The Devil's Guard, page 27
"No use. It leaves off at the head. His heart is sound enough, but when the brain sees disadvantages the head prevails. His brain is full of terror. Calm that."
"I have tried, but he becomes afraid of me."
"He is dreaming of nothing but dugpas. The whole universe seems full of evil to him. He has been badly poisoned. Get into his dream and let him see that what he fears is but the other side of what he loves. Make haste."
What Lhaten did then neither Grim nor I discovered, although we were almost exactly agreed, afterward, about the conversation and we both saw Lhaten sit down by Chullunder Ghose's head. Thereafter, Rao Singh monopolized attention, striding over to us where we sat together on the yak-skin bench, our backs against the wall.
And that is another circumstance in favor of the dream theory. I may have been too weak to stand, but I can not imagine that Grim would have remained seated if he had been awake; ordinary manners would have made him stand up. When we discussed it afterward, Grim was as sure as I that both of us remained exactly as we were.
Rao Singh stood still and looked at us, his penetrating blue eyes dwelling first on Grim's face, then on mine. He was not exactly awe-inspiring; he impressed one much too favorably for a sense of awe to creep into the feeling, which was rather of confidence combined with inability to understand him. There was no vanity about his dignity, no condemnation in his frown. When he spoke after several minutes he began in the middle of a sentence, as if he had been talking to us since he came into the hut:
"—So you think it matters what is said of you, or what is done to you. But I tell you, nothing matters to you except what you think, and what you do to other people. If you expect praise for what you do and adulation in return for what you think, you may just as well give up thinking, because the world will only praise what pleases it and will only tolerate what does not cause it the necessity to think. It stifles thought with ostracism and with bayonets, and then flatters itself how wise it is. How wise are you?"
He smiled, stood silent for a moment, and then went away and left us.
Neither of us spoke. I dare say it was twenty minutes before Grim asked whether I remembered just what Rao Singh had said and we began comparing notes. It first occurred to us it might have been a dream when we found that we did not agree as to minor details. Even then we did not care to interrupt Lhaten, who was motionless in meditation near the babu. But when Lhaten moved at last and stood up Grim asked him whether Rao Singh had gone for good, or whether we might expect him again presently.
"From Rao Singh you will never know what to expect except benevolence," he answered.
So I put the question bluntly: "Was he here, or was he not here?"
He looked at me a moment rather keenly and then answered:
"Before you will ever know much about Rao Singh you will have to learn not to discuss him. Not that it injures him in any way, but gossip is a rolling stone that runs downhill. Many a man who was climbing uphill has been hit by that stone and discouraged or else hurt. Some, who are nearer the bottom, where the stone has much more impetus, are crushed."
"Were we awake or asleep?" I asked.
"My back was turned," he answered. "Sleeping and waking are relative terms. Very few people indeed are awake at all until they die. Your friend Chullunder Ghose is feeling better."
Chapter Twenty-Four—Chullunder Ghose.
What shall it profit a man if he know more than he can possibly perform? Or if he can do more than he understands? Be moderate in all things, so preserving equilibrium, which is a form of justice that the gods love.—From The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsang Samdup
Chullunder Ghose recovered slowly, and suffered more than we did from the altitude, but from the moment his consciousness fully returned he seemed to have the same experience of thinking, as it were, in high relief with all the mental images appearing rounded and solid, instead of flat and spectral. Plus was plus; minus was minus; there was no borderland of doubt between them.
Unexpectedly he grieved over Narayan Singh, whom he had urged us not to bring on the expedition and with whom he had never arrived on terms of intimacy.
"Sahibs, I was jealous of that Sikh. I loved him. He was a fighting fool, as sure to go off as a stick of dynamite. I was afraid of him. I hated his way of sitting by a fireside with that little hone and sharpening his saber. But I would give all I have to be able to wear such blinkers as he wore, and to have such firmity of purpose. Firmity of purpose—ah! To understand too much and see too much is my infirmity, since I see all around a thing. I see absurdities, where other men see only opportunities for valor. Sahibs, knowledge is a dreadful handicap. I envied that man Narayan Singh his blindness; he could not see the absurdity of things, and so he died a hero. But I fear me, I shall die in bed, which is of all abominations the least tolerable because it is the essence of expectedness and almost any fool can do it."
We remained three weeks in that stone but on the grim, white, wind- swept shoulder of a mountain, eating food that Lhaten and his men provided from I don't know what source and recovering strength slowly but without relapse. Lhaten would not hear of our moving on before I was fit to make long marches, although he made no such stipulation as regarded Chullunder Ghose.
"For if our starting should depend on him, we might stay here a long time," he remarked as he eyed the babu sharply.
Chullunder Ghose, I thought, seemed disappointed by that decision. Announcement that Lhaten's men would carry him aroused no noticeable satisfaction. He was not ill-tempered, but he wore an air of martyrdom when Lhaten's men at last brought in the litter—and he was hoisted shoulder-high by four great smiling stalwarts who made nothing of the weight and only moved with greater dignity beneath it. He waved an almost tearful farewell to the but.
I walked beside him for a while, until the track grew narrow and too rough for anything but single file; and it occurred to me to ask him why he had shown such affection for the hut.
"I bade goodby to all romance!" he answered. "Sahib, we are going to where they will teach us the truth about all our illusions, and I have too few illusions as it is!"
He had some, nevertheless, though I am not quite sure what shape the most attractive of them took. At the end of three days' exhausting struggle with the wind over a mountain trail that followed the line of a watershed, we started to descend toward a river that we learned from Lhaten was the Tsang-po. The following afternoon we entered a hermit's cave, about a hundred feet above the river that came thundering through an ice-encrusted gorge around a turn a mile away on our left hand, widened and shallowed in front of the cave but flowed too rapidly to freeze except along the banks, and plunged over a cataract a mile below us. Over beyond the river was another range of mountains, snow-clad, and with no trail visible. Either Chullunder Ghose imagined he could swim that river, or else he suffered from the equally ridiculous delusion that we would let him drown himself. He climbed down to the water's edge by rough steps hewn in the rock, and the only reason why I followed him was that I wanted to study the rock formation where a buttress of the mountain jutted out into the stream. Suddenly Grim shouted front the cave mouth—pointed—and I saw Chullunder Ghose struggling in the river as the ice-cold current swept him toward midstream.
There was nothing in sight that would float and I had to plunge after him, cursing his bad manners, for the water chilled the very marrow in one's bones and, though it was no task to overhaul him, it was desperate work to reach the rock-staked shore across that current. Ice froze in my hair as I swam, and I could hear the thunder of the cataract grow louder as I caught the babu by the neck of his cloak, pulled him over on his back, and tried to turn toward the bank.
It was impossible. The only chance we had was to go forward with the current in the hope of being thrown up on an ice-covered beach across the river; and we never could have reached that if two men had not put out from the farther side in a sort of coracle made of inflated skins which they let out by a rope made fast to the shore and, paddling furiously, guided across our course. They hauled us into the unsteady craft and let it swing down current by the rope until it struck the ice at the edge of the beach, where it bucked and swayed and we had to jump toward ice strong enough to bear our united weight, whence we dragged the coracle, with the babu lying in the bottom of it, to the beach and safety.
Then we ran, dragging the babu with us, and lay breathless on a cave floor by a drift-wood fire while four men stripped us naked and rubbed warmth into our bones. Another dried our clothing at the fire.
It was an hour before Grim and Lhaten came, since they had to wait for another coracle to work its way across the river for them. And by that time it was dark. Grim said nothing, but sat down beside the fire when he had noticed I was not much worse for the experience. The Tibetans who had rescued us sat near him with the firelight on their faces, making them look like disembodied spirits framed in the flickering gloom. Lhaten paced to and fro with his hands behind him, paused after a while and, looking at the babu, said abruptly:
"So. Well, we have crossed the river."
That was the only comment any of us made. In less than half-an-hour, before supper was ready, Chullunder Ghose was in delirium and raging fever. Lhaten brought snow and packed him in it, alternating that with sheep-skins, motioning the rest of us away, requesting silence and taking his place at last, cross-legged, near the babu's head. There he remained the whole night long, except that once or twice when I awoke I heard him ordering one of those Tibetans who had rescued us to bring more ice. In the morning the fever was less and the babu was breathing easily but still unconscious. Lhaten told us we must march at once, but added, pointing at the babu:
"Don't question him. Don't speak of it. That sort of fear is like a sleeping snake. If you stir it, it strikes."
That day's march was the hardest of them all. The litter bearers had to pass their load from hand to hand up naked cliffs where there was hardly foothold and the wind blew such a gale that sometimes there was nothing possible to do but cling with hand and toe to the projections and wait for a lull. There was a coulair where the sky looked like a patch of smooth glass resting on the summit of the walls and, as we climbed, infinity appeared to yawn beneath us. Once, between the ridges of a parallel escarpment, we passed through a tunnel of snow and ice, through which the sun shone as if through heaps of jewelry. And there was one descent, of a mile or more, on sheet ice that we had to break for foothold. Lhaten led, pausing only to pay attention to Chullunder Ghose.
It was sunset when we reached this cave in which I am now writing. It is a long cave with two entrances that are very nearly at a right angle, and at the angle's apex, facing the cave's interior, there is the tall, carved image of a seated man, who rather resembles Rodin's Thinker, except that his features are Asiatic and his figure like an Athenian's of the time of Pericles. He is carved from a block of marble that crops out from between retaining walls of porphyry. The rest of the cave is partly porphyry and partly limestone.
There, that night, we slept, dog-weary. In the morning Lhaten said that Grim should go with him, but said he did not know how long Grim was likely to be absent. He offered to leave two Tibetans, one to tend the fire and cook for us, the other to help me with Chullunder Ghose, adding that a messenger would come at intervals with food and medicine. So Grim and I restated the terms of our bargain, argued a little about it and shook hands. I haven't seen him since he strode away across the snow, two paces behind Lhaten.
There is a sort of altar in the middle of the cave, half-marble and half-porphyry, as smooth as glass except where broken, and the floor around it has been worn smooth by the tread of countless feet, although it does not seem to have been used for centuries. I got up on the altar and sat there after I had watched Grim vanish over the horizon, and for a while a sense of abject loneliness swept over me. The cave felt like a sepulcher. The cold, and the wind moaning in through the double entrance added physical discomfort. I began to feel as though I were going mad. I even went to the cave mouth with the thought of hurrying after Grim and calling him back to reconsider things but returned, determined to control myself by giving full attention to Chullunder Ghose.
He had no fever. He was lying in a sort of comatose condition, conscious, perfectly aware of me and of what had happened recently, but apparently unwilling to speak. I felt inclined to kick and shake him to arouse his will, but remembered what Lhaten had said about fear. I did not want to kick him into kingdom come or to terrify the reason put of him. Lhaten had restored his physical condition; he was breathing naturally and his pulse, if anything, was too quick. It was fear, it seemed to me, that had him by the brain and I wondered why Lhaten had not found some means to relieve it.
There was nothing else for me to do but occupy my mind with him and I began to try to think of ways of stirring up his will, to make him think of something else than what obsessed him and begin to talk. For a while I sang—all the idiotic songs I could remember—even danced, clowning for him as I used to do for men in mining camps to get them in a reasonable humor. But though I grew warm with the effort and recovered something of my own equanimity, it was afternoon before I found the way to manage the babu.
I sat down where he could not see me, near his head, as Lhaten had done, and began to moan. I haven't cried for thirty years, but I can sob behind my hands like a Worthington pump with an overload and valves that need repacking. I can sound like a man with a broken heart and a cow with her throat cut moaning a duet. I kept that up for fifteen minutes, until at last the babu's voice said very wearily:
"What is it, Rammy sahib? Are you also hopeless person?"
I pretended not to hear him and sobbed on, inserting a crescendo bar or two suggestive of hysteria. At last he sat up.
"Rammy sahib, let us make clean breast of miserable business!"
I sat in shadow, so he could not see I was dry-eyed, and in another minute he himself was crying, the tears streaming down into the coarse black beard that had made him hardly recognizable.
"Rammy sahib, I am miserable babu!" he exclaimed. "Oh, would that I had died the way the Sikh did! I can not go forward. I shall not submit to being made to see more clearly than I do. Yet, if I turn back I am self-confessed coward! Furthermore, how can I turn back! How shall I reach India, alone, alive? As a corpse I should no longer interest myself. And if I should succeed in reaching India, I should despise myself, because you and Jimgrim treated me as fellow man and yet I failed you. On the other hand, if I go forward they will teach me the reality of things, of which already I know much too much! It has been bad enough as failed B.A. to stick my tongue into my cheek and flatter blind men— pompous Englishmen and supine Indians—for a living. I have had to eat dust from the wheels of what the politicians think is progress; and I have had to be polite when I was patronized by men whom I should pity if I had the heart to do it! And I could endure it, Rammy sahib, because I only knew more than was good for me and not all of it by any means! I do not wish to know more. If I saw more clearly I should have to join the revolutionaries— who are worse than those they revolute against! It is already bad enough to have to toady to the snobs on top. To have to agree with the snobs underneath, who seek to level all men to a common meanness since they can not admire any sort of superiority—that would be living death! I would rather pretend to admire the Englishman whose snobbery exasperates me, than repeat the lies of Indians whose only object is to do dishonestly and badly but much more cleverly what the English do honestly and with all the stupidity of which they are capable!" I suggested that wisdom, if that should prove to be the essence of Sham-bha-la's teaching, almost certainly would counterbalance revelation of the dismalness of things with knowledge of effective remedies.
"No, no!" he almost screamed. "No more! Wisdom only makes the heart ache. For a babu with a wife and children ignorance is the best condition. But you also were weeping, Rammy sahib. You must tell me why you wept."
I told him the plain truth about it: that I had pretended, in order to get him to talk. At that he threw himself down on the blankets in abject misery, beating the floor with his fists.
"Krishna! How I wish I had refused to come with you!" he shouted. "Then I should have suffered only from regret. But now what shall I do? WHAT SHALL I DO?"
I went and climbed back on the altar, and sat there until one of the Tibetans came and cooked our supper at a small fire over in the farthest corner of the cave. I did not know what Grim would have to say to the determination that was forming in my mind and setting there as solidly as concrete. It was growing clear to me that I had neither right nor inclination either to compel Chullunder Ghose to go another yard with us or to desert him. Yet I knew that Grim would not desert me. I was torn between unwillingness to rob Grim of his goal and obligation, as clear as daylight, to stand by a man who had done nothing to forfeit our friendship.
"I will take you back to India," I said at last. "I don't know how. We shall have to ask Lhaten for guides and provisions. I will wait for Grim in India if we can persuade him not to come back with us."
During that night and the following day Chullunder Ghose spoke only at rare intervals. There was something he was turning over in his mind, but whenever he tried to speak of it he always checked himself and seemed to go back to his thinking. He was silent when, at sunset, a man came into the cave and handed me a note from Grim, scribbled in pencil on a leaf torn from a memorandum book.
"All right, Jeff. Come forward. I am waiting in a guest house and can see our destination from the window. I refused pointblank to go another yard without you, but I never was so keen on anything in all my life. However, the bearer of this, who is somebody, will doubtless do his best to scare both of you of the lot, so summon all your resolution, put the spurs into Chullunder Ghose, and come soon. J.G."
I read the note by firelight and then looked up at the man who brought it to me. He was tall, straight, robed in yak-skin, bearded, neither a Tibetan nor a Rajput. He resembled Michael Angelo—or John Singer Sargent's painting of Moses. It was difficult to see him in the firelight.
