Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  In the opposite wing, no longer in white or in stockings, protected by three stalwart Tibetans, who lounged in the flies, were the women of mystery. They were in costume, which so orientalized them that Ommony almost doubted recognition. Memory plays strange tricks; his took him back to the day when he and Benjamin had played a part at Chota Pegu and the nautch girls had been wild with inquisitive mischief — ready to betray the chief-priest at a nod. These girls now, in gauzy draperies, less naked, but as subtle in their motions, so resembled those nautch-girls at first glance that he was not sure they were the same he had seen in the room among the Hindu ladies until he noticed that they laughed and chattered on a comparatively low note instead of a high-pitched dissonance.

  The Lama clapped his hands and sat down inside the well, where he could see out through holes in the painted cloth. Then he told Ommony to make Diana sit down almost exactly in front of the well, and the rehearsal began at once, as if preordained from the beginning of time, the girls in their Indian costume mingling with the stage crowd, and so well versed in their part that they pushed the other actors into place, needing no direction by the Lama.

  Ommony had plenty of chance to observe some of them closely, for three had been told to engage the saddhu in mock-conversation during parts of the first act. One — the Gretchen-girl — put an offering into his begging-bowl. But though he missed his cue twice through trying to engage her in real whispered conversation, he failed; she was as evasive as abstract thought — as apparently engaging and as actually distant as a day-dream. She turned every advance he made into an excuse of by-play for the imaginary audience’s benefit, and all Ommony accomplished was to draw the Lama’s irony from behind the well:

  “Some saddhus hide lascivious hearts under robes of sanctity, but you are supposed to be one who has truly forsaken the pursuit of women, Gupta Rao!”

  When the laugh that followed that rebuke had died down Ommony was still not sure of the Gretchen-girl’s real nationality. He had tried her with English, French, German and two or three Indian languages, watching her face, but detecting no expression that suggested she had understood him. As for the others, one might be a Jewess; but there are many well-bred women, for instance in Rajputana, and in Persia, who are fair-skinned and who resemble Jewesses in profile. Even fair hair was no proof of their origin; most eastern women, but by no means all, have dark hair.

  The only really convincing evidence that they were Europeans was their behavior, and even that was offset by the fact that some of them were certainly Tibetans, whose manner was equally unembarrassed in the presence of men, yet equally free from familiarity. The difference from their behavior and that of Maitraya’s actresses grew more and more noticeable as the professionals became aware of an atmosphere to which they were utter strangers. They tried at first to imitate it; then grew resentful and sneered; resorting at last to low jests in loud whispers and attempts to scandalize by bold advances to the men — until at last the Lama stood up in the well like a priest in a pulpit and beckoned those three women to come and stand in front of him.

  “I could show you your secret hearts,” he said, in a kind voice that was much more withering than scorn, “and ye would die in horror at the sight. It is not good to slay, not even with the rays of truth. So I show you instead what ye may become.” Mildly, patiently, a little wearily, as if he had done the same thing very often, he included all his own mysterious family in a gesture that conveyed diffidence and hesitation. “Life after life ye shall struggle with yourselves before ye shall come as these. And these are nothing — nothing to what ye may become. The road is long, and there are difficulties; but ye must face it. Take advantage of the moment, for it is easier to imitate than to find the way alone. Ye cannot undo the past, nor can all the gods, nor He who rules the gods, undo it. But now, this moment, and the next one, and the next, forever, ye yourselves by thought and act create the very hair’s-breadths of your destiny. — Now let us begin again, from the beginning.”

  They began again so meekened and subdued that for a while the first act suffered. But that was overcome by Diana, who produced such peals of laughter that the Lama had difficulty in restoring order and had to reprimand the musicians for thrusting their heads above the level of the stage to watch. At a signal from Ommony standing near the wings, Diana’s mouth opened and the Lama from inside the well croaked words that sounded, even on the stage, as if the dog were speaking them.

  When the shoemaker said “Ah, if I were king!” Diana’s mouth opened wide and the retort came from behind her:

  “It might be better to be a dog like me and not worry so much!”

  The illusion was perfect because everybody on the stage looked at the dog as if expecting her to speak; and the best of it was that Diana cocked an ear, put her head to one side, and was immensely interested.

  In answer to the saddhu’s, “How long will ye store up wrath against the day of reckoning?” there was put into Diana’s mouth:

  “For myself I bury bones, but jackals come in the night and make away with them!”

  When the king asked, “Is this your gratitude?” and the saddhu replied, “To whom? For what?” Diana’s retort was:

  “The saddhu is like the vermin on my back; he helps himself but isn’t grateful. And when he is scratched he just goes to another place!”

  Diana was easy to manage, and Ommony’s signals, made with his right hand, were invisible from the front of the theater on his left. But Dawa Tsering was a hard problem; he was supposed to be one of those wandering clown-fakirs who amuse and terrify village gatherings by alternately acting like idiots and pretending they are in communication with the underworld of demons and lost souls. He could neither remember his lines nor keep his head, but blundered in at the wrong cues and then laughed self-consciously. Ommony advised the Lama to dispense with him altogether.

  “Nay,” said the Lama. “All things are good in the proper place. There is a part he can play.”

  Whereat he ordered the stage set for the second act, which was a simple business. The flies reversed suggested a palace interior. Curtains at the rear concealed the greenery. The well was replaced by a carpeted dais with a large throne on top of it, inside which the Lama could conceal himself quite easily. A few heaps of cushions and settees were carried on the stage and while the change was being made the orchestra rehearsed amazing music.

  Tomtoms, radongs and stringed instruments thundered, howled and jingled like a storm in the Himalayas with the voices of a thousand disembodied spirits carrying on an argument in the teeth of wind and rain. It was stunning — weird — a sort of cataclysmic din foreboding marvelous events, but music, nevertheless, in every quarter-note of its disturbing harmonies.

  CHAPTER XVIII. Diana Adopts Buskins

  He who would reform the world must first reform himself; and that, if he do it honestly, will keep him so employed that he will have no time to criticize his neighbor. Nevertheless, his neighbor will be benefited — even as a man without a candle, who at last discerns another’s light.

  — from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup

  WORK. Ommony had been a worker all his days, but had never known the real meaning of the word until that afternoon. The Lama, as placid as a temple idol, as exacting as fate, as tireless as time itself, kept everybody occupied. There was no return to the place across the street where the beasts of burden rested; the only pause between rehearsals was at noon, when food was brought in baskets and all except Ommony munched greasy chapatis in the wings; for him there was special food provided, brought by an ostensible Brahmin and served behind a screen.

  A Tibetan make-up man, a master craftsman, spread the tools of his trade on the stage behind the well and took every one in hand in turn under the Lama’s critical supervision. Even Diana had to be touched up; daubs of paint were smeared around her eyes to make them look huge and supernatural, and her ordinary gauntness was enhanced by dark streaks that made her ribs appear to stand out prominently.
r />   Trunks full of costumes were dumped in the wings by methodical, matter-of- fact Tibetans, who seemed to have gone through the same performance scores of times and to know exactly what to do, and when, and how. They dressed the protesting actors more or less by main force, ignoring Maitraya’s protests, pulling, adjusting, stitching, until every costume hung exactly as the Lama said it should. They provided Dawa Tsering with a devil-mask and a suit of dragon-scales — then showed him himself in a mirror, which entirely solved that problem; he liked himself so well in the disguise that he could have acted Hamlet in it. But all he was required to do was to laugh like a fiend at intervals, and to dance on and off stage whenever the Lama signaled from behind the well. He was supposed to be the spirit of the underworld who mocked men’s efforts.

  There was no supper; nobody remembered it. Rehearsals continued until they had to lower the curtain because the audience began to straggle in and squat on the matted floor in groups, munching betel-nut. The orchestra tuned up at once. Three quarters of an hour before the curtain was supposed to rise the house was crowded to suffocation. Stunned by the music, which crashed and blared arresting heraldry of doom or something like it (and nothing fascinates as much as doom fore-trumpeted) the audience forgot to talk. When the curtain went up slowly as if raised by the last resounding boom of the radongs there was utter silence, in which the thrill behind the women’s gallery grating could almost be felt in the wings.

  And at the very last minute, before the king walked on, the Lama, from behind the well, signaled to Dawa Tsering to laugh like a ghoul and dance across the stage. It was inspiration. In a country that believes implicitly in devils, that following the cataclysmic music produced the perfect state of mind in which to watch the play; when Maitraya walked on he was heard with almost agonied attention. There was not a gasp from the audience until it was Diana’s turn to speak, when the Lama croaked her line so comically that even the actors laughed; and, presumably because the gods who guard coincidence approved, she put her head to one side and cocked an ear at the audience.

  It brought the house down. It was so exactly timed to break suspense, the marvel that a dog should speak was so astonishing, that an earthquake after that could hardly have called the crowd’s attention to itself. Every spoken word and every move was watched as if earth’s destiny depended on the actors’ lips, and Diana’s three short speeches were received as if some god in the form of an animal were on the stage. When she had spoken about vermin the Lama tickled her with a straw and she scratched herself; and shrill laughter from behind the women’s grille gave evidence that not a gesture of her left hind-foot was missed. When the curtain came down at the end of the prologue the applause out-thundered the orchestra.

  “It succeeds!” announced Maitraya, strutting across the stage in the way of the scene-shifters. “I told you so! I said it would! Trust me to know. Acting — good acting-technique can accomplish anything!”

  The Lama recognized familiar symptoms and was prompt. He gathered all the actors close around him in the wings and what he said was aimed straight at Maitraya, although he appeared to be watching Dawa Tsering through the corner of his eye:

  “That which is not excellent is not good. There shall be no second act, unless I can be sure of more attention to my signals. I am disappointed. If we can do no better before such an audience as this, what could we hope to do in the large cities?”

  Dawa Tsering nearly burst the devil-mask with indignation.

  “Thou!” he exploded. “Go back to thy monastery! I will entertain these princes and princesses! Hah! This is the greatest success there ever was!”

  “You will not be needed,” said the Lama, and at a sign from him, as if they had known from the first what to expect, three Tibetans seized Dawa Tsering and led him away to a small room at the rear where his roars of protest were inaudible.

  That was all that was needed. Even the vainglorious Maitraya forced himself into a careful frame of mind, and the second act began as the first had done, with everybody striving to deliver each line as the Lama wished it.

  Quite early in the second act the girls came on to dance and entertain the king’s court. They were preceded by mysterious music, quiet and rhythmic, pulsing with a tomtom under-throb that made the audience breathe in time to it and sway unconsciously.

  They floated on to the stage, barefooted, swinging so perfectly in unison that each seemed to reflect the other. Lowered lights produced a filmy, other-world effect. What little sound they made was swallowed by the pulsing subdued music, until one radong boomed an arresting note and they began to sing, never changing the dance step, weaving in and out and around and around as reflections mirrored in the water weave interminably. Song, step and dimness were all in harmony. There was one mysterious, monotonous refrain that held a hint of laughter, and yet such sadness as is felt when the wild-fowl cry across treeless wastes under a rainy sky.

  And there was no more than just enough of it to make the audience feel that it had not had enough — no encore, although the stifling theater became a pandemonium of acclamation and the king’s next speech had to be twice repeated from the throne (the Lama, underneath the throne, insisted on it, lest the audience should miss one word of the thought-laden lines).

  Diana had only one line in the second act. When the king, worried and perplexed by the ignorant disputing of his courtiers, exclaimed, “Oh, who is wise enough to tell these idiots what to do?” Diana walked up to the throne, turned at a signal from Ommony to face the audience, and from under the throne the Lama croaked:

  “A wise dog chooses its own master and obeys him. It saves lots of trouble!”

  Then she walked off, swaying her long tail contentedly as if she had solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Because of the heat, that made the grease- paint on the actors’ faces run, her tongue lolled out and she seemed to be grinning in response to the applause as she vanished into the wings.

  About midway through the second act Dawa Tsering was set free from durance vile and allowed to resume his ghoulishness, now somewhat chastened by conviction that after all he was not indispensable. There was nothing prearranged about his entrances, whenever a line fell flat or the action seemed to drag a little the Lama signaled for the devil to dance on and arouse laughter. He was particularly useful when Maitraya remembered he was an actor instead of acting the part of a king; the devil was immediately summoned then to take the conceit out of him by burlesque antics.

  There was nothing in the play an audience could misinterpret, for it mirrored their own melancholy to them and their own confusion, while Samding in the Chinese robes of San-fun-ho laughed at it triumphantly, his golden voice repeating lines that suggested, hinted, vaguely alluded to a way out of all the difficulties that he knew all about, even if nobody else did. All through the second act Samding’s lines were mockingly destructive, as one actor after another, from king to saddhu, tortured imagination with his own ideas of how to make the world convenient to live in. Between them they proposed almost every solution that has ever passed current in the realm of politics, and the saddhu seasoned the stew with peppery religious nostrums; but when, before the curtain fell, they all decided they were better off as shoemakers and goatherds Samding still mocked them. Nevertheless, there was a hint in his last line of a solution if they chose to look for it:

  “Ye mortals, there is no success in jealousy. There is no comfort in complaint. Ye win no excellence by finding fault.”

  The applause made the curtain swing and sway but it did not drown the orchestra for quite so long as after the first act. It changed into a buzz of conversation, syncopated, rising from a low note to a higher one in choppy sound-waves of expectancy; and when the curtain rose on the scene by the well at dawn there was silence in which the mouse-note creaking of a door moved by a draught of hot air sounded like whip-cracks.

  The rising sun would hardly have passed muster with a western audience. It was a thing of gilded wood, on which the strongest electric light available
was focused from the wings, but to the eastern mind, long versed in symbolism, it was intelligible, and the fact that mystic signs were painted on its face enhanced its effect. There was no need to tell anyone that San-fun-ho had used the magic jade at dawn to restore every one to his original condition. There they all were, grouped before the well, with the dancing girls costumed as members of a village crowd and some Tibetans in the background helping to swell the number.

  The whole of that last act belonged to San-fun-ho, who stood before the well with the magic jade in his right hand and, with the rising sun behind him, revealed the mystery of hope and courage. The jade gleamed like a living thing whose light came from within. His voice was like a peal of magic bells rung by the gods who keep the secrets of the dawn. His face was lit with reassuring laughter. His manner was as one who had experienced all emotions and had conquered fear.

  It was a long speech; its delivery required ten minutes, but the audience received it as the East receives a benediction always, straining breathlessly to catch the subtleties of meaning, preferring allegories and a proverb now and then to meat and drink.

  “... Does dawn die? Nay, it passes on. It lives forever. Dawn is dawn, and never changes. Discontent is discontent; its fruits are of the elements of discontent — all bitter — none can sweeten them. Who wallows in the mire of jealousy, and blames another for the want he feels, may load his bins aburst with golden goods, but he shall know more smarting jealousy and ache with gnawing wants he never guessed.

  “But hope — is hope not sweet? And is the fruit of sweetness bitter! Nay. I tell you, Hope is a creative force whose limitless dimensions lie within the boundary of each existing minute. Irresistible, Hope’s magic is accomplished now. It comprehends no lapse of time. Nay! Instant are its dawn, its noon and its accomplishment! Hope, if it is true hope, fills the mind, affording malice and deceitful dread no room. Hope lives in action. All the elements of hope are deeds done now!