‘It will take a little time,’ said the Lama. ‘Perhaps now the child will tell us what happened in his encounter with the oracle this morning.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I think you won your point, Theo. You might as well let ’em see you mean to play fair by them.’
‘All right,’ said Theodore in Mandarin. ‘I’ll tell you what I thought happened, though later I wasn’t so sure. It began after breakfast, when Lung told me to leave our room because he wanted to be alone . . .’
He told the story carefully, in the right order, leaving nothing out, not even the fact that he had thought the oracle spoke to him in Father’s words and tone, nor the fact that he had to all intents and purposes accused the Master of Protocol of cheating over the oracle’s messages. They listened closely, but questioned him only about the exact words he had used before the oracle-priest became possessed and the exact words of the reply. These the Master of Protocol wrote down on a slate which he drew from the folds of his robe. As Theodore finished he heard a shuffle and murmur at the door.
‘We will consider these meanings later,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘Let the Chinese be brought in.’
Theodore twisted on his stool in time to see the doors swing open and a shape outlined against the light from the further room. Though the shape was clearly composed of three people standing close together there was something inhuman, something monstrous about it. The shape split as the two men on the outside let go of the central figure and pushed it forward. It came at a slow, dragging walk, which still had that inhuman look, as though the figure were an automaton which would walk like this for ever. Even when it reached the area lit by the lamps in the Council Room Theodore was unable to recognize it as Lung. It was not just that the side of the face was puffy with a huge bruise and that dried blood had dribbled from the corner of the swollen lips. The face was not a man’s face at all. It was expressionless. The eyes stared like an idol’s, round as marbles, unfocused and unblinking. The head was unnaturally stiff on the neck, and the arms, held close to the side of the body, looked as though they were clamped rigid.
As this figure came up the aisle between the benches Mrs Jones rose from her stool, took two paces towards it and clutched it to her side. For a moment its legs tried to continue walking, but then they stilled. Lung, if it was Lung, showed no sign of knowing her.
‘Oh, what have you done to him? What have you done to him?’ she cried.
‘If we hadn’t protected him from the crowd in the courtyard,’ said one of the monks, ‘they would have torn him to fragments as we tear the dough giant.’
‘That ain’t what I meant,’ she snapped. ‘And you know it. What have you done to him?’
‘He was questioned and he would not answer,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘That accounts for his having been beaten a little. Then, while we are considering the proper punishment for a breaker of idols, we locked his soul within him, as you see.’
‘Can you unlock it?’
‘It can sometimes be done. But the Mother of the Tulku must understand that the Chinese is not now, so to speak, a person. He is in abeyance. Once he is himself again, with his soul guiding his body, he becomes again responsible for all that he has done. It is impossible that such a one should remain within the holy valley of Dong Pe, at the height of our great festival. He would be as it were a corruption, infecting all our rituals and ceremonies.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Give him his soul back and he can leave tomorrow morning. First thing. Theo can go with him.’
The Lama seemed about to agree when somebody spoke angrily from among the monks.
‘He cannot go back to China,’ explained the Lama. ‘There are those here who still believe that he is an agent of Pekin.’
‘It’ll have to be Inja then. You can cope with that? They’ll need an escort as far as the border. I’ve got enough money to see them through . . .’
‘We will provide for such needs,’ said the Lama.
‘It won’t be cheap,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Theo’ll need a ticket to England and then to America, and Lung’ll want a bit too . . .’
‘Dong Pe is rich. It will be done. Now let us perform the ritual, for the longer a man’s soul stays thus locked up the harder is his return.’
He gave orders in Tibetan. The monks rose and rearranged themselves. A pair of small drums and a silver incense-lamp were fetched from a curtained niche. The butter-lamps were collected and lined up in a single row at the feet of the Buddha, making the statue seem to float, gold and warm, in the darkness of the rest of the room.
‘Theo,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘Come here a tick. I want a word with you.’
She was still standing, clutching Lung to her side as though he would fall without her. Theodore rose achingly and joined her.
‘When this palaver is over,’ she whispered. ‘Come up to my cave. Nobody won’t stop you. We’ll have a bit of a chat, say good-bye, like. And there’s something important I want you to do for me.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ said Theodore.
‘Sorry to make you go all sudden like this,’ she said. ‘But I ’spect you’ll be glad of it, really. You’ll see Lung’s in good hands in Inja, won’t you?’
‘If I can.’
‘Course you can. Then there’s this other thing. It won’t be easy, but it’s got to be done. Laying a ghost, like. And I shan’t have the baby easy unless I know . . . shh, they’re starting. Tell you after.’
To Theodore’s surprise it wasn’t the Lama Amchi who performed the ceremony, but a gaunt, middle-aged monk wearing a black scarf across his shoulders and a black hat shaped like the prow of a ship. The small drums beat in the dark with a slow rhythm. The monks began to hum, a deep, throbbing note, enough of them keeping it up while the others paused for breath to make the hum continuous. Mrs Jones led Lung forward till she stood with him at the edge of the circle of light, but at a sign from the monk in the black hat she moved a little to one side. The smoke that rose from the incense-burner was not blue but orange, and had a heavy but acid smell that hung dazingly in the air. Now the noise from the monks’ throats seemed to be throbbing through the solid stones of the walls and timbers of the roof, waking in them stone and timber voices which answered with the same vibration. The monk in the black hat picked up a small drum and beat a pattering roll on it, which he echoed with a sort of chant, a monotonous rattle of syllables all on one note but ending with an explosion of breath as though the air had been forced from his lungs by a violent blow from within. This – drum-roll, rattle and explosion – happened several times, and as it did so the monk visibly changed, becoming taller and yet more gaunt until his face in the upthrown light of the butter-lamps was a skull with no gleam of any eye in the black sockets. When he had completed this change he put the drum down and became as still as the Buddha, though the rest of the room was now quivering to the vibrations of the noise made by the monks. Even the floor seemed to be trembling – Theodore could feel it through the soles of his boots – and Lung’s silhouette, which had before stood sharp against the smoky globe of light in which the monk was working his magic, was now shadowy in outline as though the vibrations were centred on Lung, making him quiver like a tuning-fork.
Theodore concentrated his energies. He willed the magic to succeed. He did not hum with the monks, but for Lung’s sake he joined his soul to theirs, letting it shudder to the same harmonics, so that there was nothing in the room that was not part of that single purpose. Perhaps he was praying, but if so it was not in any fashion that Father had taught him. He became pure prayer – not a boy praying to a separate God, but a single process in which boy and prayer and God were the same thing. He joined the ritual.
And now the globe of light seemed to contract, as though the magician were using the energies in the room to gather the light into himself. The shapeless hum also gathered to a focus, which was Lung. The walls became still and the floor no longer tingled beneath Theodore’s feet, but the noise rose in pitch
and came from a single point above Lung’s head, and still rose and narrowed till it reached a tension where it had to disintegrate or become a new mode of sound. At that moment of breaking, the magician, motionless for so long, suddenly spread his arms wide, threw them forward at Lung’s body, and at last drew them slowly and heavily back. The noise had stopped. The globe of light widened and was ordinary. The magician, a skull no longer, stepped a pace back and said a few quiet words. As he spoke the rigid creature in front of him lost tension, slackened, became human, and at the same moment started to fall. It was Mrs Jones who caught him and eased him to the floor in front of the Buddha.
Surfacing from the daze of effort Theodore had run forward as Lung fell. He was too late to help, but stayed looking down at his friend. Lung’s eyes were open. He had his head in Mrs Jones’s lap and lay there, gazing up into her face, much as Theodore had once seen them in the valley of the lilies.
‘Missy,’ he whispered, with a smile of painful joy, and closed his eyes.
18
THEODORE WAITED IN the small room to which he had been shown by a servant wearing a black jacket and striped trousers – the butler, he guessed. The room smelt strongly of many things, especially damp dogs. A row of waterproofs and great-coats hung along one wall. The two chairs were upholstered in shiny red leather, padded with horse hair, and crackled angrily when one sat down, as if they were not used to such treatment. The pictures on the walls were of men in tall hats galloping on stretched-out horses under a moonlit sky. Outside the single sash window a pale sun shone, but the morning’s rain still dripped from trees onto the gravel of the driveway where Theodore’s cab waited. The cab-horse had a vague look of Albert about it.
Sooner than Theodore had expected the butler returned.
‘This way, if you please, sir,’ he said.
His manner had changed. When Theodore had been trying to persuade him to take the note to his master at once, instead of leaving it to lie with the letters on the sideboard in the hall, he had been very stiff and in his cold way hostile. Now, though still stiff, he was respectful and even faintly inquisitive. Theodore followed him across the hall, with its polished floor and Persian rugs and cases of porcelain and trophies of animal heads along the walls, then down a short corridor to a door which the butler opened and held for him.
‘The young gentleman, sir,’ he intoned.
‘Ah. Come in,’ said a man’s voice, light, musical, tense.
This room was quite large. Tobacco smoke mingled with the powdery scent of chrysanthemums which, with a number of plants Theodore had never seen, stood in large pots around the floor. Two large windows with heavy stone mullions looked out over a valley towards bare hills. The sweep of wood Mrs Jones had told him about – ‘just right for his lilies’ – curled down the slope to the left, dark cones of pine spiring among the last tattered golds of autumn. Theodore knew that the house was less than ten years old, but it felt as though it had stood here for a long time and housed many generations of rich men. He could only guess that most of the objects in the room were expensive, just as most of the plants in the pots were exotic and rare, but that was not the reason why they were there. They were there because they suited the taste of the man they belonged to, and so the room felt as though it had taken shape round a single personality. In the hearth a couple of logs smoked in thin blue streams on a pile of white ash, and over the fireplace was a portrait of a woman, painted in profile to show the richness of her red-gold hair and the almost bird-like fineness of her profile. The picture fitted the room too.
Not much to look at, Mrs Jones had said, a little bloke, trim, something about him made him look like he’s just been polished, even in the middle of a jungle . . .
Nothing about the description was wrong, but there was something else which Theodore felt he should have been prepared for, but wasn’t – a vitality, a quickness of glance, a sense of hard intelligence poised cat-like behind the façade of this small neat man in his quiet tweeds.
‘I’m Monty German,’ the man said. ‘I believe you are Theodore Tewker. How do you do?’
‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’
‘How is she? When did you see her? Does she need help?’
‘She was fine four months ago, sir.’
‘That sounds a bit final. Are you sure she’s all right? You’re telling the truth? She’s not dead?’
‘No sir. She’s become a Buddhist . . .’
‘Daisy! What else? There’s something else.’
‘Yes sir. I said she was fine when I saw her, but she’s going to have a baby . . .’
Mr German’s face went white. He had been standing in front of the hearth, but now he took a quick step towards Theodore and stopped.
‘When?’ he whispered.
‘In about six weeks, I guess.’
‘Has she good doctors?’
‘No, sir. She says she doesn’t need them. She’s in a monastery in Tibet, and a monk called the Lama Amchi has been teaching her how to control her bodily functions. She told me to tell you that she’ll have the baby as easy as rain in April. She told me to use those words. I think she’s right, sir.’
‘Are you a Buddhist too, Mr Tewker?’
‘No, sir. I’m a member of the Congregation of Christ Jesus.’
‘You’d better sit down and tell me a bit more. I must say I don’t understand much of what you’re talking about – in fact I can’t make head or tail of it. I wasn’t certain at first, but I’ve decided that you haven’t come to try and get money out of me.’
‘No, sir. Mrs Jones made the Lamas give me enough money – I sailed first class from India, and I have enough to pay my passage to the States, and then some.’
‘All right, but if you need any more . . . sit in that chair.’
Unlike the chairs in the room where Theodore had first waited, these had been designed to make the sitter comfortable, and felt as though they had often done so; but Theodore perched on the edge of his, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, concentrating on telling his story as exactly and unemotionally as possible. As he spoke the sense grew in him that by telling the story to the one man who was entitled to hear it all he was somehow disposing of it, detaching it from his life and setting himself free. Mrs Jones had asked him to lay a ghost for her, but he found he was also doing something of the sort for himself. Though he would always remember these last months, henceforth they would no longer haunt him.
Mr German didn’t interrupt. At one point he rose and tugged at a wide embroidered ribbon which hung down the wall by the fire, and a little later the butler came in carrying a silver tray with two glasses, a green bottle and a silver jug. He opened the bottle with a pop and poured a glass of pale foaming liquid, which he handed to Mr German; then he fetched a low table to beside Theodore’s chair and poured him a tall glass of orange. Theodore, who had stopped talking at a nod from Mr German as soon as the butler had entered, sipped his drink while he made up the fire and as soon as the door closed resumed his story.
It was all there, waiting to be uncoiled like a hawser running smoothly off a deck – the burning of the Settlement, Mrs Jones riding Sir Nigel down the rain-soaked track to stare at the broken bridge, the rout of her treacherous porters, Mrs Jones riding between the smoking huts, the journey’s start, P’iu-Chun’s house, the ambush in the woods, the night at the rock pillar, the idyll in the valley of lilies, the flight to the bridge, the Lama Amchi, and all the slow accumulating change in her, right down to Theodore’s last talk with her in her mountain cave. The only things he left out of the story were his own doubts and fears and miseries. Otherwise he put it all in. Things which he would have been embarrassed or ashamed to say to anyone else seemed necessary and therefore easy.
When he’d finished he looked up. Mr German was lying stretched out in his chair with his glass beside him, barely touched. There was a long silence.
‘This fellow Lung?’ said Mr German. ‘He’s all right?’
‘I liked
him, sir.’
‘So did Daisy, evidently, and that’s recommendation enough for me. But that’s not what I meant. Does he need any help?’
‘He was still very weak when we got to Darjeeling, sir, but we met up there with Professor Lockwood and his wife . . .’
‘Yes, of course. Daisy told you to call on them?’
‘Yes, sir. They said they would look after Lung.’
‘I’ll cable Lockwood. My bank’s got a branch in Poona. I’ll cable them too. I could get him a job with our people in Hong Kong . . . but I should think the first thing he’ll do is try to get back, wouldn’t you?’
‘To Dong Pe? Yes, sir. But they won’t let him into Tibet.’
‘Well, we’ll do the best we can for him, one way or another. What about you?’
‘I’m going home, sir. I have my passage booked from Liverpool on Thursday.’
‘Sure that’s what you want? We can cancel the passage. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.’
‘Thank you, sir, but I’d better be getting back to Bluff City. I must tell the Congregation what happened to Father and the Settlement.’
‘Yes, of course. And then?’
‘I will finish my schooling and wait God’s will.’
‘You won’t go back to China?’
‘If He guides me . . . but . . .’
‘Yes. After what you’ve seen and felt it must be difficult to be so certain about things.’
That was true, but it was only partly true. If the foundations which Father had given him had been shaken, Theodore had discovered other foundations beneath, broader and more enduring. The thought of Father nudged his mind.
‘I guess I’d like to go back to China, sir. I want to see if I can rebuild that bridge.’
‘Good idea . . . And you won’t forget me, will you, wherever you find yourself. I might be some use some day. The business I work for has a lot of connections in most parts of the world. And if ever you need money for what you’re doing . . .’
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll remember.’
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