When the Devil rides on your chest remember the _chamar_.
—_Native Proverb._
Once upon a time, some people in India made a new Heaven and a new Earth
out of broken tea-cups, a missing brooch or two, and a hair-brush. These
were hidden under bushes, or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an
entire Civil Service of subordinate Gods used to find or mend them
again; and every one said: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth
than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” Several other things happened
also, but the Religion never seemed to get much beyond its first
manifestations; though it added an air-line postal service, and
orchestral effects in order to keep abreast of the times and choke off
competition.
This Religion was too elastic for ordinary use. It stretched itself and
embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have
manufactured. It approved of and stole from Freemasonry; looted the
Latter-day Rosicrucians of half their pet words; took any fragments of
Egyptian philosophy that it found in the “Encyclopædia Britannica”;
annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or
English, and talked of all the rest; built in the German versions of
what is left of the Zend Avesta; encouraged White, Gray and Black Magic,
including spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, hot
chestnuts, double-kernelled nuts and tallow-droppings; would have
adopted Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them, and showed
itself, in every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that
had ever been invented since the birth of the Sea.
When it was in thorough working order, with all the machinery, down to
the subscriptions, complete, Dana Da came from nowhere, with nothing in
his hands, and wrote a chapter in its history which has hitherto been
unpublished. He said that his first name was Dana, and his second was
Da. Now, setting aside Dana of the New York “Sun,” Dana is a Bhil name,
and Da fits no native of India unless you accept the Bengali Dé as the
original spelling. Da is Lap or Finnish; and Dana Da was neither Finn,
Chin, Bhil, Bengali, Lap, Nair, Gond, Romaney, Magh, Bokhariot, Kurd,
Armenian, Levantine, Jew, Persian, Punjabi, Madrasi, Parsee, nor
anything else known to ethnologists. He was simply Dana Da, and declined
to give further information. For the sake of brevity and as roughly
indicating his origin, he was called “The Native.” He might have been
the original Old Man of the Mountains, who is said to be the only
authorized head of the Tea-cup Creed. Some people said that he was; but
Dana Da used to smile and deny any connection with the cult; explaining
that he was an “Independent Experimenter.”
As I have said, he came from nowhere, with his hands behind his back,
and studied the Creed for three weeks; sitting at the feet of those best
competent to explain its mysteries. Then he laughed aloud and went away,
but the laugh might have been either of devotion or derision.
When he returned he was without money, but his pride was unabated. He
declared that he knew more about the Things in Heaven and Earth than
those who taught him, and for this contumacy was abandoned altogether.
His next appearance in public life was at a big cantonment in Upper
India, and he was then telling fortunes with the help of three leaden
dice, a very dirty old cloth, and a little tin box of opium pills. He
told better fortunes when he was allowed half a bottle of whiskey; but
the things which he invented on the opium were quite worth the money. He
was in reduced circumstances. Among other people’s he told the fortune
of an Englishman who had once been interested in the Simla Creed, but
who, later on, had married and forgotten all his old knowledge in the
study of babies and things. The Englishman allowed Dana Da to tell a
fortune for charity’s sake, and gave him five rupees, a dinner, and some
old clothes. When he had eaten, Dana Da professed gratitude, and asked
if there were anything he could do for his host—in the esoteric line.
“Is there any one that you love?” said Dana Da. The Englishman loved his
wife, but had no desire to drag her name into the conversation. He
therefore shook his head.
“Is there any one that you hate?” said Dana Da. The Englishman said that
there were several men whom he hated deeply.
“Very good,” said Dana Da, upon whom the whiskey and the opium were
beginning to tell. “Only give me their names, and I will despatch a
Sending to them and kill them.”
Now a Sending is a horrible arrangement, first invented, they say, in
Iceland. It is a Thing sent by a wizard, and may take any form, but,
most generally, wanders about the land in the shape of a little purple
cloud till it finds the Sendee, and him it kills by changing into the
form of a horse, or a cat, or a man without a face. It is not strictly a
native patent, though _chamars_ of the skin and hide castes can, if
irritated, despatch a Sending which sits on the breast of their enemy by
night and nearly kills him. Very few natives care to irritate _chamars_
for this reason.
“Let me despatch a Sending,” said Dana Da; “I am nearly dead now with
want, and drink, and opium; but I should like to kill a man before I
die. I can send a Sending anywhere you choose, and in any form except in
the shape of a man.”
The Englishman had no friends that he wished to kill, but partly to
soothe Dana Da, whose eyes were rolling, and partly to see what would be
done, he asked whether a modified Sending could not be arranged for—such
a Sending as should make a man’s life a burden to him, and yet do him no
harm. If this were possible, he notified his willingness to give Dana Da
ten rupees for the job.
“I am not what I was once,” said Dana Da, “and I must take the money
because I am poor. To what Englishman shall I send it?”
“Send a Sending to Lone Sahib,” said the Englishman, naming a man who
had been most bitter in rebuking him for his apostasy from the Tea-cup
Creed. Dana Da laughed and nodded.
“I could have chosen no better man myself,” said he. “I will see that he
finds the Sending about his path and about his bed.”
He lay down on the hearth-rug, turned up the whites of his eyes,
shivered all over and began to snort. This was Magic, or Opium, or the
Sending, or all three. When he opened his eyes he vowed that the Sending
had started upon the war-path, and was at that moment flying up to the
town where Lone Sahib lives.
“Give me my ten rupees,” said Dana Da wearily, “and write a letter to
Lone Sahib, telling him, and all who believe with him, that you and a
friend are using a power greater than theirs. They will see that you are
speaking the truth.”
He departed unsteadily, with the promise of some more rupees if anything
came of the Sending.
The Englishman sent a letter to Lone Sahib, couched in what he
remembered of the terminology of the Creed. He wrote: “I also, in the
days of what you held to be my backsliding, have obtained Enlightenment,
and with Enlightenment has come Power.” Then he grew so deeply
mysterious that the recipient of the letter could make neither head nor
tail of it, and was proportionately impressed; for he fancied that his
friend had become a “fifth-rounder.” When a man is a “fifth-rounder” he
can do more than Slade and Houdin combined.
Lone Sahib read the letter in five different fashions, and was beginning
a sixth interpretation when his bearer dashed in with the news that
there was a cat on the bed. Now if there was one thing that Lone Sahib
hated more than another, it was a cat. He scolded the bearer for not
turning it out of the house. The bearer said that he was afraid. All the
doors of the bedroom had been shut throughout the morning, and no _real_
cat could possibly have entered the room. He would prefer not to meddle
with the creature.
Lone Sahib entered the room gingerly, and there, on the pillow of his
bed, sprawled and whimpered a wee white kitten; not a jumpsome, frisky
little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely opened and
its paws lacking strength or direction,—a kitten that ought to have been
in a basket with its mamma. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its
neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the bearer
four annas.
That evening, as he was reading in his room, he fancied that he saw
something moving about on the hearth-rug, outside the circle of light
from his reading-lamp. When the thing began to myowl, he realised that
it was a kitten—a wee white kitten, nearly blind and very miserable. He
was seriously angry, and spoke bitterly to his bearer, who said that
there was no kitten in the room when he brought in the lamp, and _real_
kittens of tender age generally had mother-cats in attendance.
“If the Presence will go out into the verandah and listen,” said the
bearer, “he will hear no cats. How, therefore, can the kitten on the bed
and the kitten on the hearth-rug be real kittens?”
Lone Sahib went out to listen, and the bearer followed him, but there
was no sound of any one mewing for her children. He returned to his
room, having hurled the kitten down the hillside, and wrote out the
incidents of the day for the benefit of his co-religionists. Those
people were so absolutely free from superstition that they ascribed
anything a little out of the common to Agencies. As it was their
business to know all about the Agencies, they were on terms of almost
indecent familiarity with Manifestations of every kind. Their letters
dropped from the ceiling—un-stamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and
down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact
with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the
minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the
Englishman’s letter because it was the most mysterious document and
might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An
outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: “Look out! You
laughed at me once, and now I am going to make you sit up.”
Lone Sahib’s co-religionists found that meaning in it; but their
translation was refined and full of four-syllable words. They held a
sederunt, and were filled with tremulous joy, for, in spite of their
familiarity with all the other worlds and cycles, they had a very human
awe of things sent from Ghost-land. They met in Lone Sahib’s room in
shrouded and sepulchral gloom, and their conclave was broken up by a
clinking among the photo-frames on the mantelpiece. A wee white kitten,
nearly blind, was looping and writhing itself between the clock and the
candlesticks. That stopped all investigations or doubtings. Here was the
Manifestation in the flesh. It was, so far as could be seen, devoid of
purpose, but it was a Manifestation of undoubted authenticity.
They drafted a Round Robin to the Englishman, the backslider of old
days, adjuring him in the interests of the Creed to explain whether
there was any connection between the embodiment of some Egyptian God or
other (I have forgotten the name) and his communication. They called the
kitten Ra, or Toth, or Tum, or something; and when Lone Sahib confessed
that the first one had, at his most misguided instance, been drowned by
the sweeper, they said consolingly that in his next life he would be a
“bounder,” and not even a “rounder” of the lowest grade. These words may
not be quite correct, but they accurately express the sense of the
house.
When the Englishman received the Round Robin—it came by post—he was
startled and bewildered. He sent into the bazar for Dana Da, who read
the letter and laughed. “That is my Sending,” said he. “I told you I
would work well. Now give me another ten rupees.”
“But what in the world is this gibberish about Egyptian Gods?” asked the
Englishman.
“Cats,” said Dana Da with a hiccough, for he had discovered the
Englishman’s whiskey-bottle. “Cats, and cats, and cats! Never was such a
Sending. A hundred of cats. Now give me ten more rupees and write as I
dictate.”
Dana Da’s letter was a curiosity. It bore the Englishman’s signature,
and hinted at cats—at a Sending of Cats. The mere words on paper were
creepy and uncanny to behold.
“What have you done, though?” said the Englishman. “I am as much in the
dark as ever. Do you mean to say that you can actually send this absurd
Sending you talk about?”
“Judge for yourself,” said Dana Da. “What does that letter mean? In a
little time they will all be at my feet and yours, and I—O Glory!—will
be drugged or drunk all day long.”
Dana Da knew his people.
When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little
squirming kitten on his breast, or puts his hand into his ulster-pocket
and finds a little half-dead kitten where his gloves should be, or opens
his trunk and finds a vile kitten among his dress-shirts, or goes for a
long ride with his mackintosh strapped on his saddle-bow and shakes a
little squawling kitten from its folds when he opens it, or goes out to
dinner and finds a little blind kitten under his chair, or stays at home
and finds a writhing kitten under the quilt, or wriggling among his
boots, or hanging, head downwards, in his tobacco-jar, or being mangled
by his terrier in the verandah,—when such a man finds one kitten,
neither more nor less, once a day in a place where no kitten rightly
could or should be, he is naturally upset. When he dare not murder his
daily trove because he believes it to be a Manifestation, an Emissary,
an Embodiment, and half a dozen other things all out of the regular
course of nature, he is more than upset. He is actually distressed. Some
of Lone Sahib’s co-religionists thought that he was a highly favoured
individual; but many said that if he had treated the first kitten with
proper respect—as suited a Toth-Ra-Tum-Sennacherib Embodiment—all this
trouble would have been averted. They compared him to the Ancient
Mariner, but none the less they were proud of him and proud of the
Englishman who had sent the Manifestation. They did not call it a
Sending because Icelandic magic was not in their programme.
After sixteen kittens, that is to say after one fortnight, for there
were three kittens on the first day to impress the fact of the Sending,
the whole camp was uplifted by a letter—it came flying through a
window—from the Old Man of the Mountains—the Head of all the
Creed—explaining the Manifestation in the most beautiful language and
soaking up all the credit for it himself. The Englishman, said the
letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or
Asceticism, who couldn’t even raise a table by force of volition, much
less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement,
said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the
highest authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at
this, for some of the weaker brethren seeing, that an outsider who had
been working on independent lines could create kittens, whereas their
own rulers had never gone beyond crockery—and broken at best—were
showing a desire to break line on their own trail. In fact, there was
the promise of a schism. A second Round Robin was drafted to the
Englishman, beginning: “O Scoffer,” and ending with a selection of
curses from the Rites of Mizraim and Memphis and the Commination of
Jugana, who was a “fifth rounder” upon whose name an upstart
“third-rounder” once traded. A papal excommunication is a _billet-doux_
compared to the Commination of Jugana. The Englishman had been proved,
under the hand and seal of the Old Man of the Mountains, to have
appropriated Virtue and pretended to have Power which, in reality,
belonged only to the Supreme Head. Naturally the Round Robin did not
spare him.
He handed the letter to Dana Da to translate into decent English. The
effect on Dana Da was curious. At first he was furiously angry, and then
he laughed for five minutes.
“I had thought,” he said, “that they would have come to me. In another
week I would have shown that I sent the Sending, and they would have
dis-crowned the Old Man of the Mountains who has sent this Sending of
mine. Do you do nothing. The time has come for me to act. Write as I
dictate, and I will put them to shame. But give me ten more rupees.”
At Dana Da’s dictation the Englishman wrote nothing less than a formal
challenge to the Old Man of the Mountains. It wound up: “And if this
Manifestation be from your hand, then let it go forward; but if it be
from my hand, I will that the Sending shall cease in two days’ time. On
that day there shall be twelve kittens and thenceforward none at all.
The people shall judge between us.” This was signed by Dana Da, who
added pentacles and pentagrams, and a _crux ansata_, and half a dozen
_swastikas_, and a Triple Tau to his name, just to show that he was all
he laid claim to be.
The challenge was read out to the gentlemen and ladies, and they
remembered then that Dana Da had laughed at them some years ago. It was
officially announced that the Old Man of the Mountains would treat the
matter with contempt; Dana Da being an Independent Investigator without
a single “round” at the back of him. But this did not soothe his people.
They wanted to see a fight. They were very human for all their
spirituality. Lone Sahib, who was really being worn out with kittens,
submitted meekly to his fate. He felt that he was being “kittened to
prove the power of Dana Da,” as the poet says.
When the stated day dawned, the shower of kittens began. Some were white
and some were tabby, and all were about the same loathsome age. Three
were on his hearth-rug, three in his bath-room, and the other six turned
up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break
down. Never was a more satisfactory Sending. On the next day there were
no kittens, and the next day and all the other days were kittenless and
quiet. The people murmured and looked to the Old Man of the Mountains
for an explanation. A letter, written on a palm-leaf, dropped from the
ceiling, but every one except Lone Sahib felt that letters were not what
the occasion demanded. There should have been cats, there should have
been cats,—full-grown ones. The letter proved conclusively that there
had been a hitch in the Psychic Current which, colliding with a Dual
Identity, had interfered with the Percipient Activity all along the main
line. The kittens were still going on, but owing to some failure in the
Developing Fluid, they were not materialised. The air was thick with
letters for a few days afterwards. Unseen hands played Glück and
Beethoven on finger-bowls and clock-shades; but all men felt that
Psychic Life was a mockery without materialised Kittens. Even Lone Sahib
shouted with the majority on this head. Dana Da’s letters were very
insulting, and if he had then offered to lead a new departure, there is
no knowing what might not have happened.
[Illustration: THE SENDING OF DANA DA]
But Dana Da was dying of whiskey and opium in the Englishman’s godown,
and had small heart for honours.
“They have been put to shame,” said he. “Never was such a Sending. It
has killed me.”
“Nonsense,” said the Englishman, “you are going to die, Dana Da, and
that sort of stuff must be left behind. I’ll admit that you have made
some queer things come about. Tell me honestly, now, how was it done?”
“Give me ten more rupees,” said Dana Da faintly, “and if I die before I
spend them, bury them with me.” The silver was counted out while Dana Da
was fighting with Death. His hand closed upon the money and he smiled a
grim smile.
“Bend low,” he whispered. The Englishman bent.
“_Bunnia_—Mission-school—expelled—_box-wallah_ (peddler)—Ceylon
pearl-merchant—all mine English education—out-casted, and made up name
Dana Da—England with American thought-reading man and—and—you gave me
ten rupees several times—I gave the Sahib’s bearer two-eight a month for
cats—little, little cats. I wrote, and he put them about—very clever
man. Very few kittens now in the bazar. Ask Lone Sahib’s sweeper’s
wife.”
So saying, Dana Da gasped and passed away into a land where, if all be
true, there are no materialisations and the making of new creeds is
discouraged.
But consider the gorgeous simplicity of it all!