by Talbot Mundy
“Bring out the Bhat!” yelled someone. There was a chorus of supporting shouts, but that was the last of the noise. The mob grew still again, spell- bound by curiosity.
Samding took the center of the stage and the Lama squatted down beside him, eyes half-closed, apparently in meditation. The chela spoke, and his voice held a note of appeal that aimed straight at the heart of simplicity.
“O people, if ye have been wronged, it is we ourselves who first should put the matter right. Ye, being pious, unoffending people, will afford us that privilege. We ask no trial. That is unnecessary. Which among you are the individuals who have suffered at our hands? Unwittingly, it may be we have done you harm. You will agree it is the injured one to whom redress is due. Let the injured stand forth. Let him, who of his own body or possessions has suffered harm at our hands, step forth and name his own terms of settlement.”
He dared to pause for thirty seconds, while the mob glared, each expecting someone else to hurl an accusation. But the original instigators of violence are careful to keep out of reach when the trouble begins, and there was no spokesman ready with a definite accusation — nothing but a disgusting smell of sweat, a sea of eyes, and a hissing of indrawn breath. The Lama whispered, not moving his head, and the chela continued:
“It is possible the injured are not here. Let someone bring the men for whose injury we are in any way responsible!”
There was another pause, during which the Lama got up and walked meditatively toward the edge of the curtain, where he came face to face with Ommony.
“My son, can you act the Bhat as well as you can the saddhu?” he inquired. “Otherwise escape while there is opportunity! Be wise. There is no wisdom in attempting what you cannot do.”
“Yes, I can act the Bhat,” said Ommony. His jaws were set. He had been a last-ditch fighter all his life. Of all things in the world, he most loved standing by his friends with all resources and every faculty in an extremity.
The Lama returned to the chela’s side, whispered and squatted down. The chela went on speaking:
“It may be ye have been misguided. There are always unwise men who seek to stir up indignation for their own obscure advantage. Are there any Brahmins in your midst?”
There was only one possible answer to that question. No “twice-born” would risk personal defilement by mingling with such a mob of “untouchables.” A laugh with a suggestion of a sneer in it rippled across the sea of upturned faces.
“It would seem then that the Brahmins have sent you to pass judgment on a Bhat who is one of their own fraternity,” said the chela calmly. “It appears they trust you to conduct the investigation for them. That is a very high compliment from Brahmins, isn’t it? If they are willing to accept your judgment on such an important point, who are we that we should not abide by it? The Bhat shall give you his own account of himself. Henceforth ye may say to the Brahmins that they are no longer the sole judges of their own cause.”
There was a laugh — a laugh of sheer delight that grew into a good- tempered roar. There was doubtless not a member of the mob who had not suffered scores of times from the blight of Brahmin insolence. The Brahmin’s claim to be a caste apart and an unindictable offense forever soothes his own self-righteousness but does not exactly make him popular.
“I pray you to be seated,” said the chela; and after a few moments’ hesitation the mob sat down on the floor, first in dozens, then in droves.
There was no more danger, provided Ommony could play his own part; but if he should make one mistake the situation would be worse than ever. He beckoned one of the musicians, who was guarding the door at the rear of the stage, signed to him to bring his instrument, stepped out in front of the curtain and sat down beside the Lama. Hostile silence broke into a sea of grins and chuckles when Diana, still in her grease-paint, followed and squatted on his left hand between him and the musician. The musician was deathly scared, but unfroze and tuned his instrument when the Lama looked at him. Ommony surveyed the crowd with the best imitation of insolence his strained nerves could muster, taking his time, absorbing the feel of the Lama’s calmness. He needed it; he sensed that the old man’s courage was a dozen times as great as his.
“And now, my son,” the Lama whispered, “we are face to face with opportunity.”
That was a brave man’s view of danger! Ommony laughed, cleared his throat and thrust his lips out impudently:
“People who don’t know enough to ask a blessing, may expect to get — what?” he demanded tartly.
“Pranam,” said two or three voices, and the murmur caught on. It was not unanimous, but it sufficed to put him in countenance. He blessed them with an air of doing it because he had to, not for any other reason.
“Now,” he said in the nasal, impromptu, doggerel singsong of the minstrel, “I could sing for you a ballad of your own abominable shortcomings, and it would serve you right; but it would not make your souls white, and it would take all night. It would give me much delight, but it would put you all to flight, and I’m compassionate. Or I could sing you a few measures about the Brahmins of this place, who are a lousy lot, but if I sang of their disgrace, not a one would show his face again among you. You need the Brahmins to keep you from thinking too much of yourselves! They’re bad, but you’re worse; you’re the sinners and they’re the curse. Take that thought home and think about it! — Is there anybody here,” he asked with his head to one side, “who would like me to sing about him personally? No? You’re not anxious? Don’t be backward. Don’t think it’s too difficult. Stand up and tell me your name, and I’ll tell you all about you and your father and your uncles and your son, and what mischief you were up to this day fortnight. Nobody curious? Oh, very well. Then I’ll sing you the Lay of Alha.”*
India will listen to that song hours without end. It is a saga of Rajput chivalry, and men who know no chivalry nor ever were in Rajputana love to hear it better than the chink of money or the bray of the all-conquering gramophone. Since the white man first imposed himself on India there have not been half a dozen who have learned that lay by heart from end to end, not three who could have sung it, none but Ommony who could have skipped long, tedious parts so artfully and have introduced in place of them extempore allusions to modern politics and local news. He outdid any Bhat they had ever heard, because he did not dare to count, as Bhats do, on the song’s traditional popularity and so to slur through it anyhow. He had to win the audience. But what obsessed him most was a desire to win the Lama’s praise; the harder he tried, the more he admired the Lama, sitting as calm as a Buddha beside him.
Regarded as music his effort was not marvelous. As a feat of wit and memory it was next thing to a miracle. His voice, not more than fair-to- middling good and partly trained, survived to the end because he pitched it through his nose, relieving the strain on his throat, and his manner grew more and more confident as he realized that memory was not playing tricks and he could recall every line of the long epic. He sang them into a merry frame of mind; he sang them thrilled, compassionate, intrigued, excited, sentimental, bellicose and proud in turn. He had them humming the refrain with him. He had them swaying in time to the tune as they sat, their laughing, up-turned faces glistening with sweat. He had them throwing money to him before the lay was half sung; and it was then that the Lama whispered:
“Enough, my son. Forget not to put skill in the conclusion.”
Ommony stopped singing, and gagged at the crowd, with his tongue between his teeth, pretending that his voice had given out.
“Did any Brahmin in this city ever do as much for you?” he croaked, and they roared applause.
“I am a Bhat, and I can bless or I can curse more efficaciously than any thousand Brahmins in the province! Watch!”
He turned to Diana and made her sit up on her haunches.
“What do you think of the Brahmins of this city?” he demanded, and Diana growled like an earthquake.
“What do you think of these people in front of you
?” She barked and got down on all four feet to wag her tail at them.
“There! There you are! Even a dog knows you are well-meaning folk who have been fooled by rascally Brahmins, who mouth mantras and do unclean things when none is looking! Get out of here, all of you, before I curse you! Go while I am in a good temper — before I put a blight on you! Hurry!”
They yelled for more song, but it was after midnight and the Lama had other plans. He hustled Ommony off the stage, himself remaining at the corner of the curtain for a minute to make sure of the crowd’s mood. Ommony heard the chink of money as he rewarded the two “constabeels.” Then, as placid as Ommony had ever seen him, but a little stooped and tired, he led the way to the stage door, saying over his shoulder to Samding:
“Did you study that lesson? Have you learned it?” Ommony did not catch the chela’s answer. He felt the floor jerk underfoot and stepped off a trap- door. It moved, and a hand came through, then the outline of a face that appeared to be listening. He bent down to lift the heavy trap and Dawa Tsering climbed out on hands and knees, sweating profusely and rubbing dust out of his eyes.
“Yow, there are rats in that place, Gupta Rao — big ones, and it is dark! Go down and look if you don’t believe me.”
“What were you doing down there ?” Ommony inquired.
“I? Down there? Oh, I was looking to see if there was a passage by which that mob could reach you from the rear. Yes, I was! Don’t laugh at me, or I will call you by your right name! Why didn’t you turn me loose with my knife to drive the mob forth, instead of singing to them like a nurse to a lot of children? I could have cleaned the place of that rabble in two minutes. You should have left it to me!”
“Did you kill any rats? asked Samding, grinning mischievously. He was holding the door open, waiting for them.
“Thou! I will kill thee, at any rate!”
The Hillman rushed at the chela, but Ommony tripped him. Samding slipped through the door and let it slam.
“There, did you see that?” Dawa Tsering grumbled, picking himself up. “That chela uses the black arts! He threw me to the floor with one wink of his eye. Did you see? He is no good! He is a bad one! Now I am never tempted to slay the Lama, which is why I endure his objectionable righteousness; but that chela — I never see him but I want to squeeze his throat with my two thumbs, thus, until his eyes pop out!”
CHAPTER XXII. Darjeeling
The secret of the charm of the lotus is that none can say wherein its beauty lies; for some say this, and some say that, but all agree that it is beautiful. And so indeed it is with woman. Her influence is mystery; her power is concealment. For that which men have uncovered and explained, whether rightly or wrongly, they despise. But that which they discern, although its underlying essence is concealed from them, they wonder at and worship.
— from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup
THE STANDING MIRACLE was the Lama’s skill in having his own way and in keeping his own secrets without any discoverable method. His way seemed more alertly excellent, his secrets more obscure, from day to day. For instance those mysterious young women. Not for one minute during two months and eleven days did Ommony or Dawa Tsering find an opportunity to speak with them alone, not though Diana grew dangerously fat on sticky sweetmeats that they gave her, she construing orders to go and make friends with them into permission to accept food.
The only key that seemed to fit the mystery was that the girls had been too well trained to be tricked into indiscretion. Tyranny could never have accomplished it. Once, Ommony picked up an amethyst earring, dropped in a corridor: he wrapped it in paper on which he scribbled a humorous verse, tucked it into Diana’s collar, and sent her nosing around in the girls’ quarters. The dog returned after an hour or so with a caricature of himself drawn on the paper in charcoal, extremely clever but not flattering. On another occasion he sent Diana with a note asking for the words of the song that the girls chanted on the stage; he saw the Lama read that note on the stage the same night and, after a quiet glance at him, deliberately tear it up. The following morning he received the words of the song in the Lama’s heavy handwriting. He was acutely aware that the girls discussed him with a great deal of amusement, but he could never get them to exchange glances or make any response to his overtures.
Dawa Tsering made a dozen attempts to invade the women’s quarters. Several times he was caught by the Tibetans and disposed of cavalierly, usually simply chucked into the nearest heap of garbage. Three times he managed to get into a room in which the girls were, but he would never tell afterward what had happened to him; once he emerged so angry that Ommony really believed for an hour or two that he might murder someone, and took his knife away, but returned it at the Lama’s instigation.
“It is not always wise to prohibit,” said the Lama. “His imagination needs an outlet. Give him his toy.”
It was a baffling conundrum why the Lama should go to such pains to present his play in more than sixty towns and villages, and always escape immediately afterward. It was not always the police; he treated the occasional difficulties they presented pretty much as a circus director regards bad weather. He appeared to be much more afraid of the results of his own success, and to run away from that as from a conflagration. Offers of money, prayers, nothing could persuade him to repeat a performance anywhere. The greater a crowd’s importunity, the swifter his flight.
By the time they reached Darjeeling Ommony was convinced of two things: that the “Middle Way” is undiscoverable to outsiders, being opened, closed and changed in detail by unknown individuals, obeyed implicitly, who do their own selecting; and that the Lama was himself in receipt of orders from a secret hierarchy.
The latter was almost certainly true. A Ringding Gelong Lama does not rank as high in the Lamaistic scale as a cardinal does in the Roman Catholic Church. Even supposing Tsiang Samdup, as was rumored, was an outlaw who had been turned out of Tibet for schism, that would make it even more unlikely that he could command an extensive spy system and mysterious service along the “Middle Way” without some long established hierarchy to support him.
And if he were an outlawed heretic, why was it that in Darjeeling he went straight to a Tibetan monastery, that opened its doors to the whole party? They arrived at dawn, having ridden all night on mule-back up a winding path that crossed and recrossed the circling railway track, ascending through clouds that wrapped them in wet silence, until dawn shone suddenly through pine trees and the monastery roof glistened a thousand yards ahead of them.
The roar of radongs came down the chilly wind, announcing they were seen. A procession of brown-robed monks filed out to meet them, each monk spinning a prayer-wheel and grinning as he mumbled the everlasting “Om Mani Padme Hum” that by repetition bars the door of the various worlds of delusion and permits pure meditation. It seemed to give no offense that Tsiang Samdup and his chela had no prayer-wheels. Maitraya and his actors were as welcome as the rest. Ommony was greeted with child-like grins from oily, slant-eyed Mongolian faces that betrayed no suggestion of suspicion. The dog was chuckled at. Maitraya’s actresses were greeted no more and no less cordially than the rest.
But the chela’s reception was peculiar. The Abbot blessed him solemnly, then stared at him for a long time. From the others there was an air of deference; a peculiar form of treating him as a mere chela, with an attitude of deep respect underlying it and not nearly concealed. They exchanged glances and nodded, formed a group around him, regarding him with curiosity, and with something akin to awe. The chela appeared more disposed to be friendly than distant, but kept a deliberate course midway between the two extremes, watched all the while intently by the Lama, who finally leaned on his shoulder and almost hustled him in through the gate.
Once within the monastery wall Ommony was led away to a cell high up under a gabled roof, where a smiling old monk brought breakfast, laughing and snapping his fingers at Diana, not in the least afraid of her, but dumb when asked questions. He knew O
mmony was no Brahmin — laughed at the caste- mark — touched his own forehead comically — and went out spinning a prayer-wheel that he kept tucked into his girdle whenever both hands were occupied; he seemed anxious to make up for lost time.
The unglazed window provided a far view of Kanchenjunga, twenty-eight thousand feet above sea level — twenty-one thousand feet higher than the monastery roof — a lonely, lordly monarch of the silences upreared above untrodden peaks that circled the whole horizon to the north. Six thousand feet below, the Rungeet River boiled through an unseen valley. For a moment all the boundaries of Sikkim glittered in every imaginable hue of green, and between and beyond colossal snow-clad ranges the eye could scan the barren frontiers of Tibet. Then, as swiftly as eyes could sweep the vast horizon, mist of a million hues of pearly gray, phantom-formed, changing its shapes as if the gods were visioning new universes in the cloud, rolled and descended, stunning imagination with the hugeness that could wrap that scene and hide it as if it never had been.
Then rain — cold dinning rain that drummed on roof and rock, and splashed in cataracts to mingle with the spate of the Rungeet River crowding through a mountain gap toward the rice-green, steamy lushness of Bengal; rain that swallowed all the universe in sound, that beat the wind into subjection and descended straight, as if the Lords of Deluge would whelm the world at last forever. Rain, and a smell of washed earth. Rain pulsing with the rhythm of a monastery bell, like the cry of a bronze age, drowning.
That bell seemed to clamor an emergency and Ommony hurried along cold stone corridors until he found his way into a gallery from which he could peer down into a dim hall through swimming layers of incense smoke. Silken banners, ancient but unfaded, hung all about him; images of the Gautama Buddha and disciples were carved on shadowy walls; the gloom was rich with color-alive with quiet breathing. He could see the heads of monks in rows, but could distinguish no one for a while because the heads were bowed and most of the light was lost in baffling shadows.