. They show astonishment and reverence. Then San-fun-ho intones a mantra.”

  The chela began to chant in a voice that filled the huge room with golden sound, as solemn, lonely and as drenched with music as a requiem to a cathedral roof. Without an effort Ommony imagined stained-glass windows and an organ-loft. Maitraya bowed his head, and even the other actors, outcaste and irreverent, held their breath. It sounded like magic. All India believes implicitly in magic. The words were Sanskrit, and probably only Ommony, Samding and the Lama understood them; but the ancient, sacred, unintelligible language only added to the mystery and made the spell more real.

  None, not even Maitraya, moved or breathed until the chanting ceased. The Lama glanced at Ommony, who was so thrilled by the chela’s voice as to have forgotten for the moment that he held the saddhu’s scroll. He looked at it and read aloud in solemn tones:

  “‘I did not look! I turned mine eyes away!’”

  The King: “‘I looked!’” Maitraya put a world of meaning into that line.

  “And that,” said the Lama, “ends the first act.”

  “Too short! Much too short!” exclaimed Maitraya.

  “Too long,” said the Lama. “I may have to cut one of your speeches. Now there would be merit in the learning of your parts until the gong sounds for dinner. After dinner we will take the second act. Peace dwell with you. Samding!”

  The chela helped him to his feet, rolled up the mat, and followed him out through the door at the end of the platform, where neither of them paused; someone on the far side of the door opened it as they drew near, pulled back a curtain, admitted them, slammed the door after them, and locked it noisily.

  For a moment after that there was no sound. All stared at one another. Ommony felt snubbed. He had intended to force an interview with the Lama at the end of the rehearsal, but the calm old prelate seemed to have foreseen that move!

  “What do you think of it, Gupta Rao?” asked Maitraya.

  “Crafty!” answered Ommony, still thinking of the Lama. “I mean, full of craft — I mean, it is a good play; it will succeed.”

  “Perhaps — if he neglects to charge admission!” said Maitraya. (But he seemed tempted to share Ommony’s opinion.) “If he would let me give him the benefit of my experience, it might be made into a real play,” he added. “And the chela? What do you think of the chela?”

  “I know!” said Ommony. “He will make all the rest of us, except the dog, look and sound like wooden dummies!”

  “There again!” said Maitraya. “The dog! Before you know it he will order the chela to write a part for that knife-swinging savage of yours from Spiti!”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. By Vishnu’s brow, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything!” said Ommony, and cut off further conversation by returning to the trunk and squatting on it with his back to the light, to study the scroll of the saddhu — or rather, to pretend to study it. He was too full of thoughts of the Lama and the chela, and of his own good fortune in having stumbled into their company, to study anything else.

  “The Lama knows I’m Cottswold Ommony. He knows I know who he is. Is he using his own method of showing me what he knows I want to see? Or is he keeping an eye on me while he attends to his own secrets? Or am I trapped? Or being tested?”

  He had heard of the extraordinary tests to which Lamas put disciples before entrusting them with knowledge. “But I have never offered to be his disciple!” he reflected. And then he remembered that Lamas always choose their disciples, and that thought made him chuckle. It is notorious they do not choose them for what would pass for erudition according to most standards.

  “I’d better see how stupid I can be,” he decided. “I chose Diana without asking her leave,” he remembered. “She likes it all right. Maybe—”

  But the thought of becoming an ascetic Lamaist was too much like burlesque to entertain, and he dismissed it — puzzled more than ever.

  CHAPTER XIV. The Second Act

  The ways of the gods are natural, the ways of men unnatural, and there is nothing supernatural, except this: that if a man does a useless thing, none reproves him; if he does a harmful thing, few seek to restrain him; but if he seeks to imitate the gods and to encourage others, all those in authority accuse him of corruption. So it is more dangerous to teach truth than to enter a powder magazine with a lighted torch.

  — from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup

  ALTHOUGH the first act was no more than a prologue, the second was long, constituting almost the entire play, followed by a short third act which was not much more than epilogue. For more than half an hour Ommony studied his part in silence, and the more he studied it the more its grim irony appealed to him. The saddhu typified intolerant self-righteousness and the beautifully written lines were jeremiads of abortive sanctity. Whatever else the Lama, or whoever wrote the play, might be, he was witty and aware of all the arguments of the accusers of mankind.

  It appeared that, hav
ing refused to look at the magic jade while the mantra was being chanted, the saddhu alone went through the second act unchanged. The king, who had looked although warned not to look, became turned for a day and a night into an incredibly wise man (which was just what he wanted to be) but surrounded by the sweetmeat seller, shoemaker and so on, transformed into members of his court, whose ignorance exasperated him to the verge of insanity. The soldier had become a general, who prated about patriotic duty. The camel-driver was a minister of commerce, who believed that the poor were getting their exact deserts and would be ruined by paternalism. The village headman was a nobleman with vast estates, who rack-rented his tenants and insisted that he did it by divine right. The farmers had become a minister of finance and his assistant, who conspired to bring about a better state of things by wringing the last realizable rupee from the merchant classes. The goatherd, strange to say, became a courtier pure and simple, who had no ambition but to make love to every woman who came within his range. The sweetmeat seller was a chancellor whose duty was to invent laws, and the shoemaker was a judge who had to apply them.

  San-fun-ho, it seemed, had also looked into the magic jade, and had become a goddess, with her name unchanged, who came and went, heaping Puck-like irony on every one, king included, and engaging in acid exchanges of wit with the saddhu, who had much the worst of it.

  The women with the water-jars had all become court favorites, who lolled on divans and complained of their tedious, unprofitable fate, inclining rather to the saddhu’s view of things but unwilling to give up sinecures for austerity (which they declared had gone out of fashion long ago) and cynically skeptical of the morals of the dancing women, who entered early in the second act to entertain the court. The long and the short of it was, that nobody was any happier for being changed, and least of all the king, who had only implored the Powers to make him fabulously wise, and who found his wisdom sterile because foolish people could not understand it.

  The second act was supposed to take place at night, after a long day’s experience of the results of the sudden change of character, and at the close they all departed to the well, to greet the dawn and welcome a return to their former condition.

  The third act found them at the well-side, changed again, and San-fun-ho, once more a Chinese woman, took them to task for having failed to see the future seeded in themselves, depending for fruition solely on their own use of each passing moment. Because the saddhu had to interject remarks, the whole of San-fun-ho’s last speech was written on Ommony’s scroll, and as he read he chuckled at the saddhu’s vanquishment. He loved to see cant and pseudo-righteousness exploded. He could imagine the saddhu, typifying all he most loathed, slinking off-stage, brow-beaten, ashamed — and just as bent as ever on attaining Heaven by the exercise of tyranny, self-torture and contempt of fun.

  Then San-fun-ho’s last lines — a mantra — sung to Manjusri,* Lord and Teacher, “free from the two-fold mental gloom,” as redolent and ringing with immortal hope as sunshine through the rain.

  He was reading that when the gong sounded — a reverberating, clanging thing of brass whose din drowned thought and drove the wasps in squadrons through the window-slats. And that brought another problem that invited very serious attention. As a Brahmin — even a Bhat-Brahmin, who is not supposed to be above committing scores of acts the orthodox would reckon unclean — he might not eat in company with actors, nor even in the Lama’s company, nor in any room in which non-Brahmins were. He began to exercise his wits to find a way out of the difficulty — only to find that the Lama had foreseen it and had provided the solution.

  Long-robed servants entered from the courtyard bearing bowls of hot food for the actors, but none for Ommony or Dawa Tsering or the dog. Instead, a tall Tibetan came, announcing that a meal cooked by a Brahmin would be served in a ritually clean room, if his honor would condescend to be shown the way to it.

  The room turned out to be a small one at the far corner of the cloister, and no more ritually clean than eggs are square, nor had the meal been cooked by a Brahmin; but the actors were none the wiser. Dawa Tsering’s food was heaped in a bowl on a mat outside the door, and he, having no caste prejudices, squatted down to gorge himself, with a wary eye on Diana. Ommony relieved his mind:

  “She eats only at night. She won’t touch food unless I give permission.”

  Dawa Tsering promptly tried to tempt the dog, but she turned up her nose at the offer, and the Hillman grinned. “I think you have more than one devil in you, Gupta Rao! However, maybe they are not bad devils!” He nodded to himself; down in the recesses of his mind there was an evolution going on, that was best left to take its own course.

  Ommony left him and the dog outside and shut himself into the small square room. There was only one door; one window. He was safe from observation. There was a plain but well-cooked meal of rice and vegetables laid out on a low wooden bench with a stool beside it, and a pitcher of milk that smelt as fresh as if it had come from a model dairy; also a mattress in a corner, on which to rest when the meal was finished — good monastic fare and greater ease than is to be had in many an expensive hostelry.

  He finished the meal and sprawled on the mattress, confessing to himself that in spite of the Lama’s having avoided him for twenty years, in spite of the evidence of an astonishingly perfect spy-system that had enabled the Lama so infallibly to trace and recover the jade, and even in spite of Benjamin’s confession, it was next to impossible to believe the old Lama was a miscreant. Because of the story of traffic in white children, reason argued that the Lama was a fiend. Intuition, which ignores deduction, told him otherwise; and memory began to reassert itself.

  There was, for instance, twenty years of correspondence from the Lama, mostly in English, with reference to the business of the Tilgaun Mission; not one word of it was less than altruistic, practical and sane; there had never been a hint of compromise with even those conventional lapses from stern principle that most institutions find themselves compelled to make. In fact, he admitted to himself that the Lama’s letters, more than anything else during his life in India, had helped him to see straight and to govern himself uprightly.

  And now this play. And Samding. Could a man who made victims of children so educate a chela as that one evidently had been educated? Youth takes on the taint of its surroundings. Samding had the calm self-possession of one who knew the inherent barrenness of evil and therefore could not be tempted by it.

  And would a man, who permitted himself to outrage humanity by hypnotizing children, write such a play as this one, or approve of it, or stage it at his own expense? The play was not only ingeniously moral, it was radically sound and aimed equally at mockery of wrong ideals and the presentation of a manly view of life. A saint might have written it, and a reckless “angel” might finance it, but a criminal or a man with personal ambitions, hardly.

  Then again, there was the mystery of the Lama’s treatment of himself. How much had Benjamin told? The old Jew had sent the trunk, so there had been plenty of chance to send a message with it. Benjamin might have brought the trunk in person. Anyhow, the Lama now unquestionably knew who the Bhat-Brahmin was; and he was evidently willing for the present not only to submit to espionage but to protect the spy!

  It might be, of course, that the Lama had views of his own as to what constitutes crime. He had radical views, and was not averse to voicing them before strangers. But if his conception of morality included smuggling children into the unknown Hill country, how was it that he was so careful for the Tilgaun Mission and so insistent on safeguards against mental contamination?

  Above all, why was he so careful to avoid an interview? What did he propose to gain by pretending not to see through the Brahmin disguise? True, he had spoken English once or twice, but he had made no comment when the Bhat-Brahmin pretended not to understand him. Was he simply amusing himself? If so, two could play at that game! For the present Ommony had to let the problem go unsolved, but he dismissed the very notion of not
solving it and he determined to get at least as much amusement out of the process as ever the Lama should enjoy.

  He had about reached that conclusion, and was contemplating a siesta, when the same attendant who had brought him to the room came to announce that “the holy Lama Tsiang Samdup” was expecting him in the great hall. When he reached the hall rehearsal of the second act was already under way; Maitraya was getting off a speech he had already memorized, strutting, declaiming, trying to impress the Lama and the troupe with his eloquent stage personality. The Lama took no notice as Ommony entered with the dog and Dawa Tsering, but told Maitraya to repeat the lines. Maitraya, rather nettled, gave a different rendering, more pompous, louder and accompanied by gestures more emphatic than the first. The troupe applauded, since Maitraya plainly expected it, but the Lama broke into a smile that disturbed his wrinkles as if they had been stirred with a spoon.

  “My son,” he said quietly, “the whistle does not pull the train.” Maitraya’s jaw dropped. “Samding, show him how I like to have those lines read.”

  Samding spoke the lines from memory, not moving his body at all, and the amazing thing was that while he spoke one forgot he was a chela and almost actually saw a king standing where he was sitting — a king who was bored to distraction and trying to explain kindly to stupid people why their arguments were all wrong. One felt immensely sorry for the king, and saw the hopelessness of his attempt. But all that was between the lines, and in the wonderful inflection of the voice.

  “And now, my son, try once more,” said the Lama. “Imagine the audience is on the stage, and speak to them as you would like a king to speak to you; not as you yourself would speak if you were king, but as a king should speak to unwise people.”

  Maitraya swallowed pride, tried again, and so surprised himself with his second effort that he tried a third time without invitation; and the third rendering was almost good. The man had imitative talent.

  The whole of the afternoon was given up to the reading and re-reading of the second act, and Dawa Tsering slept — and snored — throughout the entire performance. Several times the Lama obliged Ommony to repeat his lines, without once calling him by name, and once he made Samding repeat them for him, the chela doing so from memory, apparently knowing the whole play by heart. The Lama was as exacting with Ommony as with Maitraya and the rest. Once he said: