TILGAUN.
There was no more rain that day, but mist that wrapped Darjiling in a
dripping shroud. Beads like perspiration gathered and trickled down
interior walls, and there were no fires; the monks led the austere life
that includes indifference to such minor afflictions as ague, and
through indifference they seemed to have become immune. But Ommony
suffered.
A monk brought him a long sheepskin coat, and in that he paraded the
corridors to keep his blood circulating. He begged more sheepskins and
set Dawa Tsering to work making a coat for Diana, because animals used
to the plains die of pneumonia in those altitudes more readily than
human beings. He tried to decide whether or not to go into Darjiling and
buy European clothes, while he leaned over a parapet to watch
strong-legged Sikhim women looming out of the mist loaded like camels
with huge piles of cord-wood for the monastery kitchen, until that bored
him.
He was feverish with impatience. At noon he made up his mind to go and
ask the Lama’s advice about disguise, supposing he could find him. But
as he left the cell to hunt for the Lama a monk came with the midday
meal and stood by to watch him eat—a cheery old monk, who laughed when
questioned and talked about everything under the sun except what Ommony
wanted to know, spinning his prayer-wheel furiously as if to immunize
himself against heretical contagion.
And when the monk had shuffled away with the empty platters and Ommony
set forth again to hunt for the Lama, Maitraya met him midway along the
first draughty corridor—Maitraya smothered in a sheepskin coat like
Ommony’s and blowing great clouds of breath in front of him.
“I am paid, O Gupta Rao! I have a draft on Benjamin and money for the
railway fares to Delhi—enough for first-class fares for all of us and
liberal provision for the way. Would that there were more men like
Tsiang Samdup! May the generous gods bless him! No argument, Gupta Rao;
no deductions; no delay; a bag of money, an order on Benjamin, and such
courteously worded thanks as Vishnu never received from a mother just
delivered of a son! I feel as if my whole body had been drenched in
thanks from inside outward! Are you on your way to your cell?”
“I am on my way to find the Lama. Where is he?”
“Gone! Didn’t you know that? He left an hour ago, he and all the women
and Samding, on little Tibetan ponies. There was no ceremony. They rode
away like ghosts into the mist.”
Maitraya took Ommony’s arm in rank defiance of caste decorum.
“Come along, Gupta Rao. I know you are no Brahman. You are possibly a
Kshattriya like me, but what the devil has caste to do with our
profession! Whatever you are, you have the approval of me, Maitraya! You
are a great actor. You are a man after mine own heart—a little
conceited possibly—a trifle grumpy on occasion—but we all have faults.
I know a first-rate actor, when I see him! I forgive the little
insignificances. I respect the strength of character—the genius! Come,
let us go along to your cell; I have a proposal for you.”
Ommony led him to the cell and sat down on the truckle bed. Maitraya
would not sit; he threw an attitude and paced the floor, striving to
create an atmosphere of tremendous drama, that somehow refused to
materialize between those dripping walls. He shuddered at the cold when
he should have gestured like a Mogul chieftain, and coughed, which
rather spoiled the grandeur of his voice.
“Gupta Rao—let us accept our destiny! If two men, mutually worthy of
respect, were ever brought together for immortal purposes, those two are
we! Consider! Have we not a task in common? Have we not a great ideal to
espouse together? Is it not our duty to inspire the stage of Hind[39]?
Have we not a ripe field waiting for us? Should we not revisit all the
scenes of our success and stage such plays as shall uplift the drama of
this land of Hind for ever? Think of those audiences, Gupta Rao! Think
of the profits! Charge no more than one-half _rupee_ admission, and we
make our fortunes!”
Ommony cast about for an excuse for refusing, that should not turn a
friend into an enemy.
“Who do you propose should write the plays?” he asked.
“We have a play! _Ye Rulers of the Upper Spheres_—a play, I tell you! I
have memorized the whole of it! Let the Jew finance us, Gupta Rao! Let
us go to Benjamin and use our joint persuasion to wheedle a decent
contract out of him. I offer you a one-third interest!
Commercialism—pah! The Jew is a commercialist, so we must feed him with
_rupees_. The Lama, on the other hand, is ignorant of money’s value; he
fails to see that it is good for the audience to pay a fair price for
its education. As for us, let us take the middle way between two crass
extremes. And if in the process we make a fortune, that will be no more
than what is due to us. Have you heard that Christian adage, that the
laborer is worthy of his hire?”
“I seem to have heard another one about stealing,” said Ommony dryly.
“The play is the Lama’s.”
“Bah! It isn’t copyright. He should have taken elementary precautions.
Besides, he has no right to keep for his own use an idea that has
universal application. The play is religious; who can copyright
religion?”
“Did you think of obtaining the Lama’s permission?” asked Ommony.
“No, I confess, I never thought of that. But it’s too late now; he’s
gone. Let us go to Benjamin. The Jew will see the point of not letting a
good profitable play lie idle for the sake of a bit of squeamishness.
Come along. Let Benjamin convince you.”
Ommony jumped at that solution. He knew Benjamin.
“All right,” he said. “You make the proposal to him. If Benjamin agrees,
I will then consider it. And don’t forget, you’ll need a genius to act
the part of San-fun-ho!”
“Aha!” exclaimed Maitraya. “Genius? I can act that part much better than
the _chela_ did! Not that he was bad, mind you—not that he was bad. I
will play San-fun-ho, and you the king. Together we will create dramatic
history!”
“First create confidence in Benjamin! I’ll answer yes or no when you
have persuaded _him_,” said Ommony.
He got rid of Maitraya with difficulty. No argument availed until it
dawned on Maitraya that he could pocket the cost of transportation by
leaving Ommony behind; then he permitted himself to be led along the
corridor and lost in the maze of passages and stairways.
Ommony went in search of the Abbot, and found a monk at last who did not
shake his head and grin when spoken to, but led up an outside stairway
to a grimly austere cell just under the roof, where the Abbot sat
cross-legged on a stone platform at one end, meditating. He opened his
eyes and gazed at Ommony for several minutes before a smile at last
spread over his Mongolian face and he passed one lean hand down the
length of his scrawny gray beard. He appeared to be well pleased with
the result of his inspection.
“The spirit of restlessness is difficult to overcome,” he said at last.
“It is sometimes wise to yield to it. There are many lives. Not all
knowledge can be acquired at once. In what way can I help, my son?”
Ommony thought of asking a dozen questions, but discerned that the
gentle courtesy concealed an iron aptitude for silence. He came straight
to the point.
“I beg forgiveness for intrusion. I return thanks for food and lodging.
Did the holy Lama Tsiang Samdup make a statement of his wishes with
regard to me?”
The Abbot’s face became wreathed in smiles again. He nodded.
“Where do you wish to go, my son? To Tilgaun? When?”
“Now!”
The Abbot struck a gong that hung on the wall beside him; before its
overtones had died a young monk appeared in the doorway and received
swiftly spoken singsong orders in a language Ommony did not understand.
The monk gave guttural assent, and waited in the door for Ommony to go
with him, but there was two or three minutes’ delay while the Abbot
amused himself by playing with Diana almost childishly, laughing at her
new sheepskin coat and using his staff to measure her height at the
shoulder and her length from the tip of her nose to the end of her tail.
Ommony made Diana sit up and salute him, whereat he blessed the dog
solemnly. Finally he gave seven turns to a prayer-wheel fixed in an iron
bracket within comfortable reach, nodded to the monk, and smiled
farewell at Ommony, dismissing him with a blessing that sounded like the
first bars of an anthem to eternal peace.
Followed laughter, bustling, friendliness, and no delay. They speeded
the departing guest. A dozen monks made themselves agreeable; two of
them carried out Ommony’s trunk into the courtyard; some led out little
sturdy Tibetan ponies and held them while others lashed the loads in
place with the unhurried speed of old campaigners. There was ample
supply of provisions, including grain for the ponies, and when Ommony
suggested paying for it all they laughed. They seemed amused at the idea
that any guest of theirs should pay for anything.
However, he noticed that two sturdy-looking Tibetans who were certainly
not monks, had been told off to accompany him; they were listening to
instructions from the young monk who had received the Abbot’s
incomprehensible orders; standing at a little distance apart, they kept
nodding as the instructions were repeated again and again.
There were in all eight ponies and the party was on the way, filing
through the wide gate with one Tibetan leading and the other Tibetan
bringing up the rear, within thirty minutes. Dawa Tsering burst into
song as he rode under the arch behind Ommony and they were all swallowed
in a drifting bank of cloud that even hid the monastery wall as they
turned sharp to the right and followed the track that ran beside it. The
sturdy little ponies put their best foot forward as they always do when
they are headed northward.
The ninety miles to Tilgaun meant four days of strenuous going, for the
miles are reckoned as the crow flies, whereas men and their mounts must
climb and descend over the shoulders of hills heaped on one another by
the gods to keep away intruders. The trail wound down through phantom
deodars and dipped into a fleecy white fog that condensed in dew on
everything warm that it touched, descending seven thousand feet into the
Rungeet Valley before they crossed a long bridge and commenced to climb
again.
Most of the time it was like sitting on an earthquake; there was nothing
to do but cling tightly and watch the pony’s ears in the mist as the
nimble legs slid, struggled and recovered. There was no chance for
anything but single file among the rocks and rhododendrons; even Diana
had to trot behind the pony to escape being trodden on. It was not the
surfaced highroad they were taking, but presumably a short-cut, which
the Tibetan guide appeared to know as intimately as a mole knows
tunnels.
They climbed nine thousand feet and slept in a windy hut above the
clouds, where the Tibetans cooked greasy supper and sang plaintive songs
in which Dawa Tsering joined. There was no sign of the Lama’s party, nor
any answer to Ommony’s questions as to how far ahead the Lama might be;
nor was there any indication that the Lama’s party had crossed that pass
ahead of them. But at dawn, when Ommony wanted to make an early start
the Tibetans had scores of excuses that ended with blunt refusal. They
were not impudent or surly; they smiled as cheerfully as Chinese statues
and simply did not load the ponies.
“If I slew them, as they deserve, there would be none to do the work,”
said Dawa Tsering. “Why not offer them money, thou? Never fear—I will
win it back from them at dice!”
Ommony offered money, but the Tibetans only showed their teeth in wider
grins than ever. There was nothing to do but wait until they were
pleased to move, and they did not do that until the sun was over the
highest ridges by a full hour and a wind had blown new banks of mist
into the ravines. Then suddenly, as if they had received a message
through the ether, they began to pack the ponies and were off in no time
without a word of explanation.
The hills lay in parallel waves that must be crossed diagonally, as a
boat offers its shoulder to a rising sea. To the northward the huge
range of the Himalayas made itself felt but was invisible; there was a
sense of impending immensity, increased by the curtain of cloud that
drifted between earth and Heaven. Wherever passes gaped between the
shoulders of the mountains, dense white clouds flowed down along them,
looking like incredibly swift glaciers. Half of the time the rump of the
pony ahead was just discernible through the mist, but once in a while
some trick of wind would reveal enormous vistas that a man could hardly
contemplate and keep his balance.
But the ponies were content to climb hour after interminable hour, and
Dawa Tsering sang about the wind-swept hills of Spiti as they rose and
descended through every imaginable plane of vegetation, from steamy
bottoms where dense jungle stifled them, up through bamboo and
rhododendron to where oaks and maples flourished—up beyond those to the
fir-line—up again until the firs gave out and raw wind rolled the
clouds around them straight from Kanchenjunga—then down again into the
suffocating tropics, where woodticks fell on them and a man’s hands were
kept constantly busy picking leeches off the ponies and Diana had to be
gone over carefully three times within the hour.
They crossed rock-cluttered torrents over bamboo bridges that swayed and
danced under the weight of one pony at a time, and bivouacked again at
midnight in the clouds, where icy wind shrieked through the chinks of a
deserted herdsman’s hut; then descended two hours after dawn into a
steaming cauldron where black water quarreled on its way through
aromatic jungle.
Never a sign of the Lama’s party, although they passed stone
_chortens_[40] every mile or so, and cairns built by pilgrims, to which
every passer by had stuck little prayer-flags to flutter the eternal
formula “_Om mani padme hum_.” There were messages on bits of paper from
one pilgrim to another, weighted down with stones near some of the
_chortens_, but none that the Lama had left.
And there were unaccountable delays. At times the two Tibetans seemed to
think they had come too fast and, after a whispered consultation,
unloaded the ponies whether they appeared to need a rest or not. The
ponies rolled on sky-hung moss-banks within a dozen feet of the edge of
an abyss, and the Tibetans chewed oily seed by the handful, offering
Ommony some, and pointing out good places to sit down when he showed
impatience. Dawa Tsering flicked at the edge of his knife with a
suggestive thumb-nail, but they laughed at that, too, showing him a
tough tree, dwarfed by the wind, that he could cut down if he needed
exercise. In their own good time they started off again without excuse
or argument, usually singing hymns to pacify the spirits of the
mountains.
As he drew near Tilgaun Ommony’s thought dwelt more on Hannah Sanburn
than on the Lama and Samding. Aware now that for twenty years she had
kept a secret from him, in spite of mutual respect and confidence that
in every other way he could think of had been almost absolute, he
wondered how to tackle her about it. He did not care to know even a part
of her secret without letting her know that he knew it.
There had been times when he had seriously thought of asking Hannah
Sanburn to become his wife; other times, when the thought that he could
hardly live at the mission without marrying her had been all that kept
him from resigning his forestry job and spending the remainder of his
life in active duty as a trustee at Tilgaun. He was too confirmed a
bachelor not to flinch from matrimony when he reasoned out all the pros
and cons, but in the back of his head there was a conviction that Hannah
Sanburn would not refuse, if he should ask her. But he also had known,
any time these past ten years, that he never would ask her to marry him
unless—he wondered what the reservation was; he had never quite defined
it.
Hunted through his mind and pinned at last into a corner, up there
thirteen thousand feet above sea level with a view of Kanchenjunga to
adjust mere human problems to their right proportion, he realized that
he would marry Hannah Sanburn—gladly enough—at any time—if by doing
so he could solve a difficulty from which she could not otherwise
escape.
He was almost convinced that there was a page in Hannah Sanburn’s life
which needed very careful protecting; something which called for
limitless generosity. He had no use for generosity that hedged itself
within conventional limits. He liked his freedom and the habit of
consulting no one’s inclinations but his own in private matters, that
becomes almost second nature in an independent man of forty-five, but he
knew he could forego all that and be a reasonably companionable married
man, if his interpretation of the law of friendship should impose that
course on him. To Cottswold Ommony friendship was the highest law; no
conceivable claims could outweigh it; Hannah Sanburn was his friend;
there was nothing to argue about. But he hoped—without much confidence,
but he hoped—that she was not in the predicament he guessed her to be
in; suspecting that, since she had kept him in the dark for twenty
years, she could quite easily have fooled Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, who
notoriously believed the best of every one.
He rather dreaded meeting her—very much dreaded the inevitable
interview; and although he fretted to overtake the Lama he was much more
patient with delay than he might otherwise have been, leaving untried a
good many methods with which he might have persuaded the Tibetans to
hurry. He salved his conscience by grumbling aloud to them and _sotto
voce_ to Dawa Tsering, but there was not much energy in his complaints.
At last, toward the end of the fourth day out, they topped a
fifteen-thousand-foot rise and looked over a sheer ravine, where eagles
perched, toward Tilgaun that nestled in a valley with a Lamaist
monastery perched on a crag three thousand feet above it. The mission
buildings glowed warm in the westering sun—one instance where a rich
man’s money had been spent on art as well as altruism, with good manners
and respect for other men’s historical associations, such as
missionaries commonly dispense with. The graceful contour of the
buildings and the color of the carved stone matched the panorama. There
was no assertiveness, no challenge. The Tibetan roof-lines paid
acknowledgment to older art on crag and cliff around them. Without
beauty there is no beatitude. Old Marmaduke, who tortured thirty million
dollars from protesting pigs, had somehow learned that; so the mission
buildings were a monument to beauty, not to his ambition or his zeal.
Ommony was thrilled by the sight, as always on his rare visits. All the
way down the winding track, that looked so short and actually was a
half-day’s journey, he recalled the days when Marmaduke had hurled
Chicago business methods into battle with obstruction, subtly raised
against him by foes that were easy enough to identify but undiscoverable
when it came to issues. Rajahs, all the missionaries, all the Indian
priesthood, politicians and the press had joined in opposing the
project, occasionally praising, always preventing.
Even the banks, that levied toll on Marmaduke’s long purse, had invented
difficulties. There were strikes of labor-gangs (imported in the teeth
of government obstruction) because money for the pay-roll did not arrive
punctually. There had been personal attacks on Marmaduke—three bullets,
and a dose of ground glass in his food, in addition to assaults on his
reputation. Missionaries had declared (and perhaps believed) that he was
a satyr who sought to corrupt young innocents. Consignments of supplies,
machinery and what-not else had failed to reach the destination, or had
arrived so smashed as to be useless. Marmaduke had grinned, continued
grinning, and had won, dying with his boots on six months after Hannah
Sanburn was installed in charge, hoping, as they laid him on a
stretcher, that the pigs he had slain for sausage-meat might have most
of the credit; since it was they who made the mission possible.
His will, in which he appointed a Tibetan Lama chief trustee, had been a
nine days’ wonder, partly because of its novelty, but mostly because
that masterly provision introduced an international element, which made
it next to impossible for politicians to undo the work. Tibet as a
military power can not be taken seriously: but it is noteworthy that not
even “big business” has succeeded in controlling its government or in
penetrating its frontiers. The backing of the Dalai Lama is worth more,
in some contingencies, than a billion dollars and a million armed men.
(There is a European parallel.)
And the Tashi Lama is to the Dalai Lama as is the differential calculus
to the simple rule of three, only if anything rather more so.
-----
[39] India.
[40] Vase-shaped stone monuments of Buddhist origin.
My son, the wise are few; for Wisdom very seldom pleases, so
that they are few who seek her. Wisdom will compel whoever
entertains her to avoid all selfishness and to escape from
praise. But Wisdom seeks them who are worthy, discovering some
here and there, unstupified and uncorrupted by the slime of
cant, with whom thereafter it is a privilege to other men to
tread the self-same earth, whether or not they know it.
From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.