by Talbot Mundy
A rain cloud rolled between them and the view. It was dark again, with shafts of warm light streaming through the window behind them.
“False dawn! Another false prophet! Gone!” said Elsa. “Oh, how wonderful it was. How can there be such passion of beauty — and then this gloom?”
“Are you feeling discouraged?”
“No, I don’t think so. Deflated is what it feels like. Three days since Andrew left. I t seems like three years — longer. Oh, I hope he’s all right.”
Nancy Strong’s white felt hat tilted. She glanced at Elsa. “Why? Have you a premonition?”
“No. Except that I can’t even get a mental picture of him.”
“I know you can’t.”
“I tried to send him a message, from Darjeeling, before we sent the telegram.”
“I know you did.”
“I don’t think he got it. I couldn’t find him: he was gone. I tried again last night. But I know I didn’t reach him last night. He seems to have gone — gone forever. I don’t think he even got the telegram.”
“I thought of coming into your room last night to stop you from trying. But I thought better of it. It seemed wiser to let you fail. Did you ever hear of radio interference? You can’t think here. You would be echoing Jesuit thoughts if we stayed here long enough. Echoing them badly. Jesuits can, so to speak, bend iron. They can wear down adamant. You might as well try to whistle against a thunderstorm as to oppose your thought against theirs.”
The Mission garden gradually awoke and spread its fragrance to greet the dim daybreak. The birds’ hymn began. Elsa found it almost impossible to believe that the recent past was true, it seemed so distant and unreal. The sensation reminded her of an utterly different scene in Southampton, with the gulls around an ocean liner, in a fog, and the siren going, when she was seeing friends off on a long voyage. Utterly different, and yet no difference. Unreal, and yet heartbursting with reality.
The evening’s visit had been civilized. The night’s seclusion had felt like guarded peace in an armed camp disciplined to silence. The breakfast, brought before daybreak by an earless ex-brigand convert from Bhutan, had seemed and tasted like communion with the invisible presence of Peace. Nevertheless, she had felt uneasy; and now she felt impatient, wondering why the car was so long coming from the barn at the rear of the Mission buildings.
She felt ungrateful for good hospitality. That was a perplexing and contemptible sensation. Unnatural, and not at all like her, but there it was. The scrupulous impersonal politeness of their hosts had rendered almost imperceptible the fact that there was any difference between Nancy’s point of view and theirs — her religion and theirs. No arguments. No strained aloofness. Almost familiar courtesy. Bright conversation. Praise of each other’s achievements. Mutual exchange of information about children’s diet and the frugal use of money. Silence about religion — not even armed neutrality, but silence, and no issue from it that could introduce a hint of the ill-mannered tolerance, that is only insolence in undress. They had agreed on Nancy’s treatment of rhododendrons; and on the care of children’s lips who are learning to play wind instruments. The Father Superior had shown Nancy a new way to cut down the cost of insulation against termites, and how to keep books free from weevils and mildew. But no peering beneath mental surfaces — no spy work — no leading questions.
The neat, two-roomed guest house had been an oasis of privileged calm, amid hive-like, unhurried energy. Elsa had rather resented the priests’ lack of astonishment when she had betrayed, by the merest accident, that she could speak and write Tibetan. They had shown no curiosity. So far as she was able to observe, they didn’t even glance at one another. Perhaps they had heard rumors about her, that were none of their business, but nevertheless no recommendation. There had been no hostility, no coolness; but she had felt that her reception as a privileged guest was due entirely to the fact that Nancy Strong had introduced her. It was a compliment to Nancy, not to herself. She wondered why she resented it. She had no right to. She did her half-hearted best to subdue malicious triumph at the thought that she was on her way, in secret, to where even the Soldiers of Loyola might only yearn to go, but could not. She wished they knew where she was going. She would have enjoyed their envy.
The car came — Nancy’s old Sunbeam, with the top up — driven by a veteran Mahratta ex-Pioneer Sepoy, bearded like the pard, surlier than Diogenes, but not so interested as that grim philosopher in looking for an honest man. He was quite sure there was none. He regarded Nancy as a beloved lunatic whose will was the higher law, but whose aberrations called for no encouragement from him. A man of few words, and those mainly disrespectful. A man of few miles to the hour because petrol is expensive and Nancy was school-poor; also because his honor was his own and he had no intention to die in a ditch. A man who broke no traffic rules, and could be neither bribed nor bullied. He had been known, when questioned about Nancy’s movements, to tell a brashly new inspector of police to ask God, since God made her mad, so perhaps God understood her secrets.
Two Jesuit priests neglected daybreak duty, for two stopwatch minutes, to come and say good-bye. They were polite to Elsa, cordial to Nancy, expert at speeding the parting guests. The rain descended in a squall. The car started. It felt good. They were off.
“So you don’t like my friends?” said Nancy, as they headed north- westward, between terraced hills that showed the touch of the Jesuit influence. The peasants’ agricultural gods were slowly losing the long war against energy, brains, and a faith that moves men and women, if not their mountains.
Elsa didn’t answer until she had rearranged the packed saddlebags that Andrew had left for her. She wanted to think. She took her time about making a comfortable heap for Nancy’s feet to rest on. Then:
“I know so little about them. But — well — I mean — how shall I say it? — well, they’re Jesuits. I never met any before, but—”
“Why do you suppose I chose that place to spend the night?”
“You said: to throw Bulah Singh’s spies off the trail — and to avoid meeting busybodies at a dak bungalow — oh, and because we couldn’t make the full distance in one day — and — I think that was all.”
“Those were only excuses. There was a real reason. Didn’t you like the Father Superior?”
“He didn’t give me a chance to like him. He didn’t like me. I expect he guessed that I was brought up to believe Jesuitry is about the vilest human trait.”
“So it is,” said Nancy. “But the Jesuits didn’t invent it. They have less of it than most people. Haven’t you discovered, with all the reading you have done, that politicians, and historians, and priests, and other people with axes to grind, always accuse their betters of the very treacheries that they themselves use and intend to keep on using? — Father Patrick is quite an authority on Tibet.”
“Is he? I thought he didn’t understand Tibetan. He didn’t seem to. He doesn’t talk or look like a man who has traveled much.”
Nancy chuckled. “He traveled Tibet for three years, in disguise, mostly alone and on foot. Two of his subordinates are there now — secretly, of course; they can’t get permits. The first time I saw Father Patrick was in Lhasa. But he didn’t see me; or if he did, he didn’t know it. That was before the war. — Heavens! If I would only let me, I could be an old woman, couldn’t I! Nineteen — never mind — Curzon was Viceroy. Father Patrick was in difficulties — found out — caught — they’d have killed him, I think. He was in a dungeon. But Lobsang Pun was in high standing in those days. As the diplomatic representative of the Tashi Lama, he had the ear of the Dalai Lama. And I was Lobsang Pun’s chela. So by being very careful I was able to get a plea through edgewise.”
“Were you in disguise?”
“Of course. But not the way you probably imagine. I was born without a trace of a gift for wearing false whiskers. I had to hide myself even from me, and it would take a lifetime, almost, to tell how that was done. Letting Father Patrick know who helpe
d him was quite out of the question. But they let him continue his journey. He carried on for two years after that.”
Elsa was silent for a moment. But she had to say something to relieve the feeling of deflated malicious triumph:
“But what a strange coincidence. Two pelings — total strangers to each other — crossing trails in Tibet, and one helping the other without the other’s knowledge.”
“No,” said Nancy. “There is no such thing as a coincidence, except to the minus-minded intellectuals. To them, of course, everything is a coincidence, including creation itself. Poor things, to believe in a Universal Intelligence would make them feel too unimportant. But, I grant you, it never ceases to be an exciting surprise when things like that do happen, even though one knows they must happen. It’s a law of nature.”
“I’m afraid I’m awfully stupid,” said Elsa. “Perhaps I’m minus-minded. Which law of nature are you talking about?”
“The first law. The very first one that Lobsang Pun compelled me to discover, and recognize, and learn, and practise. The affluence law of supply and demand. That is to say, the opposite of the economic law, which governs greed, which creates poverty, and blinds us to the truth. The real law is that affluence must find work to do. Affluence is positive. Greed and its derivatives are negative. Affluence is an indestructible idea, forever active, perpetually seeking and finding self-consciousness. No matter where we are, nor what our condition may be at any given moment, it is impossible to avoid finding someone who can use what we can give. I don’t doubt Father Patrick was praying to the God created by the Jesuits. That is none of my business. The point is: he wasn’t pitying himself. So he didn’t get between himself and the help that is always ready. I remember what I had been thinking about: I had been studying Jesus’s remark about Solomon and the lilies, comparing it with dozens of similar texts in Sanskrit, and with my own experience. I was trying to understand the importance of now, and the absoluteness of the law of affluence. I wasn’t arrayed like a lily, and I was equally impotent in any material sense. But I was learning what giving means, and how material need is the room made ready for supply. So I became useful, and no one suffered by it. Of course, there is only one thing really worth giving.”
Elsa made a guess at the answer: “I hope you’re not going to say love. They all say that. Nobody means it.”
“Me? Love a Jesuit! God forbid!”
Elsa leaned back and laughed with relief. “Nancy, you’re priceless.”
“I deny it! Priceless is an idiotic word. I am a pilgrim on the way toward reality, with a long, long way to go. I refuse to be mislabeled. Machiavelli and Napoleon, and their imitators, sneered quite accurately about that. They were liars in most respects, but they knew enough about themselves to guess that everyone in the world has his price, and it is usually cheap. They were almost quite right about that. But I am not telling my price. It is being notched continually higher. Show me the price, and I’ll raise it. The bribe would have to be too subtle for me to recognize it. Even so, I’d never stay bought! I’d wake up and betray the buyer!”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know you didn’t. But I did.”
“What is the only one thing worth giving? Go on, tell me. If you had said it’s love I wouldn’t even have tried to believe you. People have said they love me, who were so cruel that I would prefer their hatred. I hate them. Surely love must be an individual something that one reserves for one’s own lover, husband, children, friends. — What is it that’s worth giving? Tell me.”
“That is for each one to find out for himself,” Nancy answered after a moment’s pause. “Definitions usually defeat their own purpose. Perhaps one might almost define the one great gift that we can give to one another as spiritual elbowroom. Mind our own business. Give others a chance to find out for themselves who and what they really are. The only way to do that is to realize who and what we are.” Before Elsa could wedge in another question she continued: “But let me tell you about Father Patrick. I have a reason for telling. It isn’t just an excuse.”
Elsa curled up in her corner of the back seat. “Please. I would rather listen to you than think my own thoughts.”
“Aren’t you pleasantly excited about Tibet?”
“Yes. But feeling like a parasite, too. I don’t want to think, I want to listen.”
“Very well. The second time I met Father Patrick was toward the end of the World War, in the year of the influenza epidemic. It spread all around the world. It killed more people than the war did — the best and the worst and the mediocrities, all in one obscene corruption. You remember it? Or weren’t you old enough? Great numbers of people called it the hand of God. They did really. The very same people told us that we should love God. But the doctors went to work and fought God with all their might. They were at their wit’s end, but they fought back bravely, without a second’s respite. If it was God’s doing, all the doctors must have been hellions in league with the devil. I was on their side, against God. But there seemed to be no remedy. Thousands died — hundreds of thousands. Eleven children in my school. Of course, what you can always depend on, happened. Helpless people did their best to help one another. Some of the bravest and best work was done by stark materialists, who didn’t believe in God or devil. The professionals — the salaried prelates — Hindu — Moslem — Christian — tried to save face by commanding us all to pray. We were to implore, especially our Christian God, in the name of mercy, to undo something, that He had inflicted on us, that was even more devilish than the poison gas we had been using in the war, and that we had no intention of not using in the next one.”
“I prayed my last prayer to that God long ago,” said Elsa. “What did you do?”
“I made dozens of mistakes. Bad ones. The worst was the first. I went off on the wrong foot, and that led to all the other mistakes. I went fanatical. I tried to prove, at other people’s expense, what I hadn’t, yet proved at my own cost. It didn’t occur to me — not then, in that time of bewildering fear — that I personally had all the faults that I could see in others. I was worse even than those insufferable prigs of prelates, because I might have known better; I hadn’t the disadvantage of their tradition and miseducation. I didn’t realize that everything vile in my consciousness was being boiled to the surface by the conflict between what I knew and what my senses saw and believed. I was conceited — enough to believe that my little bit of a bud of evolving consciousness, that had been awakened by a great teacher, must already be strong enough to overcome that epidemic, at least for my own school. I hadn’t the humility to do what I really could have done. I had to do what I couldn’t. That school — so it seemed to me — was the fruit of my own labor. It was mine. It was my vineyard. Hadn’t I tilled it? Wasn’t I there, where my own soul put me, for the very purpose of protecting those children? Naturally, such nonsense had no effect whatever on the course of the epidemic. It didn’t change it one way or the other. But it got worse and worse for me.”
“In what way worse?”
“Better, of course, in the long run. But at the time heartbreaking, humiliating, cruel. Because I was cruel.”
“How were you cruel?”
“I was as cruel as a politician. Even more cruel than if I had neglected people. I disappointed them. I let them down. I let my ignorance deceive them. I betrayed them with pride, instead of protecting them with humility. I was worse than King Canute defying the sea — much worse. He made himself ridiculous to teach a lesson to fools.”
“Then isn’t your philosophy any use in a crisis?”
“Philosophy? Have I insulted you?”
“No. Of course you haven’t.”
“Did you ever read Cardinal Newman?”
“No. Wasn’t he the Protestant bishop who switched over and became a Catholic?”
“It makes no difference what he became,” said Nancy. “Greater men than he have become beggars, not cardinals. Nevertheless, he was very great. He saved many a p
oor wretch from hopelessness.”
“Wasn’t it he who wrote ‘Lead, Kindly Light’?”
“Yes. He also wrote: ‘Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another ... Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles.’ Memorize that, and have nothing to do with philosophy, it’s no good.”
“But how does that fit the influenza epidemic? I don’t see the connection.”
“I knew, what every genuine thinker has known since the dawn of history, that epidemics — and endemics, too, are a product of the subconscious mind of humanity. The only actual substance of that stuff is the fear that builds up the illusion and all its consequences. That is why Jesus called it ‘a liar, and the father of it.’ The mass mind fears and consequently creates vengeance upon its own secret swinishness. It’s a vicious circle. I had challenged the whole ocean of subconsciousness, including my own subconsciousness. Little me! Single-handed! So, of course, the vile stuff came in through my doors and windows. As I told you, eleven children died. Two teachers. Then the overworked government and private doctors asked for one of my buildings for use as a hospital. I lent them two buildings. They became a morgue. Corpses! Corpses!”
Nancy was silent for several minutes. Then she threw a mood aside and suddenly continued: “Spiritual arrogance was the mischief in me. That is a dirtier thing than any pathological disease. Always the most difficult thing is to detect our own falsehoods. I found it finally — tore it out of my consciousness — killed it. But that stuff is a phoenix. It reappears when you least expect it, out of the ashes of one’s own pride. However, I had killed it for the time being. And then I really did go to work.”
“What did you do?”
“I used every last human resource available. Money, credit, energy. Then, when there wasn’t anything left, I prayed. I had a right to pray then. I had emptied the bin.”
“But, Nancy, you don’t believe in prayer! You said so!”