Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 59
By this means the general doctrine of Boohooism spread rapidly. Indeed, a great many of the members of the society soon attained to a stage of Bahee, or the Higher Indifference, that it would have been hard to equal outside of Juggapore or Jumbumbabad. For example, when Mrs. Buncomhearst learned of the remarriage of her second husband — she had lost him three years before, owing to a difference of opinion on the emancipation of women — she showed the most complete Bahee possible. And when Miss Snagg learned that her brother in Venezuela had died — a very sudden death brought on by drinking rum for seventeen years — and had left her ten thousand dollars, the Bahee which she exhibited almost amounted to Nirvana.
In fact, the very general dissemination of the Oriental idea became more and more noticeable with each week that passed. Some members attained to so complete a Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that they even ceased to attend the meetings of the society; others reached a Swaraj, or Control of Self, so great that they no longer read its pamphlets; while others again actually passed into Nirvana, to a Complete Negation of Self, so rapidly that they did not even pay their subscriptions.
But features of this sort, of course, are familiar wherever a successful occult creed makes its way against the prejudices of the multitude.
The really notable part of the whole experience was the marvellous demonstration of occult power which attended the final seance of the society, the true nature of which is still wrapped in mystery.
For some weeks it had been rumoured that a very special feat or demonstration of power by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was under contemplation. In fact, the rapid spread of Swaraj and of Nirvana among the members rendered such a feat highly desirable. Just what form the demonstration would take was for some time a matter of doubt. It was whispered at first that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt the mysterious eastern rite of burying Ram Spudd alive in the garden of the Rasselyer-Brown residence and leaving him there in a state of Stoj, or Suspended Inanition, for eight days. But this project was abandoned, owing to some doubt, apparently, in the mind of Mr. Ram Spudd as to his astral fitness for the high state of Stoj necessitated by the experiment.
At last it became known to the members of the Poosh, or Inner Circle, under the seal of confidence, that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt nothing less than the supreme feat of occultism, namely, a reincarnation, or more correctly a reastralization of Buddha.
The members of the Inner Circle shivered with a luxurious sense of mystery when they heard of it.
“Has it ever been done before?” they asked of Mr. Snoop.
“Only a few times,” he said; “once, I believe, by Jam-bum, the famous Yogi of the Carnatic; once, perhaps twice, by Boohoo, the founder of the sect. But it is looked upon as extremely rare. Mr. Yahi tells me that the great danger is that, if the slightest part of the formula is incorrectly observed, the person attempting the astralization is swallowed up into nothingness. However, he declares himself willing to try.”
The seance was to take place at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s residence, and was to be at midnight.
“At midnight!” said each member in surprise. And the answer was, “Yes, at midnight. You see, midnight here is exactly midday in Allahabad in India.”
This explanation was, of course, ample. “Midnight,” repeated everybody to everybody else, “is exactly midday in Allahabad.” That made things perfectly clear. Whereas if midnight had been midday in Timbuctoo the whole situation would have been different.
Each of the ladies was requested to bring to the seance some ornament of gold; but it must be plain gold, without any setting of stones.
It was known already that, according to the cult of Boohooism, gold, plain gold, is the seat of the three virtues — beauty, wisdom and grace. Therefore, according to the creed of Boohooism, anyone who has enough gold, plain gold, is endowed with these virtues and is all right. All that is needed is to have enough of it; the virtues follow as a consequence.
But for the great experiment the gold used must not be set with stones, with the one exception of rubies, which are known to be endowed with the three attributes of Hindu worship, modesty, loquacity, and pomposity.
In the present case it was found that as a number of ladies had nothing but gold ornaments set with diamonds, a second exception was made; especially as Mr. Yahi-Bahi, on appeal, decided that diamonds, though less pleasing to Buddha than rubies, possessed the secondary Hindu virtues of divisibility, movability, and disposability.
On the evening in question the residence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown might have been observed at midnight wrapped in utter darkness. No lights were shown. A single taper, brought by Ram Spudd from the Taj Mohal, and resembling in its outer texture those sold at the five-and-ten store near Mr. Spudd’s residence, burned on a small table in the vast dining-room. The servants had been sent upstairs and expressly enjoined to retire at half past ten. Moreover, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had had to attend that evening, at the Mausoleum Club, a meeting of the trustees of the Church of St. Asaph, and he had come home at eleven o’clock, as he always did after diocesan work of this sort, quite used up; in fact, so fatigued that he had gone upstairs to his own suite of rooms sideways, his knees bending under him. So utterly used up was he with his church work that, as far as any interest in what might be going on in his own residence, he had attained to a state of Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that even Buddha might have envied.
The guests, as had been arranged, arrived noiselessly and on foot. All motors were left at least a block away. They made their way up the steps of the darkened house, and were admitted without ringing, the door opening silently in front of them. Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd, who had arrived on foot carrying a large parcel, were already there, and were behind a screen in the darkened room, reported to be in meditation.
At a whispered word from Mr. Snoop, who did duty at the door, all furs and wraps were discarded in the hall and laid in a pile. Then the guests passed silently into the great dining room. There was no light in it except the dim taper which stood on a little table. On this table each guest, as instructed, laid an ornament of gold, and at the same time was uttered in a low voice the word Ksvoo. This means, “O Buddha, I herewith lay my unworthy offering at thy feet; take it and keep it for ever.” It was explained that this was only a form.
“What is he doing?” whispered the assembled guests as they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi pass across the darkened room and stand in front of the sideboard.
“Hush!” said Mr. Snoop; “he’s laying the propitiatory offering for Buddha.”
“It’s an Indian rite,” whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown.
Mr. Yahi-Bahi could be seen dimly moving to and fro in front of the sideboard. There was a faint clinking of glass.
“He has to set out a glass of Burmese brandy, powdered over with nutmeg and aromatics,” whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. “I had the greatest hunt to get it all for him. He said that nothing but Burmese brandy would do, because in the Hindu religion the god can only be invoked with Burmese brandy, or, failing that, Hennessy’s with three stars, which is not entirely displeasing to Buddha.”
“The aromatics,” whispered Mr. Snoop, “are supposed to waft a perfume or incense to reach the nostrils of the god. The glass of propitiatory wine and the aromatic spices are mentioned in the Vishnu-Buddayat.”
Mr. Yahi-Bahi, his preparations completed, was now seen to stand in front of the sideboard bowing deeply four times in an Oriental salaam. The light of the single taper had by this time burned so dim that his movements were vague and uncertain. His body cast great flickering shadows on the half-seen wall. From his throat there issued a low wail in which the word wah! wah! could be distinguished.
The excitement was intense.
“What does wah mean?” whispered Mr. Spillikins.
“Hush!” said Mr. Snoop; “it means, ‘O Buddha, wherever thou art in thy lofty Nirvana, descend yet once in astral form before our eyes!’”
Mr. Yahi-Bahi rose. He was seen to place one finger on his lips and then, silently moving across the room, he disappeared behind the screen. Of what Mr. Ram Spudd was doing during this period there is no record. It was presumed that he was still praying.
The stillness was now absolute.
“We must wait in perfect silence,” whispered Mr. Snoop from the extreme tips of his lips.
Everybody sat in strained intensity, silent, looking towards the vague outline of the sideboard.
The minutes passed. No one moved. All were spellbound in expectancy.
Still the minutes passed. The taper had flickered down till the great room was almost in darkness.
Could it be that by some neglect in the preparations, the substitution perhaps of the wrong brandy, the astralization could not be effected?
But no.
Quite suddenly, it seemed, everybody in the darkened room was aware of a presence. That was the word as afterwards repeated in a hundred confidential discussions. A presence. One couldn’t call it a body. It wasn’t. It was a figure, an astral form, a presence.
“Buddha!” they gasped as they looked at it.
Just how the figure entered the room, the spectators could never afterwards agree. Some thought it appeared through the wall, deliberately astralizing itself as it passed through the bricks. Others seemed to have seen it pass in at the farther door of the room, as if it had astralized itself at the foot of the stairs in the back of the hall outside.
Be that as it may, there it stood before them, the astralized shape of the Indian deity, so that to every lip there rose the half-articulated word, “Buddha”; or at least to every lip except that of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. From her there came no sound.
The figure as afterwards described was attired in a long shirak, such as is worn by the Grand Llama of Tibet, and resembling, if the comparison were not profane, a modern dressing-gown. The legs, if one might so call them, of the apparition were enwrapped in loose punjahamas, a word which is said to be the origin of the modern pyjamas; while the feet, if they were feet, were encased in loose slippers.
Buddha moved slowly across the room. Arrived at the sideboard the astral figure paused, and even in the uncertain light Buddha was seen to raise and drink the propitiatory offering. That much was perfectly clear. Whether Buddha spoke or not is doubtful. Certain of the spectators thought that he said, ‘Must a fagotnit’, which is Hindustanee for “Blessings on this house.” To Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s distracted mind it seemed as if Buddha said, “I must have forgotten it” But this wild fancy she never breathed to a soul.
Silently Buddha recrossed the room, slowly wiping one arm across his mouth after the Hindu gesture of farewell.
For perhaps a full minute after the disappearance of Buddha not a soul moved. Then quite suddenly Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, unable to stand the tension any longer, pressed an electric switch and the whole room was flooded with light.
There sat the affrighted guests staring at one another with pale faces.
But, to the amazement and horror of all, the little table in the centre stood empty — not a single gem, not a fraction of the gold that had lain upon it was left. All had disappeared.
The truth seemed to burst upon everyone at once. There was no doubt of what had happened.
The gold and the jewels had been deastralized. Under the occult power of the vision they had been demonetized, engulfed into the astral plane along with the vanishing Buddha.
Filled with the sense of horror still to come, somebody pulled aside the little screen. They fully expected to find the lifeless bodies of Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the faithful Ram Spudd. What they saw before them was more dreadful still. The outer Oriental garments of the two devotees lay strewn upon the floor. The long sash of Yahi-Bahi and the thick turban of Ram Spudd were side by side near them; almost sickening in its repulsive realism was the thick black head of hair of the junior devotee, apparently torn from his scalp as if by lightning and bearing a horrible resemblance to the cast-off wig of an actor.
The truth was too plain.
“They are engulfed!” cried a dozen voices at once.
It was realized in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd had paid the penalty of their daring with their lives. Through some fatal neglect, against which they had fairly warned the participants of the seance, the two Orientals had been carried bodily in the astral plane.
“How dreadful!” murmured Mr. Snoop. “We must have made some awful error.”
“Are they deastralized?” murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.
“Not a doubt of it,” said Mr. Snoop.
And then another voice in the group was heard to say, “We must hush it up. We can’t have it known!”
On which a chorus of voices joined in, everybody urging that it must be hushed up.
“Couldn’t you try to reastralize them?” said somebody to Mr. Snoop.
“No, no,” said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. “Better not try to. We must hush it up if we can.”
And the general assent to this sentiment showed that, after all, the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to Others, had taken a real root in the society.
“Hush it up,” cried everybody, and there was a general move towards the hall.
“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Mrs. Buncomhearst; “our wraps!”
“Deastralized!” said the guests.
There was a moment of further consternation as everybody gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and wraps had lain.
“Never mind,” said everybody, “let’s go without them — don’t stay. Just think if the police should—”
And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop of the horses of the police patrol wagon.
“The police!” cried everybody. “Hush it up! Hush it up!” For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to the police.
In another moment the doorbell of the house rang with a long and violent peal, and in a second as it seemed, the whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in blue.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,” cried a loud, firm voice from the sidewalk. “We have them both. Everything is here. We got them before they’d gone a block. But if you don’t mind, the police must get a couple of names for witnesses in the warrant.”
It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer attired as such. He wore the uniform of an inspector of police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.
And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the deastralized forms of Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore long overcoats, doubtless the contents of the magic parcels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron on the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps in the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped white in patches.
They were making no attempt to break away. Indeed, Mr. Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate, which is attained only by long services in state penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.
“We were waiting for them,” explained a tall police officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round him with a return of courage. “They had the stuff in a hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You’ll find everything all right, I think, ladies,” he added, as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs up the steps.
Somehow many of the ladies realized at the moment what cheery, safe, reliable people policemen in blue are, and what a friendly, familiar shelter they offer against the wiles of Oriental occultism.
“Are they old criminals?” someone asked.
“Yes, ma’am. They’ve worked this same thing in four cities already, and both of them have done time, and lots of it. They’ve only been out six months. No need to worry over them,” he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.
So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol wagon where they seated themselves with a composure worthy of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as “boys,” and to remark that they had “got them good” that time.
So the seance ended and the guests vanished, and the Yahi-Bahi Society terminated itself without even a vote of dissolution.
And in all the later confidential discussions of the episode only one point of mysticism remained. After they had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger of arrest, the members of the society realized that on one point the police were entirely off the truth of things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said, from Missouri, had actually succeeded in reastralizing Buddha.
Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself.
“For after all,” she said, “if it was not Buddha, who was it?”
And the question was never answered.
The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins
ALMOST ANY DAY, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.
To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident, their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the boys were all at Mr. Wackem’s Academy for Exceptional Youths in the foothills of Tennessee, and while their mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spending the winter on the Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not allow herself to have the boys with her.
