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The ninth vibration and other stories

by L. Adams Beck · English · Gutenberg #1853 · 392,470 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The ninth vibration and other stories

Author: L. Adams Beck


        
Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1853]
                Most recently updated: November 1, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1853

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NINTH VIBRATION AND OTHER STORIES ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





THE NINTH VIBRATION AND OTHER STORIES

By L. Adams Beck




CONTENTS:

     THE NINTH VIBRATION

     THE INTERPRETER A ROMANCE OF THE EAST

     THE INCOMPARABLE LADY A STORY OF CHINA WITH A MORAL

     THE HATRED OF THE QUEEN A STORY OF BURMA

     FIRE OF BEAUTY

     THE BUILDING OF THE TAJ MAHAL

     “HOW GREAT IS THE GLORY OF KWANNON!”

     “THE ROUND-FACED BEAUTY”




THE NINTH VIBRATION

There is a place uplifted nine thousand feet in purest air where one
of the most ancient tracks in the world runs from India into Tibet.
It leaves Simla of the Imperial councils by a stately road; it passes
beyond, but now narrowing, climbing higher beside the khuds or steep
drops to the precipitous valleys beneath, and the rumor of Simla grows
distant and the way is quiet, for, owing to the danger of driving horses
above the khuds, such baggage as you own must be carried by coolies, and
you yourself must either ride on horseback or in the little horseless
carriage of the Orient, here drawn and pushed by four men. And presently
the deodars darken the way with a solemn presence, for--

  “These are the Friars of the wood,
  The Brethren of the Solitude
  Hooded and grave--”

their breath most austerely pure in the gradually chilling air. Their
companies increase and now the way is through a great wood where it
has become a trail and no more, and still it climbs for many miles and
finally a rambling bungalow, small and low, is sighted in the deeps of
the trees, a mountain stream from unknown heights falling beside it. And
this is known as the House in the Woods. Very few people are permitted
to go there, for the owner has no care for money and makes no provision
for guests. You must take your own servant and the khansamah will cook
you such simple food as men expect in the wilds, and that is all. You
stay as long as you please and when you leave not even a gift to the
khansamah is permitted.

I had been staying in Ranipur of the plains while I considered the
question of getting to Upper Kashmir by the route from Simla along the
old way to Chinese Tibet where I would touch Shipki in the Dalai
Lama’s territory and then pass on to Zanskar and so down to Kashmir--a
tremendous route through the Himalaya and a crowning experience of
the mightiest mountain scenery in the world. I was at Ranipur for the
purpose of consulting my old friend Olesen, now an irrigation official
in the Rampur district--a man who had made this journey and nearly lost
his life in doing it. It is not now perhaps so dangerous as it was, and
my life was of no particular value to any one but myself, and the plan
interested me.

I pass over the long discussions of ways and means in the blinding heat
of Ranipur. Olesen put all his knowledge at my service and never uttered
a word of the envy that must have filled him as he looked at the
distant snows cool and luminous in blue air, and, shrugging good-natured
shoulders, spoke of the work that lay before him on the burning
plains until the terrible summer should drag itself to a close. We had
vanquished the details and were smoking in comparative silence one night
on the veranda, when he said in his slow reflective way;

“You don’t like the average hotel, Ormond, and you’ll like it still less
up Simla way with all the Simla crowd of grass-widows and fellows out
for as good a time as they can cram into the hot weather. I wonder if I
could get you a permit for The House in the Woods while you re waiting
to fix up your men and route for Shipki.”

He explained and of course I jumped at the chance. It belonged, he said,
to a man named Rup Singh, a pandit, or learned man of Ranipur. He had
always spent the summer there, but age and failing health made this
impossible now, and under certain conditions he would occasionally allow
people known to friends of his own to put up there.

“And Rup Singh and I are very good friends,” Olesen said; “I won his
heart by discovering the lost Sukh Mandir, or Hall of Pleasure, built
many centuries ago by a Maharao of Ranipur for a summer retreat in the
great woods far beyond Simla. There are lots of legends about it here in
Ranipur. They call it The House of Beauty. Rup Singh’s ancestor had been
a close friend of the Maharao and was with him to the end, and that’s
why he himself sets such store on the place. You have a good chance if I
ask for a permit.

“He told me the story and since it is the heart of my own I give it
briefly. Many centuries ago the Ranipur Kingdom was ruled by the Maharao
Rai Singh a prince of the great lunar house of the Rajputs. Expecting
a bride from some far away kingdom (the name of this is unrecorded)
he built the Hall of Pleasure as a summer palace, a house of rare and
costly beauty. A certain great chamber he lined with carved figures of
the Gods and their stories, almost unsurpassed for truth and life. So,
with the pine trees whispering about it the secret they sigh to tell,
he hoped to create an earthly Paradise with this Queen in whom all
loveliness was perfected. And then some mysterious tragedy ended all
his hopes. It was rumoured that when the Princess came to his court,
she was, by some terrible mistake, received with insult and offered the
position only of one of his women. After that nothing was known. Certain
only is it that he fled to the hills, to the home of his broken hope,
and there ended his days in solitude, save for the attendance of two
faithful friends who would not abandon him even in the ghostly quiet of
the winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral moon
stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath. Of
these two Rup Singh’s ancestor was one. And in his thirty fifth year
the Maharao died and his beauty and strength passed into legend and his
kingdom was taken by another and the jungle crept silently over his Hall
of Pleasure and the story ended.

“There was not a memory of the place up there,” Olesen went on.
“Certainly I never heard anything of it when I went up to the Shipki
in 1904. But I had been able to be useful to Rup Singh and he gave me a
permit for The House in the Woods, and I stopped there for a few days’
shooting. I remember that day so well. I was wandering in the dense
woods while my men got their midday grub, and I missed the trail somehow
and found myself in a part where the trees were dark and thick and the
silence heavy as lead. It was as if the trees were on guard--they stood
shoulder to shoulder and stopped the way. Well, I halted, and had a
notion there was something beyond that made me doubt whether to go on.
I must have stood there five minutes hesitating. Then I pushed on,
bruising the thick ferns under my shooting boots and stooping under the
knotted boughs. Suddenly I tramped out of the jungle into a clearing,
and lo and behold a ruined House, with blocks of marble lying all about
it, and carved pillars and a great roof all being slowly smothered
by the jungle. The weirdest thing you ever saw. I climbed some fallen
columns to get a better look, and as I did I saw a face flash by at the
arch of a broken window. I sang out in Hindustani, but no answer: only
the echo from the woods. Somehow that dampened my ardour, and I didn’t
go in to what seemed like a great ruined hall for the place was so
eerie and lonely, and looked mighty snaky into the bargain. So I came
ingloriously away and told Rup Singh. And his whole face changed. ‘That
is The House of Beauty,’ he said. ‘All my life have I sought it and in
vain. For, friend of my soul, a man must lose himself that he may find
himself and what lies beyond, and the trodden path has ever been my
doom. And you who have not sought have seen. Most strange are the way
of the Gods’. Later on I knew this was why he had always gone up yearly,
thinking and dreaming God knows what. He and I tried for the place
together, but in vain and the whole thing is like a dream. Twice he has
let friends of mine stay at The House in the Woods, and I think he won’t
refuse now.”

“Did he ever tell you the story?”

“Never. I only know what I’ve picked up here. Some horrible mistake
about the Rani that drove the man almost mad with remorse. I’ve heard
bits here and there. There’s nothing so vital as tradition in India.”

“I wonder’. what really happened.”

“That we shall never know. I got a little old picture of the
Maharao--said to be painted by a Pahari artist. It’s not likely to be
authentic, but you never can tell. A Brahman sold it to me that he might
complete his daughter’s dowry, and hated doing it.”

“May I see it?”

“Why certainly. Not a very good light, but--can do,” as the Chinks say.

He brought it out rolled in silk stuff and I carried it under the
hanging lamp. A beautiful young man indeed, with the air of race
these people have beyond all others;--a cold haughty face, immovably
dignified. He sat with his hands resting lightly on the arms of his
chair of State. A crescent of rubies clasped the folds of the turban and
from this sprang an aigrette scattering splendours. The magnificent hilt
of a sword was ready beside him. The face was not only beautiful but
arresting.

“A strange picture,” I said. “The artist has captured the man himself.
I can see him trampling on any one who opposed him, and suffering in the
same cold secret way. It ought to be authentic if it isn’t. Don’t you
know any more?”

“Nothing. Well--to bed, and tomorrow I’ll see Rup Singh.”

I was glad when he returned with the permission. I was to be very
careful, he said, to make no allusion to the lost palace, for two women
were staying at the House in the Woods--a mother and daughter to whom
Rup Singh had granted hospitality because of an obligation he must
honor. But with true Oriental distrust of women he had thought fit to
make no confidence to them. I promised and asked Olesen if he knew them.

“Slightly. Canadians of Danish blood like my own. Their name is Ingmar.
Some people think the daughter good-looking. The mother is supposed
to be clever; keen on occult subjects which she came back to India to
study. The husband was a great naturalist and the kindest of men. He
almost lived in the jungle and the natives had all sorts of rumours
about his powers. You know what they are. They said the birds and beasts
followed him about. Any old thing starts a legend.”

“What was the connection with Rup Singh?”

“He was in difficulties and undeservedly, and Ingmar generously lent
him money at a critical time, trusting to his honour for repayment. Like
most Orientals he never forgets a good turn and would do anything for
any of the family--except trust the women with any secret he valued. The
father is long dead. By the way Rup Singh gave me a queer message for
you. He said; ‘Tell the Sahib these words--“Let him who finds water in
the desert share his cup with him who dies of thirst.” He is certainly
getting very old. I don’t suppose he knew himself what he meant.”

I certainly did not. However my way was thus smoothed for me and I took
the upward road, leaving Olesen to the long ungrateful toil of the man
who devotes his life to India without sufficient time or knowledge to
make his way to the inner chambers of her beauty. There is no harder
mistress unless you hold the pass-key to her mysteries, there is none of
whom so little can be told in words but who kindles so deep a passion.
Necessity sometimes takes me from that enchanted land, but when the
latest dawns are shining in my skies I shall make my feeble way back to
her and die at her worshipped feet. So I went up from Kalka.

I have never liked Simla. It is beautiful enough--eight thousand feet
up in the grip of the great hills looking toward the snows, the famous
summer home of the Indian Government. Much diplomacy is whispered
on Observatory Hill and many are the lighter diversions of which Mr.
Kipling and lesser men have written. But Simla is also a gateway to many
things--to the mighty deodar forests that clothe the foot-hills of the
mountains, to Kulu, to the eternal snows, to the old, old bridle way
that leads up to the Shipki Pass and the mysteries of Tibet--and to the
strange things told in this story. So I passed through with scarcely a
glance at the busy gayety of the little streets and the tiny shops
where the pretty ladies buy their rouge and powder. I was attended by
my servant Ali Khan, a Mohammedan from Nagpur, sent up with me by Olesen
with strong recommendation. He was a stout walker, so too am I, and an
inveterate dislike to the man-drawn carriage whenever my own legs would
serve me decided me to walk the sixteen miles to the House in the Woods,
sending on the baggage. Ali Khan despatched it and prepared to follow
me, the fine cool air of the hills giving us a zest.

“Subhan Alla! (Praise be to God!) the air is sweet!” he said, stepping
out behind me. “What time does the Sahib look to reach the House?”

“About five or six. Now, Ali Khan, strike out of the road. You know the
way.”

So we struck up into the glorious pine woods, mountains all about us.
Here and there as we climbed higher was a little bank of forgotten
snow, but spring had triumphed and everywhere was the waving grace of
maiden-hair ferns, banks of violets and strangely beautiful little wild
flowers. These woods are full of panthers, but in day time the only
precaution necessary is to take no dog,--a dainty they cannot resist.
The air was exquisite with the sun-warm scent of pines, and here and
there the trees broke away disclosing mighty ranges of hills covered
with rich blue shadows like the bloom on a plum,--the clouds chasing the
sunshine over the mountain sides and the dark green velvet of the robe
of pines. I looked across ravines that did not seem gigantic and yet the
villages on the other side were like a handful of peas, so tremendous
was the scale. I stood now and then to see the rhododendrons, forest
trees here with great trunks and massive boughs glowing with blood-red
blossom, and time went by and I took no count of it, so glorious was the
climb.

It must have been hours later when it struck me that the sun was getting
low and that by now we should be nearing The House in the Woods. I said
as much to Ali Khan. He looked perplexed and agreed. We had reached
a comparatively level place, the trail faint but apparent, and it
surprised me that we heard no sound of life from the dense wood where
our goal must be.

“I know not, Presence,” he said. “May his face be blackened that
directed me. I thought surely I could not miss the way, and yet-”

We cast back and could see no trail forking from the one we were on.
There was nothing for it but to trust to luck and push on. But I began
to be uneasy and so was the man. I had stupidly forgotten to unpack
my revolver, and worse, we had no food, and the mountain air is an
appetiser, and at night the woods have their dangers, apart from being
absolutely trackless. We had not met a living being since we left the
road and there seemed no likelihood of asking for directions. I stopped
no longer for views but went steadily on, Ali Khan keeping up a running
fire of low-voiced invocations and lamentations. And now it was dusk and
the position decidedly unpleasant.

It was at that moment I saw a woman before us walking lightly and
steadily under the pines. She must have struck into the trail from
the side for she never could have kept before us all the way. A native
woman, but wearing the all-concealing boorka, more like a town dweller
than a woman of the hills. I put on speed and Ali Khan, now very tired,
toiled on behind me as I came up with her and courteously asked the
way. Her face was entirely hidden, but the answering voice was clear and
sweet. I made up my mind she was young, for it had the bird-like thrill
of youth.

“If the Presence continues to follow this path he will arrive. It is not
far. They wait for him.”

That was all. It left me with a desire to see the veiled face. We passed
on and Ali Khan looked fearfully back.

“Ajaib! (Wonderful!) A strange place to meet one of the purdah-nashin
(veiled women)” he muttered. “What would she be doing up here in the
heights? She walked like a Khanam (khan’s wife) and I saw the gleam of
gold under the boorka.”

I turned with some curiosity as he spoke, and lo! there was no human
being in sight. She had disappeared from the track behind us and it was
impossible to say where. The darkening trees were beginning to hold the
dusk and it seemed unimaginable that a woman should leave the way and
take to the dangers of the woods.

“Puna-i-Khoda--God protect us!” said Ali Khan in a shuddering whisper.
“She was a devil of the wilds. Press on, Sahib. We should not be here in
the dark.”

There was nothing else to do. We made the best speed we could, and the
trees grew more dense and the trail fainter between the close trunks,
and so the night came bewildering with the expectation that we must pass
the night unfed and unarmed in the cold of the heights. They might send
out a search party from The House in the Woods--that was still a hope,
if there were no other. And then, very gradually and wonderfully the
moon dawned over the tree tops and flooded the wood with mysterious
silver lights and about her rolled the majesty of the stars. We pressed
on into the heart of the night. From the dense black depths we emerged
at last. An open glade lay before us--the trees falling back to right
and left to disclose--what?

A long low house of marble, unlit, silent, bathed in pale splendour and
shadow. About it stood great deodars, clothed in clouds of the white
blossoming clematis, ghostly and still. Acacias hung motionless trails
of heavily scented bloom as if carved in ivory. It was all silent as
death. A flight of nobly sculptured steps led up to a broad veranda and
a wide open door with darkness behind it. Nothing more.

I forced myself to shout in Hindustani--the cry seeming a brutal outrage
upon the night, and an echo came back numbed in the black woods. I tried
once more and in vain. We stood absorbed also into the silence.

“Ya Alla! it is a house of the dead!” whispered Ali Khan, shuddering at
my shoulder,--and even as the words left his lips I understood where we
were. “It is the Sukh Mandir.” I said. “It is the House of the Maharao
of Ranipur.”

It was impossible to be in Ranipur and hear nothing of the dead house
of the forest and Ali Khan had heard--God only knows what tales. In his
terror all discipline, all the inborn respect of the native forsook him,
and without word or sign he turned and fled along the track, crashing
through the forest blind and mad with fear. It would have been insanity
to follow him, and in India the first rule of life is that the Sahib
shows no fear, so I left him to his fate whatever it might be, believing
at the same time that a little reflection and dread of the lonely forest
would bring him to heel quickly.

I stood there and the stillness flowed like water about me. It was
as though I floated upon it--bathed in quiet. My thoughts adjusted
themselves. Possibly it was not the Sukh Mandir. Olesen had spoken of
ruin. I could see none. At least it was shelter from the chill which is
always present at these heights when the sun sets,--and it was beautiful
as a house not made with hands. There was a sense of awe but no fear as
I went slowly up the great steps and into the gloom beyond and so gained
the hall.

The moon went with me and from a carven arch filled with marble tracery
rained radiance that revealed and hid. Pillars stood about me, wonderful
with horses ramping forward as in the Siva Temple at Vellore. They
appeared to spring from the pillars into the gloom urged by invisible
riders, the effect barbarously rich and strange--motion arrested, struck
dumb in a violent gesture, and behind them impenetrable darkness. I
could not see the end of this hall--for the moon did not reach it, but
looking up I beheld the walls fretted in great panels into the utmost
splendour of sculpture, encircling the stories of the Gods amid a
twining and under-weaving of leaves and flowers. It was more like a
temple than a dwelling. Siva, as Nataraja the Cosmic Dancer, the Rhythm
of the Universe, danced before me, flinging out his arms in the passion
of creation. Kama, the Indian Eros, bore his bow strung with honey-sweet
black bees that typify the heart’s desire. Krishna the Beloved smiled
above the herd-maidens adoring at his feet. Ganesha the Elephant-Headed,
sat in massive calm, wreathing his wise trunk about him. And many more.
But all these so far as I could see tended to one centre panel larger
than any, representing two life-size figures of a dim beauty. At first
I could scarcely distinguish one from the other in the upward-reflected
light, and then, even as I stood, the moving moon revealed the two as
if floating in vapor. At once I recognized the subject--I had seen it
already in the ruined temple of Ranipur, though the details differed.
Parvati, the Divine Daughter of the Himalaya, the Emanation of the
mighty mountains, seated upon a throne, listening to a girl who played
on a Pan pipe before her. The goddess sat, her chin leaned upon her
hand, her shoulders slightly inclined in a pose of gentle sweetness,
looking down upon the girl at her feet, absorbed in the music of the
hills and lonely places. A band of jewels, richly wrought, clasped the
veil on her brows, and below the bare bosom a glorious girdle clothed
her with loops and strings and tassels of jewels that fell to her
knees--her only garment.

The girl was a lovely image of young womanhood, the proud swell of the
breast tapering to the slim waist and long limbs easily folded as she
half reclined at the divine feet, her lips pressed to the pipe. Its
silent music mysteriously banished fear. The sleep must be sweet
indeed that would come under the guardianship of these two fair
creatures--their gracious influence was dewy in the air. I resolved that
I would spend the night beside them. Now with the march of the moon dim
vistas of the walls beyond sprang into being. Strange mythologies--the
incarnations of Vishnu the Preserver, the Pastoral of Krishna the
Beautiful. I promised myself that next day I would sketch some of the
loveliness about me. But the moon was passing on her way--I folded the
coat I carried into a pillow and lay down at the feet of the goddess and
her nymph. Then a moonlit quiet I slept in a dream of peace.

Sleep annihilates time. Was it long or short when I woke like a man
floating up to the surface from tranquil deeps? That I cannot tell, but
once more I possessed myself and every sense was on guard.

My hearing first. Bare feet were coming, falling softly as leaves, but
unmistakable. There was a dim whispering but I could hear no word. I
rose on my elbow and looked down the long hall. Nothing. The moonlight
lay in pools of light and seas of shadow on the floor, and the feet drew
nearer. Was I afraid? I cannot tell, but a deep expectation possessed
me as the sound grew like the rustle of grasses parted in a fluttering
breeze, and now a girl came swiftly up the steps, irradiate in the
moonlight, and passing up the hall stood beside me. I could see her
robe, her feet bare from the jungle, but her face wavered and changed
and re-united like the face of a dream woman. I could not fix it for
one moment, yet knew this was the messenger for whom I had waited all
my life--for whom one strange experience, not to be told at present, had
prepared me in early manhood. Words came, and I said:

“Is this a dream?”

“No. We meet in the Ninth Vibration. All here is true.”

“Is a dream never true?”

“Sometimes it is the echo of the Ninth Vibration and therefore a
harmonic of truth. You are awake now. It is the day-time that is the
sleep of the soul. You are in the Lower Perception, wherein the truth
behind the veil of what men call Reality is perceived.”

“Can I ascend?”

“I cannot tell. That is for you, not me.

“What do I perceive tonight?”

“The Present as it is in the Eternal. Say no more. Come with me.”

She stretched her hand and took mine with the assurance of a goddess,
and we went up the hall where the night had been deepest between the
great pillars.

Now it is very clear to me that in every land men, when the doors of
perception are opened, will see what we call the Supernatural clothed
in the image in which that country has accepted it. Blake, the mighty
mystic, will see the Angels of the Revelation, driving their terrible
way above Lambeth--it is not common nor unclean. The fisherman, plying
his coracle on the Thames will behold the consecration of the great new
Abbey of Westminster celebrated with mass and chant and awful lights
in the dead mid-noon of night by that Apostle who is the Rock of the
Church. Before him who wanders in Thessaly Pan will brush the dewy
lawns and slim-girt Artemis pursue the flying hart. In the pale gold of
Egyptian sands the heavy brows of Osiris crowned with the pshent will
brood above the seer and the veil of Isis tremble to the lifting. For
all this is the rhythm to which the souls of men are attuned and in that
vibration they will see, and no other, since in this the very mountains
and trees of the land are rooted. So here, where our remote ancestors
worshipped the Gods of Nature, we must needs stand before the Mystic
Mother of India, the divine daughter of the Himalaya.

How shall I describe the world we entered? The carvings upon the walls
had taken life--they had descended. It was a gathering of the dreams men
have dreamed here of the Gods, yet most real and actual. They watched in
a serenity that set them apart in an atmosphere of their own--forms of
indistinct majesty and august beauty, absolute, simple, and everlasting.
I saw them as one sees reflections in rippled water--no more. But
all faces turned to the place where now a green and flowering leafage
enshrined and partly hid the living Nature Goddess, as she listened to
a voice that was not dumb to me. I saw her face only in glimpses of an
indescribable sweetness, but an influence came from her presence like
the scent of rainy pine forests, the coolness that breathes from great
rivers, the passion of Spring when she breaks on the world with a wave
of flowers. Healing and life flowed from it. Understanding also. It
seemed I could interpret the very silence of the trees outside into the
expression of their inner life, the running of the green life-blood in
their veins, the delicate trembling of their finger-tips.

My companion and I were not heeded. We stood hand in hand like children
who have innocently strayed into a palace, gazing in wonderment. The
august life went its way upon its own occasions, and, if we would, we
might watch. Then the voice, clear and cold, proceeding, as it were,
with some story begun before we had strayed into the Presence, the whole
assembly listening in silence.

“--and as it has been so it will be, for the Law will have the blind
soul carried into a body which is a record of the sins it has committed,
and will not suffer that soul to escape from rebirth into bodies until
it has seen the truth--”

And even as this was said and I listened, knowing myself on the verge of
some great knowledge, I felt sleep beginning to weigh upon my eyelids.
The sound blurred, flowed unsyllabled as a stream, the girl’s hand grew
light in mine; she was fading, becoming unreal; I saw her eyes like
faint stars in a mist. They were gone. Arms seemed to receive me--to lay
me to sleep and I sank below consciousness, and the night took me.

When I awoke the radiant arrows of the morning were shooting into the
long hall where I lay, but as I rose and looked about me, strange--most
strange, ruin encircled me everywhere. The blue sky was the roof. What I
had thought a palace lost in the jungle, fit to receive its King should
he enter, was now a broken hall of State; the shattered pillars were
festooned with waving weeds, the many coloured lantana grew between the
fallen blocks of marble. Even the sculptures on the walls were difficult
to decipher. Faintly I could trace a hand, a foot, the orb of a
woman’s bosom, the gracious outline of some young God, standing above a
crouching worshipper. No more. Yes, and now I saw above me as the dawn
touched it the form of the Dweller in the Windhya Hills, Parvati the
Beautiful, leaning softly over something breathing music at her feet.
Yet I knew I could trace the almost obliterated sculpture only because
I had already seen it defined in perfect beauty. A deep crack ran across
the marble; it was weathered and stained by many rains, and little ferns
grew in the crevices, but I could reconstruct every line from my own
knowledge. And how? The Parvati of Ranipur differed in many important
details. She stood, bending forward, wheras this sweet Lady sat. Her
attendants were small satyr-like spirits of the wilds, piping and
fluting, in place of the reclining maiden. The sweeping scrolls of a
great halo encircled her whole person. Then how could I tell what this
nearly obliterated carving had been? I groped for the answer and could
not find it. I doubted--

  “Were such things here as we do speak about?
  Or have we eaten of the insane root
  That takes the reason captive?”

Memory rushed over me like the sea over dry sands. A girl--there had
been a girl--we had stood with clasped hands to hear a strange music,
but in spite of the spiritual intimacy of those moments I could not
recall her face. I saw it cloudy against a background of night and
dream, the eyes remote as stars, and so it eluded me. Only her presence
and her words survived; “We meet in the Ninth Vibration. All here is
true.” But the Ninth Vibration itself was dream-land. I had never heard
the phrase--I could not tell what was meant, nor whether my apprehension
was true or false. I knew only that the night had taken her and the dawn
denied her, and that, dream or no dream, I stood there with a pang of
loss that even now leaves me wordless.

A bird sang outside in the acacias, clear and shrill for day, and this
awakened my senses and lowered me to the plane where I became aware of
cold and hunger, and was chilled with dew. I passed down the tumbled
steps that had been a stately ascent the night before and made my way
into the jungle by the trail, small and lost in fern, by which we had
come. Again I wandered, and it was high noon before I heard mule bells
at a distance, and, thus guided, struck down through the green tangle
to find myself, wearied but safe, upon the bridle way that leads to Fagu
and the far Shipki. Two coolies then directed me to The House in the
Woods.

All was anxiety there. Ali Khan had arrived in the night, having found
his way under the guidance of blind flight and fear. He had brought the
news that I was lost in the jungle and amid the dwellings of demons. It
was, of course, hopeless to search in the dark, though the khansamah and
his man had gone as far as they dared with lanterns and shouting,
and with the daylight they tried again and were even now away. It was
useless to reproach the man even if I had cared to do so. His ready plea
was that as far as men were concerned he was as brave as any (which
was true enough as I had reason to know later) but that when it came to
devilry the Twelve Imaums themselves would think twice before facing it.

“Inshalla ta-Alla! (If the sublime God wills!) this unworthy one will
one day show the Protector of the poor, that he is a respectable person
and no coward, but it is only the Sahibs who laugh in the face of
devils.”

He went off to prepare me some food, consumed with curiosity as to my
adventures, and when I had eaten I found my tiny whitewashed cell, for
the room was little more, and slept for hours.

Late in the afternoon I waked and looked out. A low but glowing
sunlight suffused the wild garden reclaimed from the strangle-hold of
the jungle and hemmed in with rocks and forest. A few simple flowers had
been planted here and there, but its chief beauty was a mountain stream,
brown and clear as the eyes of a dog, that fell from a crag above into
a rocky basin, maidenhair ferns growing in such masses about it that
it was henceforward scarcely more than a woodland voice. Beside it two
great deodars spread their canopies, and there a woman sat in a low
chair, a girl beside her reading aloud. She had thrown her hat off and
the sunshine turned her massed dark hair to bronze. That was all I could
see. I went out and joined them, taking the note of introduction which
Olesen had given me.

I pass over the unessentials of my story; their friendly greetings and
sympathy for my adventure. It set us at ease at once and I knew my stay
would be the happier for their presence though it is not every woman one
would choose as a companion in the great mountain country. But what
is germane to my purpose must be told, and of this a part is the
personality of Brynhild Ingmar. That she was beautiful I never doubted,
though I have heard it disputed and smiled inwardly as the disputants
urged lip and cheek and shades of rose and lily, weighing and
appraising. Let me describe her as I saw her or, rather, as I can,
adding that even without all this she must still have been beautiful
because of the deep significance to those who had eyes to see or
feel some mysterious element which mingled itself with her presence
comparable only to the delight which the power and spiritual essence of
Nature inspires in all but the dullest minds. I know I cannot hope to
convey this in words. It means little if I say I thought of all quiet
lovely solitary things when I looked into her calm eyes,--that when she
moved it was like clear springs renewed by flowing, that she seemed the
perfect flowering of a day in June, for these are phrases. Does Nature
know her wonders when she shines in her strength? Does a woman know the
infinite meanings her beauty may have for the beholder? I cannot tell.
Nor can I tell if I saw this girl as she may have seemed to those who
read only the letter of the book and are blind to its spirit, or in the
deepest sense as she really was in the sight of That which created her
and of which she was a part. Surely it is a proof of the divinity of
love that in and for a moment it lifts the veil of so-called reality and
shows each to the other mysteriously perfect and inspiring as the world
will never see them, but as they exist in the Eternal, and in the sight
of those who have learnt that the material is but the dream, and the
vision of love the truth.

I will say then, for the alphabet of what I knew but cannot tell, that
she had the low broad brows of a Greek Nature Goddess, the hair swept
back wing-like from the temples and massed with a noble luxuriance. It
lay like rippled bronze, suggesting something strong and serene in its
essence. Her eyes were clear and gray as water, the mouth sweetly curved
above a resolute chin. It was a face which recalled a modelling in
marble rather than the charming pastel and aquarelle of a young woman’s
colouring, and somehow I thought of it less as the beauty of a woman
than as some sexless emanation of natural things, and this impression
was strengthened by her height and the long limbs, slender and strong as
those of some youth trained in the pentathlon, subject to the severest
discipline until all that was superfluous was fined away and the perfect
form expressing the true being emerged. The body was thus more beautiful
than the face, and I may note in passing that this is often the case,
because the face is more directly the index of the restless and unhappy
soul within and can attain true beauty only when the soul is in harmony
with its source.

She was a little like her pale and wearied mother. She might resemble
her still more when the sorrow of this world that worketh death should
have had its will of her. I had yet to learn that this would never
be--that she had found the open door of escape.

We three spent much time together in the days that followed. I never
tired of their company and I think they did not tire of mine, for
my wanderings through the world and my studies in the ancient Indian
literatures and faiths with the Pandit Devaswami were of interest to
them both though in entirely different ways. Mrs. Ingmar was a woman who
centred all her interests in books and chiefly in the scientific forms
of occult research. She was no believer in anything outside the range
of what she called human experience. The evidences had convinced her of
nothing but a force as yet unclassified in the scientific categories and
all her interest lay in the undeveloped powers of brain which might be
discovered in the course of ignorant and credulous experiment. We met
therefore on the common ground of rejection of the so-called occultism
of the day, though I knew even then, and how infinitely better now, that
her constructions were wholly misleading.

Nearly all day she would lie in her chair under the deodars by the
delicate splash and ripple of the stream. Living imprisoned in the
crystal sphere of the intellect she saw the world outside, painted in
few but distinct colours, small, comprehensible, moving on a logical
orbit. I never knew her posed for an explanation. She had the contented
atheism of a certain type of French mind and found as much ease in it as
another kind of sweet woman does in her rosary and confessional.

“I cannot interest Brynhild,” she said, when I knew her better. “She has
no affinity with science. She is simply a nature worshipper, and in such
places as this she seems to draw life from the inanimate life about her.
I have sometimes wondered whether she might not be developed into a kind
of bridge between the articulate and the inarticulate, so well does she
understand trees and flowers. Her father was like that--he had all sorts
of strange power with animals and plants, and thought he had more than
he had. He could never realize that the energy of nature is merely
mechanical.”

“You think all energy is mechanical?”

“Certainly. We shall lay our finger on the mainspring one day and
the mystery will disappear. But as for Brynhild--I gave her the best
education possible and yet she has never understood the conception of a
universe moving on mathematical laws to which we must submit in body and
mind. She has the oddest ideas. I would not willingly say of a child of
mine that she is a mystic, and yet--”

She shook her head compassionately. But I scarcely heard. My eyes were
fixed on Brynhild, who stood apart, looking steadily out over the snows.
It was a glorious sunset, the west vibrating with gorgeous colour spilt
over in torrents that flooded the sky, Terrible splendours--hues for
which we have no thought--no name. I had not thought of it as music
until I saw her face but she listened as well as saw, and her expression
changed as it changes when the pomp of a great orchestra breaks upon the
silence. It flashed to the chords of blood-red and gold that was burning
fire. It softened through the fugue of woven crimson gold and flame, to
the melancholy minor of ashes-of-roses and paling green, and so through
all the dying glories that faded slowly to a tranquil grey and left
the world to the silver melody of one sole star that dawned above the
ineffable heights of the snows. Then she listened as a child does to
a bird, entranced, with a smile like a butterfly on her parted lips. I
never saw such a power of quiet.

She and I were walking next day among the forest ways, the pine-scented
sunshine dappling the dropped frondage. We had been speaking of her
mother. “It is such a misfortune for her,” she said thoughtfully, “that
I am not clever. She should have had a daughter who could have shared
her thoughts. She analyses everything, reasons about everything, and
that is quite out of my reach.”

She moved beside me with her wonderful light step--the poise and balance
of a nymph in the Parthenon frieze.

“How do you see things?”

“See? That is the right word. I see things--I never reason about them.
They are. For her they move like figures in a sum. For me every one of
them is a window through which one may look to what is beyond.”

“To where?”

“To what they really are--not what they seem.”

I looked at her with interest.

“Did you ever hear of the double vision?”

For this is a subject on which the spiritually learned men of India,
like the great mystics of all the faiths, have much to say. I had
listened with bewilderment and doubt to the expositions of my Pandit
on this very head. Her simple words seemed for a moment the echo of his
deep and searching thought. Yet it surely could not be. Impossible.

“Never. What does it mean?” She raised clear unveiled eyes. “You must
forgive me for being so stupid, but it is my mother who is at home with
all these scientific phrases. I know none of them.”

“It means that for some people the material universe--the things we see
with our eyes--is only a mirage, or say, a symbol, which either hides
or shadows forth the eternal truth. And in that sense they see things as
they really are, not as they seem to the rest of us. And whether this is
the statement of a truth or the wildest of dreams, I cannot tell.”

She did not answer for a moment; then said;

“Are there people who believe this--know it?”

“Certainly. There are people who believe that thought is the only real
thing--that the whole universe is thought made visible. That we create
with our thoughts the very body by which we shall re-act on the universe
in lives to be.

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

She paused; looked at me, and then went on:

“You see, I don’t think things out. I only feel. But this cannot
interest you.”

I felt she was eluding the question. She began to interest me more than
any one I had ever known. She had extraordinary power of a sort. Once,
in the woods, where I was reading in so deep a shade that she never
saw me, I had an amazing vision of her. She stood in a glade with the
sunlight and shade about her; she had no hat and a sunbeam turned her
hair to pale bronze. A small bright April shower was falling through the
sun, and she stood in pure light that reflected itself in every leaf and
grass-blade. But it was nothing of all this that arrested me,
beautiful as it was. She stood as though life were for the moment
suspended;--then, very softly, she made a low musical sound, infinitely
wooing, from scarcely parted lips, and instantly I saw a bird of azure
plumage flutter down and settle on her shoulder, pluming himself there
in happy security. Again she called softly and another followed the
first. Two flew to her feet, two more to her breast and hand. They
caressed her, clung to her, drew some joyous influence from her
presence. She stood in the glittering rain like Spring with her birds
about her--a wonderful sight. Then, raising one hand gently with the
fingers thrown back she uttered a different note, perfectly sweet and
intimate, and the branches parted and a young deer with full bright eyes
fixed on her advanced and pushed a soft muzzle into her hand.

In my astonishment I moved, however slightly, and the picture broke up.
The deer sprang back into the trees, the birds fluttered up in a hurry
of feathers, and she turned calm eyes upon me, as unstartled as if she
had known all the time that I was there.

“You should not have breathed,” she said smiling. “They must have utter
quiet.”

I rose up and joined her.

“It is a marvel. I can scarcely believe my eyes. How do you do it?”

“My father taught me. They come. How can I tell?”

She turned away and left me. I thought long over this episode. I
recalled words heard in the place of my studies--words I had dismissed
without any care at the moment. “To those who see, nothing is alien.
They move in the same vibration with all that has life, be it in bird
or flower. And in the Uttermost also, for all things are One. For such
there is no death.”

That was beyond me still, but I watched her with profound interest. She
recalled also words I had half forgotten--

  “There was nought above me and nought below,
   My childhood had not learnt to know;
   For what are the voices of birds,
   Aye, and of beasts, but words, our words,--
   Only so much more sweet.”

That might have been written of her. And more.

She had found one day in the woods a flower of a sort I had once seen
in the warm damp forests below Darjiling--ivory white and shaped like a
dove in flight. She wore it that evening on her bosom. A week later she
wore what I took to be another.

“You have had luck,” I said; “I never heard of such a thing being seen
so high up, and you have found it twice.”

“No, it is the same.”

“The same? Impossible. You found it more than a week ago.” “I know. It
is ten days. Flowers don’t die when one understands them--not as most
people think.”

Her mother looked up and said fretfully:

“Since she was a child Brynhild has had that odd idea. That flower is
dead and withered. Throw it away, child. It looks hideous.”

Was it glamour? What was it? I saw the flower dewy fresh in her bosom
She smiled and turned away.

It was that very evening she left the veranda where we were sitting in
the subdued light of a little lamp and passed beyond where the ray cut
the darkness. She went down the perspective of trees to the edge of he
clearing and I rose to follow for it seemed absolutely unsafe that she
should be on the verge of the panther-haunted woods alone. Mrs. Ingmar
turned a page of her book serenely;

“She will not like it if you go. I cannot imagine that she should come
to harm. She always goes her own way--light or dark.”

I returned to my seat and watched steadfastly. At first I could see
nothing but as my sight adjusted itself I saw her a long way down the
clearing that opened the snows, and quite certainly also I saw something
like a huge dog detach itself from the woods and bound to her feet. It
mingled with her dark dress and I lost it. Mrs. Ingmar said, seeing my
anxiety but nothing else; “Her father was just the same;--he had no fear
of anything that lives. No doubt some people have that power. I have
never seen her attract birds and beasts as he certainly did, but she is
quite as fond of them.”

I could not understand her blindness--what I myself had seen raised
questions I found unanswerable, and her mother saw nothing! Which of us
was right? presently she came back slowly and I ventured no word.

A woodland sorcery, innocent as the dawn, hovered about her. What was
it? Did the mere love of these creatures make a bond between her soul
and theirs, or was the ancient dream true and could she at times move
in the same vibration? I thought of her as a wood-spirit sometimes, an
expression herself of some passion of beauty in Nature, a thought of
snows and starry nights and flowing rivers made visible in flesh. It is
surely when seized with the urge of some primeval yearning which in
man is merely sexual that Nature conceives her fair forms and manifests
them, for there is a correspondence that runs through all creation.

Here I ask myself--Did I love her? In a sense, yes, deeply, but not in
the common reading of the phrase. I have trembled with delight before
the wild and terrible splendour of the Himalayan heights-; low golden
moons have steeped my soul longing, but I did not think of these things
as mine in any narrow sense, nor so desire them. They were Angels of the
Evangel of beauty. So too was she. She had none of the “silken nets and
traps of adamant,” she was no sister of the “girls of mild silver or of
furious gold;”--but fair, strong, and her own, a dweller in the House of
Quiet. I did not covet her. I loved her.

Days passed. There came a night when the winds were loosed--no moon,
the stars flickering like blown tapers through driven clouds, the trees
swaying and lamenting.

“There will be rain tomorrow.” Mrs. Ingmar said, as we parted for the
night. I closed my door. Some great cat of the woods was crying harshly
outside my window, the sound receding towards the bridle way. I slept in
a dream of tossing seas and ships labouring among them.

With the sense of a summons I waked--I cannot tell when. Unmistakable,
as if I were called by name. I rose and dressed, and heard distinctly
bare feet passing my door. I opened it noiselessly and looked out into
the little passage way that made for the entry, and saw nothing but
pools of darkness and a dim light from the square of the window at the
end. But the wind had swept the sky clear with its flying bosom and was
sleeping now in its high places and the air was filled with a mild moony
radiance and a great stillness.

Now let me speak with restraint and exactness. I was not afraid but felt
as I imagine a dog feels in the presence of his master, conscious of a
purpose, a will entirely above his own and incomprehensible, yet to
be obeyed without question. I followed my reading of the command,
bewildered but docile, and understanding nothing but that I was called.

The lights were out. The house dead silent; the familiar veranda
ghostly in the night. And now I saw a white figure at the head of the
steps--Brynhild. She turned and looked over her shoulder, her face
pale in the moon, and made the same gesture with which she summoned her
birds. I knew her meaning, for now we were moving in the same rhythm,
and followed as she took the lead. How shall I describe that strange
night in the jungle. There were fire-flies or dancing points of light
that recalled them. Perhaps she was only thinking them--only thinking
the moon and the quiet, for we were in the world where thought is the
one reality. But they went with us in a cloud and faintly lighted our
way. There were exquisite wafts of perfume from hidden flowers breathing
their dreams to the night. Here and there a drowsy bird stirred and
chirped from the roof of darkness, a low note of content that greeted
her passing. It was a path intricate and winding and how long we went,
and where, I cannot tell. But at last she stooped and parting the boughs
before her we stepped into an open space, and before us--I knew it--I
knew it!--The House of Beauty.

She paused at the foot of the great marble steps and looked at me.

“We have met here already.”

I did not wonder--I could not. In the Ninth vibration surprise had
ceased to be. Why had I not recognized her before--O dull of heart! That
was my only thought. We walk blindfold through the profound darkness of
material nature, the blinder because we believe we see it. It is only
when the doors of the material are closed that the world appears to man
as it exists in the eternal truth.

“Did you know this?” I asked, trembling before mystery.

“I knew it, because I am awake. You forgot it in the dull sleep which we
call daily life. But we were here and THEY began the story of the King
who made this house. Tonight we shall hear it. It he story of Beauty
wandering through the world and the world received her not. We hear it
in this place because here he agonized for what he knew too late.”

“Was that our only meeting?”

“We meet every night, but you forget when the day brings the sleep of
the soul.--You do not sink deep enough into rest to remember. You float
on the surface where the little bubbles of foolish dream are about you
and I cannot reach you then.”

“How can I compel myself to the deeps?”

“You cannot. It will come. But when you have passed up the bridle
way and beyond the Shipki, stop at Gyumur. There is the Monastery of
Tashigong, and there one will meet you--

“His name?”

“Stephen Clifden. He will tell you what you desire to know. Continue on
then with him to Yarkhand. There in the Ninth Vibration we shall meet
again. It is a long journey but you will be content.”

“Do you certainly know that we shall meet again?”

“When you have learnt, we can meet when we will. He will teach you
the Laya Yoga. You should not linger here in the woods any longer. You
should go on. In three days it will be possible.”

“But how have you learnt--a girl and young?”

“Through a close union with Nature--that is one of the three roads. But
I know little as yet. Now take my hand and come.

“One last question. Is this house ruined and abject as I have seen it in
the daylight, or royal and the house of Gods as we see it now? Which is
truth?”

“In the day you saw it in the empty illusion of blind thought. Tonight,
eternally lovely as in the thought of the man who made it. Nothing that
is beautiful is lost, though in the sight of the unwise it seems to die.
Death is in the eyes we look through--when they are cleansed we see Life
only. Now take my hand and come. Delay no more.”

She caught my hand and we entered the dim magnificence of the great
hall. The moon entered with us.

Instantly I had the feeling of supernatural presence. Yet I only write
this in deference to common use, for it was absolutely natural--more so
than any I have met in the state called daily life. It was a thing in
which I had a part, and if this was supernatural so also was I.

Again I saw the Dark One, the Beloved, the young Krishna, above the
women who loved him. He motioned with his hand as we passed, as though
he waved us smiling on our way. Again the dancers moved in a rhythmic
tread to the feet of the mountain Goddess--again we followed to where
she bent to hear. But now, solemn listening faces crowded in the shadows
about her, grave eyes fixed immovably upon what lay at her feet--a man,
submerged in the pure light that fell from her presence, his dark face
stark and fine, lips locked, eyes shut, arms flung out cross-wise in
utter abandonment, like a figure of grief invisibly crucified upon his
shame. I stopped a few feet from him, arrested by a barrier I could not
pass. Was it sleep or death or some mysterious state that partook of
both? Not sleep, for there was no flutter of breath. Not death--no rigid
immobility struck chill into the air. It was the state of subjection
where the spirit set free lies tranced in the mighty influences which
surround us invisibly until we have entered, though but for a moment,
the Ninth Vibration.

And now, with these Listeners about us, a clear voice began and stirred
the air with music. I have since been asked in what tongue it spoke and
could only answer that it reached my ears in the words of my childhood,
and that I know whatever that language had been it would so have reached
me.

“Great Lady, hear the story of this man’s fall, for it is the story of
man. Be pitiful to the blind eyes and give them light.”

There was long since in Ranipur a mighty King and at his birth the wise
men declared that unless he cast aside all passions that debase the
soul, relinquishing the lower desires for the higher until a Princess
laden with great gifts should come to be his bride, he would experience
great and terrible misfortunes. And his royal parents did what they
could to possess him with this belief, but they died before he reached
manhood. Behold him then, a young King in his palace, surrounded with
splendour. How should he withstand the passionate crying of the flesh or
believe that through pleasure comes satiety and the loss of that in the
spirit whereby alone pleasure can be enjoyed? For his gift was that
he could win all hearts. They swarmed round him like hiving bees and
hovered about him like butterflies. Sometimes he brushed them off. Often
he caressed them, and when this happened, each thought proudly “I am the
Royal Favourite. There is none other than me.”

Also the Princess delayed who would be the crest-jewel of the crown,
bringing with her all good and the blessing of the High Gods, and in
consequence of all these things the King took such pleasures as he
could, and they were many, not knowing they darken the inner eye whereby
what is royal is known through disguises.

(Most pitiful to see, beneath the close-shut lids of the man at the
feet of the Dweller in the Heights, tears forced themselves, as though
a corpse dead to all else lived only to anguish. They flowed like
blood-drops upon his face as he lay enduring, and the voice proceeded.)
What was the charm of the King? Was it his stately height and strength?
Or his faithless gayety? Or his voice, deep and soft as the sitar when
it sings of love? His women said--some one thing, some another, but none
of these ladies were of royal blood, and therefore they knew not.

Now one day, the all-privileged jester of the King, said, laughing
harshly:

“Maharaj, you divert yourself. But how if, while we feast and play, the
Far Away Princess glided past and was gone, unknown and unwelcomed?”

And the King replied:

“Fool, content yourself. I shall know my Princess, but she delays so
long that I weary.”

Now in a far away country was a Princess, daughter of the Greatest,
and her Father hesitated to give her in marriage to such a King for all
reported that he was faithless of heart, but having seen his portrait
she loved him and fled in disguise from the palaces of her Father, and
being captured she was brought before the King in Ranipur.

He sat upon a cloth of gold and about him was the game he had killed in
hunting, in great masses of ruffled fur and plumage, and he turned the
beauty of his face carelessly upon her, and as the Princess looked upon
him, her heart yearned to him, and he said in his voice that was like
the male string of the sitar:

“Little slave, what is your desire?”

Then she saw that the long journey had scarred her feet and dimmed her
hair with dust, and that the King’s eyes, worn with days and nights of
pleasure did not pierce her disguise. Now in her land it is a custom
that the blood royal must not proclaim itself, so she folded her hands
and said gently:

“A place in the household of the King.” And he, hearing that the Waiting
slave of his chief favorite Jayashri was dead, gave her that place. So
the Princess attended on those ladies, courteous and obedient to all
authority as beseemed her royalty, and she braided her bright hair so
that it hid the little crowns which the Princesses of her House
must wear always in token of their rank, and every day her patience
strengthened.

Sometimes the King, carelessly desiring her laughing face and sad eyes,
would send for her to wile away an hour, and he would say; “Dance,
little slave, and tell me stories of the far countries. You quite unlike
my Women, doubtless because you are a slave.”

And she thought--“No, but because I am a Princess,”--but this she did
not say. She laughed and told him the most marvellous stories in the
world until he laid his head upon her warm bosom, dreaming awake.

There were stories of the great Himalayan solitudes where in the winter
nights the white tiger stares at the witches’ dance of the Northern
Lights dazzled by the hurtling of their myriad spears. And she told
how the King-eagle, hanging motionless over the peaks of Gaurisankar,
watches with golden eyes for his prey, and falling like a plummet
strikes its life out with his clawed heel and, screaming with triumph,
bears it to his fierce mate in her cranny of the rocks.

“A gallant story!” the King would say. “More!” Then she told of the
tropical heats and the stealthy deadly creatures of forest and jungle,
and the blue lotus of Buddha swaying on the still lagoon,--And she spoke
of loves of men and women, their passion and pain and joy. And when she
told of their fidelity and valour and honour that death cannot quench,
her voice was like the song of a minstrel, for she had read all the
stories of the ages and the heart of a Princess told her the rest. And
the King listened unwearying though he believed this was but a slave.

(The face of the man at the feet of the Dweller in the Heights twitched
in a white agony. Pearls of sweat were distilled upon his brows, but
he moved neither hand nor foot, enduring as in a flame of fire. And the
voice continued.)

So one day, in the misty green of the Spring, while she rested at his
feet in the garden Pavilion, he said to her:

“Little slave, why do you love me?”

And she answered proudly:

“Because you have the heart of a King.”

He replied slowly;

“Of the women who have loved me none gave this reason, though they gave
many.”

She laid her cheek on his hand.

“That is the true reason.”

But he drew it away and was vaguely troubled, for her words, he knew
not why, reminded him of the Far Away Princess and of things he had long
forgotten, and he said; “What does a slave know of the hearts of Kings?”
 And that night he slept or waked alone.

Winter was at hand with its blue and cloudless days, and she was
commanded to meet the King where the lake lay still and shining like an
ecstasy of bliss, and she waited with her chin dropped into the cup of
her hands, looking over the water with eyes that did not see, for her
whole soul said; “How long O my Sovereign Lord, how long before you know
the truth and we enter together into our Kingdom?”

As she sat she heard the King’s step, and the colour stole up into her
face in a flush like the earliest sunrise. “He is coming,” she said; and
again; “He loves me.”

So he came beside the water, walking slowly. But the King was not alone.
His arm embraced the latest-come beauty from Samarkhand, and, with his
head bent, he whispered in her willing ear.

Then clasping her hands, the Princess drew a long sobbing breath, and he
turned and his eyes grew hard as blue steel.

“Go, slave,” he cried. “What place have you in Kings’ gardens? Go. Let
me see you no more.”

(The man lying at the feet of the Dweller in the Heights, raised a heavy
arm and flung it above his head, despairing, and it fell again on the
cross of his torment. And the voice went on.)

And as he said this, her heart broke; and she went and her feet were
weary. So she took the wise book she loved and unrolled it until she
came to a certain passage, and this she read twice; “If the heart of
a slave be broken it may be mended with jewels and soft words, but the
heart of a Princess can be healed only by the King who broke it, or in
Yamapura, the City under the Sunset where they make all things new. Now,
Yama, the Lord of this City, is the Lord of Death.” And having thus read
the Princess rolled the book and put it from her.

And next day, the King said to his women; “Send for her,” for his heart
smote him and he desired to atone royally for the shame of his speech.
And they sought and came back saying;

“Maharaj, she is gone. We cannot find her.”

Fear grew in the heart of the King--a nameless dread, and he said,
“Search.” And again they sought and returned and the King was striding
up and down the great hall and none dared cross his path. But,
trembling, they told him, and he replied; “Search again. I will not lose
her, and, slave though be, she shall be my Queen.”

So they ran, dispersing to the Four Quarters, and King strode up and
down the hall, and Loneliness kept step with him and clasped his hand
and looked his eyes.

Then the youngest of the women entered with a tale to tell. “Majesty,
we have found her. She lies beside the lake. When the birds fled this
morning she fled with them, but upon a longer journey. Even to Yamapura,
the City under the Sunset.”

And the King said; “Let none follow.” And he strode forth swiftly, white
with thoughts he dared not think.

The Princess lay among the gold of the fallen leaves. All was gold,
for her bright hair was out-spread in shining waves and in it shone the
glory of the hidden crown. On her face was no smile--only at last was
revealed the patience she had covered with laughter so long that even
the voice of the King could not now break it into joy. The hands that
had clung, the swift feet that had run beside his, the tender body,
mighty to serve and to love, lay within touch but farther away than the
uttermost star was the Far Away Princess, known and loved too late.

And he said; “My Princess--O my Princess!” and laid his head on her cold
bosom.

“Too late!” a harsh Voice croaked beside him, and it was the voice of
the Jester who mocks at all things. “Too late! O madness, to despise
the blood royal because it humbled itself to service and so was doubly
royal. The Far Away Princess came laden with great gifts, and to her the
King’s gift was the wage of a slave and a broken heart. Cast your crown
and sceptre in the dust, O King--O King of Fools.”

(The man at the feet of the Dweller in the Heights moved. Some dim word
shaped upon his locked lips. She listened in a divine calm. It seemed
that the very Gods drew nearer. Again the man essayed speech, the body
dead, life only in the words that none could hear. The voice went on.)

But the Princess flying wearily because of the sore wound in her heart,
came at last to the City under the Sunset, where the Lord of Death rules
in the House of Quiet, and was there received with royal honours for in
that land are no disguises. And she knelt before the Secret One and in
a voice broken with agony entreated him to heal her. And with veiled and
pitying eyes he looked upon her, for many and grievous as are the wounds
he has healed this was more grievous still. And he said;

“Princess, I cannot, But this I can do--I can give a new heart in a new
birth--happy and careless as the heart of a child. Take this escape from
the anguish you endure and be at peace.”

But the Princess, white with pain, asked only;

“In this new heart and birth, is there room for the King?”

And the Lord of Peace replied;

“None. He too will be forgotten.”

Then she rose to her feet.

“I will endure and when he comes I will serve him once more. If he will
he shall heal me, and if not I will endure for ever.”

And He who is veiled replied;

“In this sacred City no pain may disturb the air, therefore you must
wait outside in the chill and the dark. Think better, Princess! Also,
he must pass through many rebirths, because he beheld the face of Beauty
unveiled and knew her not. And when he comes he will be weary and weak
as a new-born child, and no more a great King.” And the Princess smiled;

“Then he will need me the more,” she said; “I will wait and kiss the
feet of my King.”

“And the Lord of Death was silent. So she went outside into the darkness
of the spaces, and the souls free passed her like homing doves, and she
sat with her hands clasped over the sore wound in her heart, watching
the earthward way. And the Princess is keeping still the day of her long
patience.”

The voice ceased. And there was a great silence, and the listening faces
drew nearer.

Then the Dweller in the Heights spoke in a voice soft as the falling of
snow in the quiet of frost and moon. I could have wept myself blind with
joy to hear that music. More I dare not say.

“He is in the Lower State of Perception. He sorrows for his loss. Let
him have one instant’s light that still he may hope.”

She bowed above the man, gazing upon him as a mother might upon her
sleeping child. The dead eyelids stirred, lifted, a faint gleam showed
beneath them, an unspeakable weariness. I thought they would fall
unsatisfied. Suddenly he saw What looked upon him, and a terror of
joy no tongue can tell flashed over the dark mirror of his face. He
stretched a faint hand to touch her feet, a sobbing sigh died upon his
lips, and once more the swooning sleep took him. He lay as a dead man
before the Assembly.

“The night is far spent,” a voice said, from I know not where. And I
knew it was said not only for the sleeper but for all, for though the
flying feet of Beauty seem for a moment to outspeed us she will one day
wait our coming and gather us to her bosom.

As before, the vision spread outward like rings in a broken reflection
in water. I saw the girl beside me, but her hand grew light in mine. I
felt it no longer. I heard the roaring wind in the trees, or was it a
great voice thundering in my ears? Sleep took me. I waked in my little
room.

Strange and sad--I saw her next day and did not remember her whom of all
things I desired to know. I remembered the vision and knew that whether
in dream or waking I had heard an eternal truth. I longed with a great
longing to meet my beautiful companion, and she stood at my side and I
was blind.

Now that I have climbed a little higher on the Mount of Vision it seems
even to myself that this could not be. Yet it was, and it is true of not
this only but of how much else!

She knew me. I learnt that later, but she made no sign. Her simplicities
had carried her far beyond and above me, to places where only the winged
things attain--“as a bird among the bird-droves of God.”

I have since known that this power of direct simplicity in her was why
among the great mountains we beheld the Divine as the emanation of
the terrible beauty about us. We cannot see it as it is--only in some
shadowing forth, gathering sufficient strength for manifestation from
the spiritual atoms that haunt the region where that form has been for
ages the accepted vehicle of adoration. But I was now to set forth to
find another knowledge--to seek the Beauty that blinds us to all other.
Next day the man who was directing my preparations for travel sent me
word from Simla that all was ready and I could start two days later. I
told my friends the time of parting was near.

“But it was no surprise to me,” I added, “for I had heard already that
in a very few days I should be on my way.”

Mrs. Ingmar was more than kind. She laid a frail hand on mine.

“We shall miss you indeed. If it is possible to send us word of your
adventures in those wild solitudes I hope you will do it. Of course
aviation will soon lay bare their secrets and leave them no mysteries,
so you don’t go too soon. One may worship science and yet feel it
injures the beauty of the world. But what is beauty compared with
knowledge?”

“Do you never regret it?” I asked.

“Never, dear Mr. Ormond. I am a worshipper of hard facts and however
hideous they may be I prefer them to the prismatic colours of romance.”

Brynhild, smiling, quoted;

  “Their science roamed from star to star
   And than itself found nothing greater.
   What wonder? In a Leyden jar
   They bottled the Creator?”

“There is nothing greater than science,” said Mrs. Ingmar with soft
reverence. “The mind of man is the foot-rule of the universe.”

She meditated for a moment and then added that my kind interests in
their plans decided her to tell me that she would be returning to
Europe and then to Canada in a few months with a favourite niece as her
companion while Brynhild would remain in India with friends in Mooltan
for a time. I looked eagerly at her but she was lost in her own thoughts
and it was evidently not the time to say more.

If I had hoped for a vision before I left the neighbourhood of that
strange House of Beauty where a spirit imprisoned appeared to await the
day of enlightenment I was disappointed. These things do not happen as
one expects or would choose. The wind bloweth where it listeth until the
laws which govern the inner life are understood, and then we would not
choose if we could for we know that all is better than well. In this
world, either in the blinded sight of daily life or in the clarity of
the true sight I have not since seen it, but that has mattered little,
for having heard an authentic word within its walls I have passed on my
way elsewhere.

Next day a letter from Olesen reached me.

“Dear Ormond, I hope you have had a good time at the House in the Woods.
I saw Rup Singh a few days ago and he wrote the odd message I enclose.
You know what these natives are, even the most sensible of them, and you
will humour the old fellow for he ages very fast and I think is breaking
up. But this was not what I wanted to say. I had a letter from a man I
had not seen for years--a fellow called Stephen Clifden, who lives in
Kashmir. As a matter of fact I had forgotten his existence but evidently
he has not repaid the compliment for he writes as follows--No, I had
better send you the note and you can do as you please. I am rushed off
my legs with work and the heat is hell with the lid off. And-”

But the rest was of no interest except to a friend of years’ standing. I
read Rup Singh’s message first. It was written in his own tongue.

“To the Honoured One who has attained to the favour of the Favourable.

“You have with open eyes seen what this humble one has dreamed but
has not known. If the thing be possible, write me this word that I may
depart in peace. ‘With that one who in a former birth you loved all is
well. Fear nothing for him. The way is long but at the end the lamps of
love are lit and the Unstruck music is sounded. He lies at the feet of
Mercy and there awaits his hour.’ And if it be not possible to write
these words, write nothing, O Honoured, for though it be in the hells my
soul shall find my King, and again I shall serve him as once I served.”

I understood, and wrote those words as he had written them. Strange
mystery of life--that I who had not known should see, and that this man
whose fidelity had not deserted his broken King in his utter downfall
should have sought with passion for one sight of the beloved face across
the waters of death and sought in vain. I thought of those Buddhist
words of Seneca--“The soul may be and is in the mass of men drugged and
silenced by the seductions of sense and the deceptions of the world.
But if, in some moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and
jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will seek at
once the region of its birth and its true home.”

Well--the shell must break before the bird can fly, and the time drew
near for the faithful servant to seek his lord. My message reached him
in time and gladdened him.

I turned then to Clifden’s letter.

“Dear Olesen, you will have forgotten me, and feeling sure of this I
should scarcely have intruded a letter into your busy life were it not
that I remember your good-nature as a thing unforgettable though so many
years have gone by. I hear of you sometimes when Sleigh comes up the
Sind valley, for I often camp at Sonamarg and above the Zoji La and
farther. I want you to give a message to a man you know who should
be expecting to hear from me. Tell him I shall be at the Tashigong
Monastery when he reaches Gyumur beyond the Shipki. Tell him I have the
information he wants and I will willingly go on with him to Yarkhand
and his destination. He need not arrange for men beyond Gyumur. All
is fixed. So sorry to bother you, old man, but I don’t know Ormond’s
address, except that he was with you and has gone up Simla way. And of
course he will be keen to hear the thing is settled.”

Amazing. I remembered the message I had heard and this man’s words
rang true and kindly, but what could it mean? I really did not question
farther than this for now I could not doubt that I was guided. Stronger
hands than mine had me in charge, and it only remained for me to set
forth in confidence and joy to an end that as yet I could not discern. I
turned my face gladly to the wonder of the mountains.

Gladly--but with a reservation. I was leaving a friend and one whom I
dimly felt might one day be more than a friend--Brynhild Ingmar. That
problem must be met before I could take my way. I thought much of what
might be said at parting. True, she had the deepest attraction for me,
but true also that I now beheld a quest stretching out into the unknown
which I must accept in the spirit of the knight errant. Dare I then
bind my heart to any allegiance which would pledge me to a future
inconsistent with what lay before me? How could I tell what she
might think of the things which to me were now real and external--the
revelation of the only reality that underlies all the seeming. Life can
never be the same for the man who has penetrated to this, and though it
may seem a hard saying there can be but a maimed understanding between
him and those who still walk amid the phantoms of death and decay.

Her sympathy with nature was deep and wonderful but might it not be that
though the earth was eloquent to her the skies were silent? I was but
a beginner myself--I knew little indeed. Dare I risk that little in a
sweet companionship which would sink me into the contentment of the
life lived by the happily deluded between the cradle and the grave and
perhaps close to me for ever that still sphere where my highest hope
abides? I had much to ponder, for how could I lose her out of my
life--though I knew not at all whether she who had so much to make her
happiness would give me a single thought when I was gone.

If all this seem the very uttermost of selfish vanity, forgive a man who
grasped in his hand a treasure so new, so wonderful that he walked
in fear and doubt lest it should slip away and leave him in a world
darkened for ever by the torment of the knowledge that it might have
been his and he had bartered it for the mess of pottage that has bought
so many birthrights since Jacob bargained with his weary brother in
the tents of Lahai-roi. I thought I would come back later with my
prize gained and throwing it at her feet ask her wisdom in return, for
whatever I might not know I knew well she was wiser than I except in
that one shining of the light from Eleusis. I walked alone in the woods
thinking of these things and no answer satisfied me.

I did not see her alone until the day I left, for I was compelled by the
arrangements I was making to go down to Simla for a night. And now the
last morning had come with golden sun--shot mists rolling upward to
disclose the far white billows of the sea of eternity, the mountains
awaking to their enormous joys. The trees were dripping glory to the
steaming earth; it flowed like rivers into their most secret recesses,
moss and flower, fern and leaf floated upon the waves of light revealing
their inmost soul in triumphant gladness. Far off across the valleys
a cuckoo was calling--the very voice of spring, and in the green world
above my head a bird sang, a feathered joy, so clear, so passionate that
I thought the great summer morning listened in silence to his rapture
ringing through the woods. I waited until the Jubilate was ended and
then went in to bid good-bye to my friends.

Mrs. Ingmar bid me the kindest farewell and I left her serene in the
negation of all beauty, all hope save that of a world run on the lines
of a model municipality, disease a memory, sewerage, light and air
systems perfected, the charted brain sending its costless messages to
the outer parts of the habitable globe, and at least a hundred years
of life with a decent cremation at the end of it assured to every
eugenically born citizen. No more. But I have long ceased to regret
that others use their own eyes whether clear or dim. Better the merest
glimmer of light perceived thus than the hearsay of the revelations of
others. And by the broken fragments of a bewildered hope a man shall
eventually reach the goal and rejoice in that dawn where the morning
stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy. It must come, for
it is already here.

Brynhild walked with me through the long glades in the fresh thin air
to the bridle road where my men and ponies waited, eager to be off. We
stood at last in the fringe of trees on a small height which commanded
the way;--a high uplifted path cut along the shoulders of the hills and
on the left the sheer drop of the valleys. Perhaps seven or eight feet
in width and dignified by the name of the Great Hindustan and Tibet Road
it ran winding far away into Wonderland. Looking down into the valleys,
so far beneath that the solitudes seem to wall them in I thought of all
the strange caravans which have taken this way with tinkle of bells
and laughter now so long silenced, and as I looked I saw a lost little
monastery in a giant crevice, solitary as a planet on the outermost ring
of the system, and remembrance flashed into my mind and I said;

“I have marching orders that have countermanded my own plans. I am to
journey to the Buddhist Monastery of Tashigong, and there meet a friend
who will tell me what is necessary that I may travel to Yarkhand and
beyond. It will be long before I see Kashmir.”

In those crystal clear eyes I saw a something new to me--a faint smile,
half pitying, half sad;

“Who told you, and where?”

“A girl in a strange place. A woman who has twice guided me--”

I broke off. Her smile perplexed me. I could not tell what to say. She
repeated in a soft undertone;

“Great Lady, be pitiful to the blind eyes and give them light.”

And instantly I knew. O blind--blind! Was the unhappy King of the story
duller of heart than I? And shame possessed me. Here was the chrysoberyl
that all day hides its secret in deeps of lucid green but when the night
comes flames with its fiery ecstasy of crimson to the moon, and I--I had
been complacently considering whether I might not blunt my own spiritual
instinct by companionship with her, while she had been my guide, as
infinitely beyond me in insight as she was in all things beautiful. I
could have kissed her feet in my deep repentance. True it is that the
gateway of the high places is reverence and he who cannot bow his head
shall receive no crown. I saw that my long travel in search of knowledge
would have been utterly vain if I had not learnt that lesson there and
then. In those moments of silence I learnt it once and for ever.

She stood by me breathing the liquid morning air, her face turned upon
the eternal snows. I caught her hand in a recognition that might
have ended years of parting, and its warm youth vibrated in mine, the
foretaste of all understanding, all unions, of love that asks nothing,
that fears nothing, that has no petition to make. She raised her eyes to
mine and her tears were a rainbow of hope. So we stood in silence that
was more than any words, and the golden moments went by. I knew her now
for what she was, one of whom it might have been written;

  “I come from where night falls clearer
   Than your morning sun can rise;
   From an earth that to heaven draws nearer
   Than your visions of Paradise,--
   For the dreams that your dreamers dream
   We behold them with open eyes.”

With open eyes! Later I asked the nature of the strange bond that had
called her to my side.

“I do not understand that fully myself,” she said--“That is part of the
knowledge we must wait for. But you have the eyes that see, and that is
a tie nothing can break. I had waited long in the House of Beauty for
you. I guided you there. But between you and me there is also love.”

I stretched an eager hand but she repelled it gently, drawing back a
little. “Not love of each other though we are friends and in the future
may be infinitely more. But--have you ever seen a drawing of Blake’s--a
young man stretching his arms to a white swan which flies from him on
wings he cannot stay? That is the story of both our lives. We long to
be joined in this life, here and now, to an unspeakable beauty and power
whose true believers we are because we have seen and known. There is no
love so binding as the same purpose. Perhaps that is the only true love.
And so we shall never be apart though we may never in this world be
together again in what is called companionship.”

“We shall meet,” I said confidently. She smiled and was silent.

“Do we follow a will-o’-the wisp in parting? Do we give up the substance
for the shadow? Shall I stay?”

She laughed joyously;

“We give a single rose for a rose-tree that bears seven times seven.
Daily I see more, and you are going where you will be instructed. As you
know my mother prefers for a time to have my cousin with her to help her
with the book she means to write. So I shall have time to myself. What
do you think I shall do?”

“Blow away on a great wind. Ride on the crests of tossing waves. Catch a
star to light the fireflies!”

She laughed like a bird’s song.

“Wrong--wrong! I shall be a student. All I know as yet has come to me
by intuition, but there is Law as well as Love and I will learn. I have
drifted like a happy cloud before the wind. Now I will learn to be the
wind that blows the clouds.”

I looked at her in astonishment. If a flower had desired the same thing
it could scarcely have seemed more incredible, for I had thought her
whole life and nature instinctive not intellective. She smiled as one
who has a beloved secret to keep.

“When you have gained what in this country they call The Knowledge of
Regeneration, come back and ask me what I have learnt.”

She would say no more of that and turned to another matter, speaking
with earnestness;

“Before you came here I had a message for you, and Stephen Clifden
will tell you the same thing when you meet. Believe it for it is true.
Remember always that the psychical is not the mystical and that what we
seek is not marvel but vision. These two things are very far apart, so
let the first with all its dangers pass you by, for our way lies to the
heights, and for us there is only one danger--that of turning back and
losing what the whole world cannot give in exchange. I have never seen
Stephen Clifden but I know much of him. He is a safe guide--a man who
has had much and strange sorrow which has brought him joy that cannot be
told. He will take you to those who know the things that you desire. I
wish I might have gone too.”

Something in the sweetness of her voice, its high passion, the strong
beauty of her presence woke a poignant longing in my heart. I said;

“I cannot leave you. You are the only guide I can follow. Let us search
together--you always on before.”

“Your way lies there,” she pointed to the high mountains. “And mine to
the plains, and if we chose our own we should wander. But we shall
meet again in the way and time that will be best and with knowledge
so enlarged that what we have seen already will be like an empty dream
compared to daylight truth. If you knew what waits for you you would not
delay one moment.”

She stood radiant beneath the deodars, a figure of Hope, pointing
steadily to the heights. I knew her words were true though as yet I
could not tell how. I knew that whereas we had seen the Wonderful in
beautiful though local forms there is a plane where the Formless may be
apprehended in clear dream and solemn vision-the meeting of spirit with
Spirit. What that revelation would mean I could not guess--how should
I?--but I knew the illusion we call death and decay would wither before
it. There is a music above and beyond the Ninth Vibration though I must
love those words for ever for what their hidden meaning gave me.

I took her hand and held it. Strange--beyond all strangeness that that
story of an ancient sorrow should have made us what we were to each
other--should have opened to me the gates of that Country where she
wandered content. For the first time I had realized in its fulness the
loveliness of this crystal nature, clear as flowing water to receive and
transmit the light--itself a prophecy and fulfilment of some higher race
which will one day inhabit our world when it has learnt the true values.
She drew a flower from her breast and gave it to me. It lies before me
white and living as I write these words.

I sprang down the road and mounted, giving the word to march. The men
shouted and strode on--our faces to the Shipki Pass and what lay beyond.

We had parted.

Once, twice, I looked back, and standing in full sunlight, she waved her
hand.

We turned the angle of the rocks.

What I found--what she found is a story strange and beautiful which
I may tell one day to those who care to hear. That for me there were
pauses, hesitancies, dreads, on the way I am not concerned to deny,
for so it must always be with the roots of the old beliefs of fear and
ignorance buried in the soil of our hearts and ready to throw out their
poisonous fibres. But there was never doubt. For myself I have long
forgotten the meaning of that word in anything that is of real value.

Do not let it be thought that the treasure is reserved for the few or
those of special gifts. And it is as free to the West as to the East
though I own it lies nearer to the surface in the Orient where the
spiritual genius of the people makes it possible and the greater and
more faithful teachers are found. It is not without meaning that all the
faiths of the world have dawned in those sunrise skies. Yet it is within
reach of all and asks only recognition, for the universe has been the
mine of its jewels--

  “Median gold it holds, and silver from Atropatene, Ruby and
  emerald from Hindustan, and Bactrian agate, Bright with beryl
  and pearl, sardonyx and sapphire.”--
  and more that cannot be uttered--
  the Lights and Perfections.

So for all seekers I pray this prayer--beautiful in its sonorous Latin,
but noble in all the tongues;

“Supplico tibi, Pater et Dux--I pray Thee, Guide of our vision, that
we may remember the nobleness with which Thou hast endowed us, and that
Thou wouldest be always on our right and on our left in the motion of
our wills, that we may be purged from the contagion of the body and the
affections of the brute and overcome and rule them. And I pray also
that Thou wouldest drive away the blinding darkness from the eyes of our
souls that we may know well what is to be held for divine and what for
mortal.”

“The nobleness with which Thou hast endowed us-” this, and not the
cry of the miserable sinner whose very repentance is no virtue but the
consequence of failure and weakness is the strong music to which we must
march.

And the way is open to the mountains.




THE INTERPRETER A ROMANCE OF THE EAST


I

There are strange things in this story, but, so far as I understand
them, I tell the truth. If you measure the East with a Western foot-rule
you will say, “Impossible.” I should have said it myself.

Of myself I will say as little as I can, for this story is of Vanna
Loring. I am an incident only, though I did not know that at first.

My name is Stephen Clifden, and I was eight-and-thirty; plenty of money,
sound in wind and limb. I had been by way of being a writer before the
war, the hobby of a rich man; but if I picked up anything in the welter
in France, it was that real work is the only salvation this mad world
has to offer; so I meant to begin at the beginning, and learn my trade
like a journeyman labourer. I had come to the right place. A very
wonderful city is Peshawar--rather let us say, two cities--the
compounds, the fortifications where Europeans dwell in such peace as
their strong right arms can secure them; and the native city and bazaar
humming and buzzing like a hive of angry bees with the rumours that
come up from Lower India or down the Khyber Pass with the camel caravans
loaded with merchandise from Afghanistan, Bokhara, and farther. And
it is because of this that Peshawar is the Key of India, and a city
of Romance that stands at every corner, and cries aloud in the
market--place. For at Peshawar every able-bodied man sleeps with his
revolver under his pillow, and the old Fort is always ready in case it
should be necessary at brief and sharp notice to hurry the women and
children into it, and possibly, to die in their defense. So enlivening
is the neighbourhood of the frontier tribes that haunt the famous Khyber
Pass and the menacing hills where danger is always lurking.

But there was society here, and I was swept into it--there was chatter,
and it galled me.

I was beginning to feel that I had missed my mark, and must go farther
afield, perhaps up into Central Asia, when I met Vanna Loring. If I say
that her hair was soft and dark; that she had the deepest hazel eyes
I have ever seen, and a sensitive, tender mouth; that she moved with a
flowing grace like “a wave of the sea”--it sounds like the portrait of a
beauty, and she was never that. Also, incidentally, it gives none of her
charm. I never heard any one get any further than that she was “oddly
attractive”--let us leave it at that. She was certainly attractive to
me.

She was the governess of little Winifred Meryon, whose father held
the august position of General Commanding the Frontier Forces, and her
mother the more commanding position of the reigning beauty of Northern
India, generally speaking. No one disputed that. She was as pretty as
a picture, and her charming photograph had graced as many illustrated
papers as there were illustrated papers to grace.

But Vanna--I gleaned her story by bits when I came across her with the
child in the gardens. I was beginning to piece it together now.

Her love of the strange and beautiful she had inherited from a young
Italian mother, daughter of a political refugee; her childhood had
been spent in a remote little village in the West of England; half
reluctantly she told me how she had brought herself up after her
mother’s death and her father’s second marriage. Little was said of
that, but I gathered that it had been a grief to her, a factor in her
flight to the East.

We were walking in the Circular Road then with Winifred in front leading
her Pekingese by its blue ribbon, and we had it almost to ourselves
except for a few natives passing slow and dignified on their own
occasions, for fashionable Peshawar was finishing its last rubber of
bridge, before separating to dress for dinner, and had no time to spare
for trivialities and sunsets.

“So when I came to three-and-twenty,” she said slowly, “I felt I must
break away from our narrow life. I had a call to India stronger than
anything on earth. You would not understand but that was so, and I had
spent every spare moment in teaching myself India--its history, legends,
religions, everything! And I was not wanted at home, and I had grown
afraid.”

I could divine years of patience and repression under this plain tale,
but also a power that would be dynamic when the authentic voice called.
That was her charm--gentleness in strength--a sweet serenity.

“What were you afraid of?”

“Of growing old and missing what was waiting for me out here. But I
could not get away like other people. No money, you see. So I thought I
would come out here and teach. Dare I? Would they let me? I knew I was
fighting life and chances and risks if I did it; but it was death if I
stayed there. And then--Do you really care to hear?”

“Of course. Tell me how you broke your chain.”

“I spare you the family quarrels. I can never go back. But I was
spurred--spurred to take some wild leap; and I took it. Six years ago I
came out. First I went to a doctor and his wife at Cawnpore. They had
a wonderful knowledge of the Indian peoples, and there I learned
Hindustani and much else. Then he died. But an aunt had left me two
hundred pounds, and I could wait a little and choose; and so I came
here.”

It interested me. The courage that pale elastic type of woman has!

“Have you ever regretted it? Would they take you back if you failed?”

“Never, to both questions,” she said, smiling. “Life is glorious. I’ve
drunk of a cup I never thought to taste; and if I died tomorrow I should
know I had done right. I rejoice in every moment I live--even when
Winifred and I are wrestling with arithmetic.”

“I shouldn’t have thought life was very easy with Lady Meryon.”

“Oh, she is kind enough in an indifferent sort of way. I am not the
persecuted Jane Eyre sort of governess at all. But that is all on the
surface and does not matter. It is India I care for-the people, the sun,
the infinite beauty. It was coming home. You would laugh if I told you
I knew Peshawar long before I came here. Knew it--walked here, lived.
Before there were English in India at all.” She broke off. “You won’t
understand.”

“Oh, I have had that feeling, too,” I said patronizingly. “If one has
read very much about a place-”

“That was not quite what I meant. Never mind. The people, the
place--that is the real thing to me. All this is the dream.” The sweep
of her hand took in not only Winifred and myself, but the general’s
stately residence, which to blaspheme in Peshawar is rank infidelity.

“By George, I would give thousands to feel that! I can’t get out of
Europe here. I want to write, Miss Loring,” I found myself saying. “I’d
done a bit, and then the war came and blew my life to pieces. Now I want
to get inside the skin of the East, and I can’t do it. I see it from
outside, with a pane of glass between. No life in it. If you feel as you
say, for God’s sake be my interpreter!”

I really meant what I said. I knew she was a harp that any breeze would
sweep into music. I divined that temperament in her and proposed to use
it for my own ends. She had and I had not, the power to be a part of all
she saw, to feel kindred blood running in her own veins. To the average
European the native life of India is scarcely interesting, so far is it
removed from all comprehension. To me it was interesting, but I could
not tell why. I stood outside and had not the fairy gold to pay for my
entrance. Here at all events she could buy her way where I could not.
Without cruelty, which honestly was not my besetting sin--especially
where women were concerned, the egoist in me felt I would use her, would
extract the last drop of the enchantment of her knowledge before I went
on my way. What more natural than that Vanna or any other woman should
minister to my thirst for information? Men are like that. I pretend
to be no better than the rest. She pleased my fastidiousness--that
fastidiousness which is the only austerity in men not otherwise austere.

“Interpret?” she said, looking at me with clear hazel eyes; “how could
I? You were in the native city yesterday. What did you miss?”

“Everything! I saw masses of colour, light, movement. Brilliantly
picturesque people. Children like Asiatic angels. Magnificently scowling
ruffians in sheepskin coats. In fact, a movie staged for my benefit. I
was afraid they would ring down the curtain before I had had enough. It
had no meaning. When I got back to my diggings I tried to put down
what I had just seen, and I swear there’s more inspiration in the
guide-book.”

“Did you go alone?”

“Yes, I certainly would not go sight-seeing with the Meryon crowd. Tell
me what you felt when you saw it first.”

“I went with Sir John’s uncle. He was a great traveler. The colour
struck me dumb. It flames--it sings. Think of the grey pinched life in
the West! I saw a grave dark potter turning his wheel, while his little
girl stood by, glad at our pleasure, her head veiled like a miniature
woman, tiny baggy trousers, and a silver nose-stud, like a star, in one
delicate nostril. In her thin arms she held a heavy baby in a gilt cap,
like a monkey. And the wheel turned and whirled until it seemed to be
spinning dreams, thick as motes in the sun. The clay rose in smooth
spirals under his hand, and the wheel sang, ‘Shall the vessel reprove
him who made one to honour and one to dishonour?’ And I saw the potter
thumping his wet clay, and the clay, plastic as dream-stuff, shaped
swift as light, and the three Fates stood at his shoulder. Dreams,
dreams, and all in the spinning of the wheel, and the rich shadows of
the old broken courtyard where he sat. And the wheel stopped and the
thread broke, and the little new shapes he had made stood all about him,
and he was only a potter in Peshawar.”

Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my existence. I
did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to hear more, and the
impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give a man.

“Did you buy anything?”

“He gave me a gift--a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint turquoise
green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I bought a little
gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul grapes. About a rupee, all
told. But it was Eastern merchandise, and I was trading from Balsora and
Baghdad, and Eleazar’s camels were swaying down from Damascus along the
Khyber Pass, and coming in at the great Darwazah, and friends’ eyes met
me everywhere. I am profoundly happy here.”

The sinking sun lit an almost ecstatic face.

I envied her more deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had the
secret of immortal youth, and I felt old as I looked at her. One might
be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age could not wither
nor custom stale the infinite variety of her world’s joys. She had a
child’s dewy youth in her eyes.

There are great sunsets at Peshawar, flaming over the plain, dying in
melancholy splendour over the dangerous hills. They too were hers, in
a sense in which they could never be mine. But what a companion! To
my astonishment a wild thought of marriage flashed across me, to be
instantly rebuffed with a shrug. Marriage--that one’s wife might talk
poetry to one about the East! Absurd! But what was it these people felt
and I could not feel? Almost, shut up in the prison of self, I knew what
Vanna had felt in her village--a maddening desire to escape, to be a
part of the loveliness that lay beyond me. So might a man love a king’s
daughter in her hopeless heights.

“It may be very beautiful on the surface,” I said morosely; “but there’s
a lot of misery below--hateful, they tell me.”

“Of course. We shall get to work one day. But look at the sunset. It
opens like a mysterious flower. I must take Winifred home now.”

“One moment,” I pleaded; “I can only see it through your eyes. I feel it
while you speak, and then the good minute goes.”

She laughed.

“And so must I. Come, Winifred. Look, there’s an owl; not like the owls
in the summer dark in England--

 “Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping,  Wavy in the
dark, lit by one low star.”

Suddenly she turned again and looked at me half wistfully.

“It is good to talk to you. You want to know. You are so near it all. I
wish I could help you; I am so exquisitely happy myself.”

My writing was at a standstill. It seemed the groping of a blind man
in a radiant world. Once perhaps I had felt that life was good in
itself--when the guns came thundering toward the Vimy Ridge in a mad
gallop of horses, and men shouting and swearing and frantically urging
them on. Then, riding for more than life, I had tasted life for an
instant. Not before or since. But this woman had the secret.

Lady Meryon, with her escort of girls and subalterns, came daintily past
the hotel compound, and startled me from my brooding with her pretty
silvery voice.

“Dreaming, Mr. Clifden? It isn’t at all wholesome to dream in the East.
Come and dine with us tomorrow. A tiny dance afterwards, you know; or
bridge for those who like it.”

I had not the faintest notion whether governesses dined with the family
or came in afterward with the coffee; but it was a sporting chance, and
I took it.

Then Sir John came up and joined us.

“You can’t well dance tomorrow, Kitty,” he said to his wife. “There’s
been an outpost affair in the Swat Hills, and young Fitzgerald has
been shot. Come to dinner of course, Clifden. Glad to see you. But no
dancing, I think.”

Kitty Meryon’s mouth drooped like a pouting child’s. Was it for the lost
dance, or the lost soldier lying out on the hills in the dying sunset.
Who could tell? In either case it was pretty enough for the illustrated
papers.

“How sad! Such a dear boy. We shall miss him at tennis.” Then brightly;
“Well, we’ll have to put the dance off for a week, but come tomorrow
anyhow.”


II


Next evening I went into Lady Meryon’s flower-scented drawing-room. The
electric fans were fluttering and the evening air was cool. Five or
six pretty girls and as many men made up the party--Kitty Meryon the
prettiest of them all, fashionably undressed in faint pink and crystal,
with a charming smile in readiness, all her gay little flags flying in
the rich man’s honour. I am no vainer than other men, but I saw that.
Whatever her charm might be it was none for me. What could I say to
interest her who lived in her foolish little world as one shut in a
bright bubble? And she had said the wrong word about young Fitzgerald--I
wanted Vanna, with her deep seeing eyes, to say the right one and adjust
those cruel values.

Governesses dine, it appeared, only to fill an unexpected place, or make
a decorous entry afterward, to play accompaniments. Fortunately Kitty
Meryon sang, in a pinched little soprano, not nearly so pretty as her
silver ripple of talk.

It was when the party had settled down to bridge and I was standing out,
that I ventured to go up to her as she sat knitting by a window--not
unwatched by the quick flash of Lady Meryon’s eyes as I did it.

“I think you hypnotize me, Miss Loring. When I hear anything I
straightway want to know what you will say. Have you heard of
Fitzgerald’s death?”

“That is why we are not dancing tonight. Tomorrow the cable will reach
his home in England. He was an only child, and they are the great people
of the village where we are the little people. I knew his mother as one
knows a great lady who is kind to all the village folk. It may kill her.
It is travelling tonight like a bullet to her heart, and she does not
know.”

“His father?”

“A brave man--a soldier himself. He will know it was a good death and
that Harry would not fail. He did not at Ypres. He would not here. But
all joy and hope will be dead in that house tomorrow.”

“And what do you think?”

“I am not sorry for Harry, if you mean that. He knew--we all know--that
he was on guard here holding the outposts against blood and treachery
and terrible things--playing the Great Game. One never loses at that
game if one plays it straight, and I am sure that at the last it was joy
he felt and not fear. He has not lost. Did you notice in the church
a niche before every soldier’s seat to hold his loaded gun? And the
tablets on the walls; “Killed at Kabul River, aged 22.”--“Killed on
outpost duty.”--“Murdered by an Afghan fanatic.” This will be one memory
more. Why be sorry.”

Presently:--

“I am going up to the hills tomorrow, to the Malakhand Fort, with Mrs.
Delany, Lady Meryon’s aunt, and we shall see the wonderful Tahkt-i-Bahi
Monastery on the way. You should do that run before you go. The fort is
the last but one on the way to Chitral, and beyond that the road is so
beset that only soldiers may go farther, and indeed the regiments escort
each other up and down. But it is an early start, for we must be back in
Peshawar at six for fear of raiding natives.”

“I know; they hauled me up in the dusk the other day, and told me I
should be swept off to the hills if I fooled about after dusk. But I
say--is it safe for you to go? You ought to have a man. Could I go too?”

I thought she did not look enthusiastic at the proposal.

“Ask. You know I settle nothing. I go where I am sent.” She said it with
the happiest smile. I knew they could send her nowhere that she would
not find joy. I thought her mere presence must send the vibrations of
happiness through the household. Yet again--why? For where there is no
receiver the current speaks in vain; and for an instant I seemed to see
the air full of messages--of speech striving to utter its passionate
truths to deaf ears stopped for ever against the breaking waves of
sound. But Vanna heard.

She left the room; and when the bridge was over, I made my request. Lady
Meryon shrugged her shoulders and declared it would be a terribly dull
run--the scenery nothing, “and only” (she whispered) “Aunt Selina and
poor Miss Loring?”

Of course I saw at once that she did not like it; but Sir John was all
for my going, and that saved the situation.

I certainly could have dispensed with Aunt Selina when the automobile
drew up in the golden river of the sunrise at the hotel. There were only
the driver, a personal servant, and the two ladies; Mrs. Delany, comely,
pleasant, talkative, and Vanna--

Her face in its dark motoring veil, fine and delicate as a young moon in
a cloud drift--the sensitive sweet mouth that had quivered a little when
she spoke of Fitzgerald--the pure glance that radiated such kindness to
all the world. She sat there with the Key of Dreams pressed against her
slight bosom--her eyes dreaming above it. Already the strange airs of
her unknown world were breathing about me, and as yet I knew not the
things that belonged unto my peace.

We glided along the straight military road from Peshawar to Nowshera,
the gold-bright sun dazzling in its whiteness--a strange drive through
the flat, burned country, with the ominous Kabul River flowing through
it. Military preparations everywhere, and the hills looking watchfully
down--alive, as it were, with keen, hostile eyes. War was at present
about us as behind the lines in France; and when we crossed the Kabul
River on a bridge of boats, and I saw its haunted waters, I began to
feel the atmosphere of the place closing down upon me. It had a sinister
beauty; it breathed suspense; and I wished, as I was sure Vanna did, for
silence that was not at our command.

For Mrs. Delany felt nothing of it. A bright shallow ripple of talk was
her contribution to the joys of the day; though it was, fortunately,
enough for her happiness if we listened and agreed. I knew Vanna
listened only in show. Her intent eyes were fixed on the Tahkt-i-Bahi
hills after we had swept out of Nowshera; and when the car drew up
at the rough track, she had a strange look of suspense and pallor. I
remember I wondered at the time if she were nervous in the wild open
country.

“Now pray don’t be shocked,” said Mrs. Delany comfortably; “but you two
young people may go up to the monastery, and I shall stay here. I am
dreadfully ashamed of myself, but the sight of that hill is enough for
me. Don’t hurry. I may have a little doze, and be all the better company
when you get back. No, don’t try to persuade me, Mr. Clifden. It isn’t
the part of a friend.”

I cannot say I was sorry, though I had a moment of panic when Vanna
offered to stay with her--very much, too, as if she really meant it. So
we set out perforce, Vanna leading steadily, as if she knew the way.
She never looked up, and her wish for silence was so evident, that I
followed, lending my hand mutely when the difficulties obliged it, she
accepting absently, and as if her thoughts were far away.

Suddenly she quickened her pace. We had climbed about nine hundred feet,
and now the narrow track twisted through the rocks--a track that looked
as age-worn as no doubt it was. We threaded it, and struggled over the
ridge, and looked down victorious on the other side.

There she stopped. A very wonderful sight, of which I had never seen the
like, lay below us. Rock and waste and towering crags, and the mighty
ruin of the monastery set in the fangs of the mountain like a robber
baron’s castle, looking far away to the blue mountains of the Debatable
Land--the land of mystery and danger. It stood there--the great ruin
of a vast habitation of men. Building after building, mysterious and
broken, corridors, halls, refectories, cells; the dwelling of a faith so
alien that I could not reconstruct the life that gave it being. And all
sinking gently into ruin that in a century more would confound it with
the roots of the mountains.

Grey and wonderful, it clung to the heights and looked with eyeless
windows at the past. Somehow I found it infinitely pathetic; the very
faith it expressed is dead in India, and none left so poor to do it
reverence.

But Vanna knew her way. Unerringly she led me from point to point, and
she was visibly at home in the intricacies. Such knowledge in a young
woman bewildered me. Could she have studied the plans in the Museum?
How else should she know where the abbot lived, or where the refractory
brothers were punished?

Once I missed her, while I stooped to examine some scroll-work, and
following, found her before one of the few images of the Buddha that the
rapacious Museum had spared--a singularly beautiful bas-relief, the hand
raised to enforce the truth the calm lips were speaking, the drapery
falling in stately folds to the bare feet. As I came up, she had an air
as if she had just ceased from movement, and I had a distinct feeling
that she had knelt before it--I saw the look of worship! The thing
troubled me like a dream, haunting, impossible, but real.

“How beautiful!” I said in spite of myself, as she pointed to the image.
“In this utter solitude it seems the very spirit of the place.”

“He was. He is,” said Vanna.

“Explain to me. I don’t understand. I know so little of him. What is the
subject?”

She hesitated; then chose her words as if for a beginner;--“It is the
Blessed One preaching to the Tree-Spirits. See how eagerly they lean
from the boughs to listen. This other relief represents him in the state
of mystic vision. Here he is drowned in peace. See how it overflows from
the closed eyes; the closed lips. The air is filled with his quiet.”

“What is he dreaming?”

“Not dreaming--seeing. Peace. He sits at the point where time and
infinity meet. To attain that vision was the aim of the monks who lived
here.”

“Did they attain?” I found myself speaking as if she could certainly
answer.

“A few. There was one, Vasettha, the Brahman, a young man who had
renounced all his possessions and riches, and seated here before this
image of the Blessed One, he fell often into the mystic state. He had a
strange vision at one time of the future of India, which will surely be
fulfilled. He did not forget it in his rebirths. He remembers-”

She broke off suddenly and said with forced indifference,--“He would sit
here often looking out over the mountains; the monks sat at his feet to
hear. He became abbot while still young. But his story is a sad one.”

“I entreat you to tell me.”

She looked away over the mountains. “While he was abbot here,--still a
young man,--a famous Chinese Pilgrim came down through Kashmir to visit
the Holy Places in India. The abbot went forward with him to Peshawar,
that he might make him welcome. And there came a dancer to Peshawar,
named Lilavanti, most beautiful! I dare not tell you her beauty. I
tremble now to think-”

Again she paused, and again the faint creeping sense of mystery invaded
me.

She resumed;--

“The abbot saw her and he loved her. He was young still, you remember.
She was a woman of the Hindu faith and hated Buddhism. It swept him down
into the lower worlds of storm and desire. He fled with Lilavanti and
never returned here. So in his rebirth he fell-”

She stopped dead; her face pale as death.

“How do you know? Where have you read it? If I could only find what you
find and know what you know! The East is like an open book to you. Tell
me the rest.”

“How should I know any more?” she said hurriedly. “We must be going
back. You should study the plans of this place at Peshawar. They were
very learned monks who lived here. It is famous for learning.”

The life had gone out of her words-out of the ruins. There was no more
to be said.

We clambered down the hill in the hot sunshine, speaking only of the
view, the strange shrubs and flowers, and, once, the swift gliding of a
snake, and found Mrs. Delany blissfully asleep in the most padded corner
of the car. The spirit of the East vanished in her comfortable presence,
and luncheon seemed the only matter of moment.

“I wonder, my dears,” she said, “if you would be very disappointed and
think me very dense if I proposed our giving up the Malakhand Fort? The
driver has been giving me in very poor English such an account of the
dangers of that awful road up the hill that I feel no Fort would repay
me for its terrors. Do say what you feel, Miss Loring. Mr. Clifden can
lunch with the officers at Nowshera and come any time. I know I am an
atrocity.”

There could be only one answer, though Vanna and I knew perfectly well
the crafty design of the driver to spare himself work. Mrs. Delany
remained brightly awake for the run home, and favored us with many
remarkable views on India and its shortcomings, Vanna, who had a sincere
liking for her, laughing with delight at her description of a visit of
condolence with Lady Meryon to the five widows of one of the hill Rajas.

But I own I was pre-occupied. I knew those moments at the monastery had
given me a glimpse into the wonderland of her soul that made me long
for more. It was rapidly becoming clear to me that unless my intentions
developed on very different lines I must flee Peshawar. For love is born
of sympathy, and sympathy was strengthening daily, but for love I had no
courage yet.

I feared it as men fear the unknown. I despised myself--but I feared.
I will confess my egregious folly and vanity--I had no doubt as to her
reception of my offer if I should make it, but possessed by a colossal
selfishness, I thought only of myself, and from that point of view could
not decide how I stood to lose or gain. In my wildest accesses of vanity
I did not suppose Vanna loved me, but I felt she liked me, and I believe
the advantages I had to offer would be overwhelming to a woman in her
position. So, tossed on the waves of indecision, I inclined to flight.

That night I resolutely began my packing, and wrote a note of farewell
to Lady Meryon. The next morning I furiously undid it, and destroyed the
note. And that afternoon I took the shortest way to the sun-set road to
lounge about and wait for Vanna and Winifred. She never came, and I was
as unreasonably angry as if I had deserved the blessing of her presence.

Next day I could see that she tried gently hut clearly to discourage our
meeting and for three days I never saw her at all. Yet I knew that in
her solitary life our talks counted for a pleasure, and when we met
again I thought I saw a new softness in the lovely hazel deeps of her
eyes.


III


On the day when things became clear to me, I was walking towards the
Meryons’ gates when I met her coming alone along the sunset road, in the
late gold of the afternoon. She looked pale and a little wearied, and I
remembered I wished I did not know every change of her face as I did. It
was a symptom that alarmed my selfishness--it galled me with the sense
that I was no longer my own despot.

“So you have been up the Khyber Pass,” she said as I fell into step at
her side. “Tell me--was it as wonderful as you expected?”

“No, no,--you tell me! It will give me what I missed. Begin at the
beginning. Tell me what I saw.”

I could not miss the delight of her words, and she laughed, knowing my
whim.

“Oh, that Pass!--the wonder of those old roads that have borne the
traffic and romance of the world for ages. Do you think there is
anything in the world so fascinating as they are? But did you go on
Tuesday or Friday?”

For these are the only days in the week when the Khyber can be safely
entered. The British then turn out the Khyber Rifles and man every crag,
and the loaded caravans move like a tide, and go up and down the narrow
road on their occasions.

Naturally mere sightseers are not welcomed, for much business must be
got through in that urgent forty eight hours in which life is not risked
in entering.

“Tuesday. But make a picture for me.”

“Well, you gave your word not to photograph or sketch--as if one wanted
to when every bit of it is stamped on one’s brain! And you went up to
Jumrood Fort at the entrance. Did they tell you it is an old Sikh Fort
and has been on duty in that turbulent place for five hundred years And
did you see the machine guns in the court? And every one armed--even the
boys with belts of cartridges? Then you went up the narrow winding track
between the mountains, and you said to yourself, ‘This is the road of
pure romance. It goes up to silken Samarkhand, and I can ride to Bokhara
of the beautiful women and to all the dreams. Am I alive and is it
real?’ You felt that?”

“All. Every bit. Go on!”

She smiled with pleasure.

“And you saw the little forts on the crags and the men on guard all
along the bills, rifles ready! You could hear the guns rattle as they
saluted. Do you know that up there men plough with rifles loaded beside
them? They have to be men indeed.”

“Do you mean to imply that we are not men?”

“Different men at least. This is life in a Border ballad. Such a life as
you knew in France but beautiful in a wild--hawk sort of way. Don’t the
Khyber Rifles bewilder you? They are drawn from these very Hill tribes,
and will shoot their own fathers and brothers in the way of duty as
comfortably as if they were jackals. Once there was a scrap here and
one of the tribesmen sniped our men unbearably. What do you suppose
happened? A Khyber Rifle came to the Colonel and said, ‘Let me put
an end to him, Colonel Sahib. I know exactly where he sits. He is my
grandfather.’ And he did it!”

“The bond of bread and salt?”

“Yes, and discipline. I’m sometimes half frightened of discipline. It
moulds a man like wax. Even God doesn’t do that. Well--then you had the
traders--wild shaggy men in sheepskin and women in massive jewelry of
silver and turquoise,-great earrings, heavy bracelets loading their
arms, wild, fierce, handsome. And the camels--thousands of them, some
going up, some coming down, a mass of human and animal life. Above
you, moving figures against the keen blue sky, or deep below you in the
ravines.

“The camels were swaying along with huge bales of goods, and dark
beautiful women in wicker cages perched on them. Silks and carpets from
Bokhara, and blue--eyed Persian cats, and bluer Persian turquoises.
Wonderful! And the dust, gilded by the sunshine, makes a vaporous golden
atmosphere for it all.”

“What was the most wonderful thing you saw there?”

“The most beautiful, I think, was a man--a splendid dark ruffian
lounging along. He wanted to show off, and his swagger was perfect. Long
black onyx eyes and a tumble of black curls, and teeth like almonds.
But what do you think he carried on his wrist--a hawk with fierce yellow
eyes, ringed and chained. Hawking is a favourite sport in the hills. Oh,
why doesn’t some great painter come and paint it all before they take to
trains and cars? I long to see it all again, but I never shall.”

“Why not,” said I. “Surely Sir John can get you up there any day?”

“Not now. The fighting makes it difficult. But it isn’t that. I am
leaving.”

“Leaving?” My heart gave a leap. “Why? Where?”

“Leaving Lady Meryon.”

“Why--for Heaven’s sake?”

“I had rather not tell you.”

“But I must know.”

“You cannot.”

“I shall ask Lady Meryon.”

“I forbid you.”

And then the unexpected happened, and an unbearable impulse swept me
into folly--or was it wisdom?

“Listen to me. I would not have said it yet, but this settles it. I want
you to marry me. I want it atrociously!”

It was a strange word. What I felt for her at that moment was difficult
to describe. I endured it like a pain that could only be assuaged by
her presence, but I endured it angrily. We were walking on the sunset
road--very deserted and quiet at the time. The place was propitious if
nothing else was.

She looked at me in transparent astonishment;

“Mr. Clifden, are you dreaming? You can’t mean what you say.”

“Why can’t I? I do. I want you. You have the key of all I care for. I
think of the world without you and find it tasteless.”

“Surely you have all the world can give? What do you want more?”

“The power to enjoy it--to understand it. You have got that--I haven’t.
I want you always with me to interpret, like a guide to a blind fellow.
I am no better.”

“Say like a dog, at once!” she interrupted. “At least you are frank
enough to put it on that ground. You have not said you love me. You
could not say it.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not. I know nothing about love. I want
you. Indescribably. Perhaps that is love--is it? I never wanted any one
before. I have tried to get away and I can’t.”

I was brutally frank, you see. She compelled my very thoughts.

“Why have you tried?”

“Because every man likes freedom. But I like you better.” “I can tell
you the reason,” she said in her gentle unwavering voice. “I am Lady
Meryon’s governess, and an undesirable. You have felt that?”

“Don’t make me out such a snob. No--yes. You force me into honesty.
I did feel it at first like the miserable fool I am, but I could kick
myself when I think of that now. It is utterly forgotten. Take me and
make me what you will, and forgive me. Only tell me your secret of joy.
How is it you understand everything alive or dead? I want to live--to
see, to know.”

It was a rhapsody like a boy’s. Yet at the moment I was not even ashamed
of it, so sharp was my need.

“I think,” she said, slowly, looking straight before her, “that I had
better be quite frank. I don’t love you. I don’t know what love means
in the Western sense. It has a very different meaning for me. Your voice
comes to me from an immense distance when you speak in that way. You
want me--but never with a thought of what I might want. Is that love? I
like you very deeply as a friend, but we are of different races. There
is a gulf.”

“A gulf? You are English.”

“By birth, yes. In mind, no. And there are things that go deeper, that
you could not understand. So I refuse quite definitely, and our ways
part here, for in a few days I go. I shall not see you again, but I wish
to say good-bye.”

The bitterest chagrin was working in my soul. I felt as if all were
deserting me-a sickening feeling of loneliness. I did not know the man
who was in me, and was a stranger to myself.

“I entreat you to tell me why, and where.”

“Since you have made me this offer, I will tell you why. Lady Meryon
objected to my friendship with you, and objected in a way which-”

She stopped, flushing palely. I caught her hand.

“That settles it!-that she should have dared! I’ll go up this minute and
tell her we are engaged. Vanna-Vanna!”

For she disengaged her hand, quietly but firmly.

“On no account. How can I make it more plain to you? I should have gone
soon in any case. My place is in the native city--that is the life I
want. I have work there, I knew it before I came out. My sympathies are
all with them. They know what life is--why even the beggars, poorer than
poor, are perfectly happy, basking in the great generous sun. Oh, the
splendour and riot of life and colour! That’s my life--I sicken of
this.”

“But I’ll give it to you. Marry me, and we will travel till you’re tired
of it.”

“Yes, and look on as at a play--sitting in the stalls, and applauding
when we are pleased. No, I’m going to work there.” “For God’s sake, how?
Let me come too.”

“You can’t. You’re not in it. I am going to attach myself to the medical
mission at Lahore and learn nursing, and then I shall go to my own
people.”

“Missionaries? You’ve nothing in common with them?”

“Nothing. But they teach what I want. Mr. Clifden, I shall not come this
way again. If I remember--I’ll write to you, and tell you what the real
world is like.”

She smiled, the absorbed little smile I knew and feared. I saw pleading
was useless then. I would wait, and never lose sight of her and of hope.

“Vanna, before you go, give me your gift of sight. Interpret for me.
Stay with me a little and make me see.”

“What do you mean exactly?” she asked in her gentlest voice, half
turning to me.

“Make one journey with me, as my sister, if you will do no more. Though
I warn you that all the time I shall be trying to win my wife. But come
with me once, and after that--if you will go, you must. Say yes.”

Madness! But she hesitated--a hesitation full of hope, and looked at me
with intent eyes.

“I will tell you frankly,” she said at last, “that I know my knowledge
of the East and kinship with it goes far beyond mere words. In my case
the doors were not shut. I believe--I know that long ago this was my
life. If I spoke for ever I could not make you understand how much I
know and why. So I shall quite certainly go back to it. Nothing--you
least of all, can hold me. But you are my friend--that is a true bond.
And if you would wish me to give you two months before I go, I might do
that if it would in any way help you. As your friend only--you clearly
understand. You would not reproach me afterwards when I left you, as I
should most certainly do?”

“I swear I would not. I swear I would protect you even from myself. I
want you for ever, but if you will only give me two months--come! But
have you thought that people will talk. It may injure you. I’m not worth
that, God knows. And you will take nothing I could give you in return.”

She spoke very quietly.

“That does not trouble me.--It would only trouble me if you asked what
I have not to give. For two months I would travel with you as a friend,
if, like a friend, I paid my own expenses-”

I would have interrupted, but she brushed that firmly aside. “No, I must
do as I say, and I am quite able to or I should not suggest it. I would
go on no other terms. It would be hard if because we are man and woman I
might not do one act of friendship for you before we part. For though I
refuse your offer utterly, I appreciate it, and I would make what little
return I can. It would be a sharp pain to me to distress you.”

Her gentleness and calm, the magnitude of the offer she was making
stunned me so that I could scarcely speak. There was such an
extraordinary simplicity and generosity in her manner that it appeared
to me more enthralling and bewildering than the most finished coquetry
I had ever known. She gave me opportunities that the most ardent lover
could in his wildest dream desire, and with the remoteness in her eyes
and her still voice she deprived them of all hope. It kindled in me a
flame that made my throat dry when I tried to speak.

“Vanna, is it a promise? You mean it?”

“If you wish it, yes. But I warn you I think it will not make it easier
for you when the time is over.

“Why two months?”

“Partly because I can afford no more. No! I know what you would say.
Partly because I can spare no more time. But I will give you that,
if you wish, though, honestly, I had very much rather not. I think it
unwise for you. I would protect you if I could--indeed I would!”

It was my turn to hesitate now. Every moment revealed to me some new
sweetness, some charm that I saw would weave itself into the very
fibre of my I had been! Was I not now a fool? Would it not being if the
opportunity were given. Oh, fool that be better to let her go before she
had become a part of my daily experience? I began to fear I was courting
my own shipwreck. She read my thoughts clearly.

“Indeed you would be wise to decide against it. Release me from my
promise. It was a mad scheme.”

The superiority--or so I felt it--of her gentleness maddened me. It
might have been I who needed protection, who was running the risk of
misjudgment--not she, a lonely woman. She looked at me, waiting--trying
to be wise for me, never for one instant thinking of herself. I felt
utterly exiled from the real purpose of her life.

“I will never release you. I claim your promise. I hold to it.”

“Very well then--I will write, and tell you where I shall be. Good-bye,
and if you change your mind, as I hope you will, tell me.”

She extended her hand cool as a snowflake, and was gone, walking swiftly
up the road. Ah, let a man beware when his wishes fulfilled, rain down
upon him!

To what had I committed myself? She knew her strength and had no fears.
I could scarcely realize that she had liking enough for me to make the
offer. That it meant no shade more than she had said I knew well. She
was safe, but what was to be the result for me? I knew nothing--she was
a beloved mystery.

 “Strange she is and secret,  Strange her eyes; her cheeks are
cold as cold sea-shells.”

Yet I would risk it, for I knew there was no hope if I let her go now,
and if I saw her again, some glimmer might fall upon my dark.

Next day this reached me:--Dear Mr. Clifden,--

I am going to some Indian friends for a time. On the 15th of June I
shall be at Srinagar in Kashmir. A friend has allowed me to take her
little houseboat, the “Kedarnath.” If you like this plan we will share
the cost for two months. I warn you it is not luxurious, but I think you
will like it. I shall do this whether you come or no, for I want a quiet
time before I take up my nursing in Lahore. In thinking of all this will
you remember that I am not a girl but a woman. I shall be twenty-nine my
next birthday. Sincerely yours, VANNA LORING.

P.S. But I still think you would be wiser not to come. I hope to hear
you will not.

I replied only this:--Dear Miss Loring,--I think I understand the
position fully. I will be there. I thank you with all my heart.
Gratefully yours, STEPHEN CLIFDEN.


IV


Three days later I met Lady Meryon, and was swept in to tea. Her manner
was distinctly more cordial as she mentioned casually that Vanna had
left--she understood to take up missionary work--“which is odd,” she
added with a woman’s acrimony, “for she had no more in common with
missionaries than I have, and that is saying a good deal. Of course she
speaks Hindustani perfectly, and could be useful, but I haven’t grasped
the point of it yet.” I saw she counted on my knowing nothing of the
real reason of Vanna’s going and left it, of course, at that. The talk
drifted away under my guidance. Vanna evidently puzzled her. She half
feared, and wholly misunderstood her.

No message came to me, as time went by, and for the time she had
vanished completely, but I held fast to her promise and lived on that
only.

I take up my life where it ceased to be a mere suspense and became life
once more.

On the 15th of June, I found myself riding into Srinagar in Kashmir,
through the pure tremulous green of the mighty poplars that hedge the
road into the city. The beauty of the country had half stunned me when
I entered the mountain barrier of Baramula and saw the snowy peaks that
guard the Happy Valley, with the Jhelum flowing through its tranquil
loveliness. The flush of the almond blossom was over, but the iris, like
a blue sea of peace had overflowed the world--the azure meadows smiled
back at the radiant sky. Such blossom! the blue shading into clear
violet, like a shoaling sea. The earth, like a cup held in the hand of a
god, brimmed with the draught of youth and summer and--love? But no, for
me the very word was sinister. Vanna’s face, immutably calm, confronted
it.

That night I slept in a boat at Sopor, and I remember that, waking at
midnight, I looked out and saw a mountain with a gloriole of hazy silver
about it, misty and faint as a cobweb threaded with dew. The river,
there spreading into a lake, was dark under it, flowing in a deep smooth
blackness of shadow, and everything awaited--what? And even while I
looked, the moon floated serenely above the peak, and all was bathed in
pure light, the water rippling and shining in broken silver and pearl.
So had Vanna floated into my sky, luminous, sweet, remote. I did not
question my heart any more. I knew I loved her.

Two days later I rode into Srinagar, and could scarcely see the wild
beauty of that strange Venice of the East, my heart was so beating
in my eyes. I rode past the lovely wooden bridges where the balconied
houses totter to each other across the canals in dim splendour of
carving and age; where the many-coloured native life crowds down to the
river steps and cleanses its flower-bright robes, its gold-bright brass
vessels in the shining stream, and my heart said only--Vanna, Vanna!

One day, one thought, of her absence had taught me what she was to me,
and if humility and patient endeavor could raise me to her feet, I was
resolved that I would spend my life in labor and think it well spent.

My servant dismounted and led his horse, asking from every one where the
“Kedarnath” could be found, and eager black eyes sparkled and two little
bronze images detached themselves from the crowd of boys, and ran, fleet
as fauns, before us.

Above the last bridge the Jhelum broadens out into a stately river,
controlled at one side by the banked walk known as the Bund, with the
Club House upon it and the line of houseboats beneath. Here the visitors
flutter up and down and exchange the gossip, the bridge appointments,
the little dinners that sit so incongruously on the pure Orient that is
Kashmir.

She would not be here. My heart told me that, and sure enough the boys
were leading across the bridge and by a quiet shady way to one of the
many backwaters that the great river makes in the enchanting city. There
is one waterway stretching on afar to the Dal Lake. It looks like a
river--it is the very haunt of peace. Under those mighty chenar, or
plane trees, that are the glory of Kashmir, clouding the water with deep
green shadows, the sun can scarcely pierce, save in a dipping sparkle
here and there to intensify the green gloom. The murmur of the city, the
chatter of the club, are hundreds of miles away. We rode downward under
the towering trees, and dismounting, saw a little houseboat tethered to
the bank. It was not of the richer sort that haunts the Bund, where the
native servants follow in a separate boat, and even the electric light
is turned on as part of the luxury. This was a long low craft, very
broad, thatched like a country cottage afloat. In the forepart lived the
native owner, and his family, their crew, our cooks and servants; for
they played many parts in our service. And in the afterpart, room for a
life, a dream, the joy or curse & many days to be.

But then, I saw only one thing--Vanna sat under the trees, reading, or
looking at the cool dim watery vista, with a single boat, loaded to the
river’s edge with melons and scarlet tomatoes, punting lazily down to
Srinagar in the sleepy afternoon.

She was dressed in white with a shady hat, and her delicate dark face
seemed to glow in the shadow like the heart of a pale rose. For the
first time I knew she was beautiful. Beauty shone in her like the flame
in an alabaster lamp, serene, diffused in the very air about her, so
that to me she moved in a mild radiance. She rose to meet me with both
hands outstretched--the kindest, most cordial welcome. Not an eyelash
flickered, not a trace of self-consciousness. If I could have seen her
flush or tremble--but no--her eyes were clear and calm as a forest pool.
So I remembered her. So I saw her once more.

I tried, with a hopeless pretence, to follow her example and hide what I
felt, where she had nothing to hide.

“What a place you have found. Why, it’s like the deep heart of a wood!”

“Yes, I saw it once when I was here with the Meryons. But we lay at the
Bund then--just under the Club. This is better. Did you like the ride
up?”

I threw myself on the grass beside her with a feeling of perfect rest.

“It was like a new heaven and a new earth. What a country!”

The very spirit of Quiet seemed to be drowsing in those branches
towering up into the blue, dipping their green fingers into the crystal
of the water. What a heaven!

“Now you shall have your tea and then I will show you your rooms,” she
said, smiling at my delight. “We shall stay here a few days more that
you may see Srinagar, and then they tow us up into the Dal Lake opposite
the Gardens of the Mogul Emperors. And if you think this beautiful what
will you say then?”

I shut my eyes and see still that first meal of my new life. The little
table that Pir Baksh, breathing full East in his jade-green turban, set
before her, with its cloth worked in a pattern of the chenar leaves
that are the symbol of Kashmir; the brown cakes made by Ahmad Khan in
a miraculous kitchen of his own invention--a few holes burrowed in the
river bank, a smoldering fire beneath them, and a width of canvas for
a roof. But it served, and no more need be asked of luxury. And Vanna,
making it mysteriously the first home I ever had known, the central
joy of it all. Oh, wonderful days of life that breathe the spirit of
immortality and pass so quickly--surely they must be treasured somewhere
in Eternity that we may look upon their beloved light once more.

“Now you must see the boat. The Kedarnath is not a Dreadnought, but she
is broad and very comfortable. And we have many chaperons. They all
live in the bows, and exist simply to protect the Sahiblog from all
discomfort, and very well they do it. That is Ahmad Khan by the kitchen.
He cooks for us. Salama owns the boat, and steers her and engages the
men to tow us when we move. And when I arrived he aired a little English
and said piously; The Lord help me to give you no trouble, and the Lord
help you! That is his wife sitting on the bank. She speaks little but
Kashmiri, but I know a little of that. Look at the hundred rat-tail
plaits of her hair, lengthened with wool, and see her silver and
turquoise jewelry. She wears much of the family fortune and is quite
a walking bank. Salama, Ahmad Khan and I talk by the hour. Ahmad comes
from Fyzabad. Look at Salama’s boy--I call him the Orange Imp. Did you
ever see anything so beautiful?”

I looked in sheer delight, and grasped my camera. Sitting near us was a
lovely little Kashmiri boy of about eight, in a faded orange coat, and
a turban exactly like his father’s. His curled black eyelashes were
so long that they made a soft gloom over the upper part of the little
golden face. The perfect bow of the scarlet lips, the long eyes, the shy
smile, suggested an Indian Eros. He sat dipping his feet in the water
with little pigeon-like cries of content.

“He paddles at the bow of our little shikara boat with a paddle exactly
like a water-lily leaf. Do you like our friends? I love them already,
and know all their affairs. And now for the boat.”

“One moment--If we are friends on a great adventure, I must call you
Vanna, and you me Stephen.”

“Yes, I suppose that is part of it,” she said, smiling. “Come, Stephen.”

It was like music, but a cold music that chilled me. She should have
hesitated, should have flushed--it was I who trembled. So I followed her
across the broad plank into our new home.

“This is our sitting-room. Look, how charming!”

It was better than charming; it was home indeed. Windows at each side
opening down almost to the water, a little table for meals that lived
mostly on the bank, with a grey pot of iris in the middle. Another
table for writing, photography, and all the little pursuits of travel.
A bookshelf with some well--worn friends. Two long cushioned chairs.
Two for meals, and a Bokhara rug, soft and pleasant for the feet. The
interior was plain unpainted wood, but set so that the grain showed like
satin in the rippling lights from the water.

That is the inventory of the place I have loved best in the world, but
what eloquence can describe what it gave me, what its memory gives me to
this day? And I have no eloquence--what I felt leaves me dumb.

“It is perfect,” was all I said as she waved her hand proudly. “It is
home.”

“And if you had come alone to Kashmir you would have had a great rich
boat with electric light and a butler. You would never have seen the
people except at meal--times. I think you will like this better.
Well, this is your tiny bedroom, and your bathroom, and beyond the
sitting--room are mine. Do you like it all?”

But I could say no more. The charm of her own personality had touched
everything and left its fragrance like a flower--breath in the air. I
was beggared of thanks, but my whole soul was gratitude. We dined on
the bank that evening, the lamp burning steadily in the still air and
throwing broken reflections in the water, while the moon looked in upon
them through the leaves. I felt extraordinarily young and happy.

The quiet of her voice was soft as the little lap of water against
the bows of the boat, and Kahdra, the Orange Imp, was singing a little
wordless song to himself as he washed the plates beside us. It was a
simple meal, and Vanna, abstemious as a hermit never ate anything but
rice and fruit, but I could remember no meal in all my days of luxury
where I had eaten with such zest.

“It looks very grand to have so many to wait upon us, doesn’t it? But
this is one of the cheapest countries in the world though the old timers
mourn over present expenses. You will laugh when I show you your share
of the cost.”

“The wealth of the world could not buy this,” I said, and was silent.

“But you must listen to my plans. We must do a little camping the
last three weeks before we part. Up in the mountains. Are they not
marvellous? They stand like a rampart round us, but not cold and
terrible, but “Like as the hills stand round about Jerusalem”--they are
guardian presences. And running up into them, high-very high, are the
valleys and hills where we shall camp. Tomorrow we shall row through
Srinagar, by the old Maharaja’s palace.”


V

And so began a life of sheer enchantment. We knew no one. The visitors
in Kashmir change nearly every season, and no one cared-no one asked
anything of us, and as for our shipmates, a willing affectionate service
was their gift, and no more. Looking back, I know in what a wonder-world
I was privileged to live. Vanna could talk with them all. She did not
move apart, a condescending or indifferent foreigner. Kahdra would
come to her knee and prattle to her of the great snake that lived up on
Mahadeo to devour erring boys who omitted their prayers at proper Moslem
intervals. She would sit with the baby in her lap while the mother
busied herself in the sunny bows with the mysterious dishes that smelt
so savory to a hungry man. The cuts, the bruises of the neighbourhood
all came to Vanna for treatment.

“I am graduating as a nurse,” she would say laughing as she bent over
the lean arm of some weirdly wrinkled old lady, bandaging and soothing
at the same moment. Her reward would be some bit of folk-lore, some
quaintness of gratitude that I noted down in the little book I kept for
remembrance--that I do not need, for every word is in my heart.

We rowed down through the city next day--Salama rowing, and little
Kahdra lazily paddling at the bow--a wonderful city, with its narrow
ways begrimed with the dirt of ages, and its balconied houses looking
as if disease and sin had soaked into them and given them a vicious
tottering beauty, horrible and yet lovely too. We saw the swarming life
of the bazaar, the white turbans coming and going, diversified by the
rose and yellow Hindu turbans, and the caste-marks, orange and red, on
the dark brows.

I saw two women--girls--painted and tired like Jezebel, looking out of
one window carved and old, and the grey burnished doves flying about
it. They leaned indolently, like all the old, old wickedness of the East
that yet is ever young--“Flowers of Delight,” with smooth black hair
braided with gold and blossoms, and covered with pale rose veils, and
gold embossed disks swinging like lamps beside the olive cheeks, the
great eyes artificially lengthened and darkened with soorma, and the
curves of the full lips emphasized with vermilion. They looked down
on us with apathy, a dull weariness that held all the old evil of the
wicked humming city.

It had taken shape in those indolent bodies and heavy eyes that could
flash into life as a snake wakes into fierce darting energy when the
time comes to spring--direct inheritrixes from Lilith, in the fittest
setting in the world--the almost exhausted vice of an Oriental city as
old as time.

“And look-below here,” said Vanna, pointing to one of the ghauts--long
rugged steps running down to the river.

“When I came yesterday, a great broken crowd was collected here, almost
shouldering each other into the water where a boat lay rocking. In it
lay the body of a man brutally murdered for the sake of a few rupees and
flung into the river. I could see the poor brown body stark in the boat
with a friend weeping beside it. On the lovely deodar bridge people
leaned over, watching with a grim open-mouthed curiosity, and business
went on gaily where the jewelers make the silver bangles for slender
wrists, and the rows of silver chains that make the necks like ‘the
Tower of Damascus builded for an armory.’ It was all very wild and
cruel. I went down to them-”

“Vanna--you went down? Horrible!”

“No, you see I heard them say the wife was almost a child and needs
help. So I went. Once long ago at Peshawar I saw the same thing happen,
and they came and took the child for the service of the gods, for she
was most lovely, and she clung to the feet of a man in terror, and the
priest stabbed her to the heart. She died in my arms.

“Good God!” I said, shuddering; “what a sight for you! Did they never
hang him?”

“He was not punished. I told you it was a very long time ago. Her
expression had a brooding quiet as she looked down into the running
river, almost it might be as if she saw the picture of that past misery
in the deep water. She said no more. But in her words and the terrible
crowding of its life, Srinagar seemed to me more of a nightmare than
anything I had seen, excepting only Benares; for the holy Benares is a
memory of horror, with a sense of blood hidden under its frantic crazy
devotion, and not far hidden either.

“Our own green shade, when we pulled back to it in the evening cool, was
a refuge of unspeakable quiet. She read aloud to me that evening by the
small light of our lamp beneath the trees, and, singularly, she read of
joy.

“I have drunk of the Cup of the Ineffable, I have found the key of the
Mystery, Travelling by no track I have come to the Sorrowless Land; very
easily has the mercy of the great Lord come upon me. Wonderful is that
Land of rest to which no merit can win. There have I seen joy filled
to the brim, perfection of joy. He dances in rapture and waves of form
arise from His dance. He holds all within his bliss.”

“What is that?”

“It is from the songs of the great Indian mystic--Kabir. Let me read you
more. It is like the singing of a lark, lost in the infinite of light
and heaven.”

So in the soft darkness I heard for the first time those immortal words;
and hearing, a faint glimmer of understanding broke upon me as to
the source of the peace that surrounded her. I had accepted it as an
emanation of her own heart when it was the pulsing of the tide of the
Divine. She read, choosing a verse here and there, and I listened with
absorption.

Suppose I had been wrong in believing that sorrow is the keynote
of life; that pain is the road of ascent, if road there be; that an
implacable Nature and that only, presides over all our pitiful struggles
and seekings and writes a black “Finis” to the holograph of our
existence?

What then? What was she teaching me? Was she the Interpreter of a Beauty
eternal in the heavens, and reflected like a broken prism in the beauty
that walked visible beside me? So I listened like a child to an unknown
language, yet ventured my protest.

“In India, in this wonderful country where men have time and will for
speculation such thoughts may be natural. Can they be found in the
West?”

“This is from the West--might not Kabir himself have said it? Certainly
he would have felt it. ‘Happy is he who seeks not to understand the
Mystery of God, but who, merging his spirit into Thine, sings to
Thy face, O Lord, like a harp, understanding how difficult it is to
know--how easy to love Thee.’ We debate and argue and the Vision passes
us by. We try to prove it, and kill it in the laboratory of our minds,
when on the altar of our souls it will dwell for ever.”

Silence--and I pondered. Finally she laid the book aside, and repeated
from memory and in a tone of perfect music; “Kabir says, ‘I shall go
to the House of my Lord with my Love at my side; then shall I sound the
trumpet of triumph.’”

And when she left me alone in the moonlight silence the old doubts came
back to me--the fear that I saw only through her eyes, and began to
believe in joy only because I loved her. I remember I wrote in the
little book I kept for my stray thoughts, these words which are not mine
but reflect my thought of her; “Thine is the skill of the Fairy Woman,
and the virtue of St. Bride, and the faith of Mary the Mild, and the
gracious way of the Greek woman, and the beauty of lovely Emer, and the
tenderness of heart-sweet Deirdre, and the courage of Maev the great
Queen, and the charm of Mouth-of-Music.”

Yes, all that and more, but I feared lest I should see the heaven of joy
through her eyes only and find it mirage as I had found so much else.

SECOND PART Early in the pure dawn the men came and our boat was towed
up into the Dal Lake through crystal waterways and flowery banks, the
men on the path keeping step and straining at the rope until the bronze
muscles stood out on their legs and backs, shouting strong rhythmic
phrases to mark the pull.

“They shout the Wondrous Names of God--as they are called,” said Vanna
when I asked. “They always do that for a timid effort. Bad shah! The
Lord, the Compassionate, and so on. I don’t think there is any religion
about it but it is as natural to them as One, Two, Three, to us. It
gives a tremendous lift. Watch and see.”

It was part of the delightful strangeness that we should move to that
strong music. We sat on the upper deck and watched the dream--like
beauty drift slowly by until we emerged beneath a little bridge into the
fairy land of the lake which the Mogul Emperors loved so well that they
made their noble pleasance gardens on the banks, and thought it little
to travel up yearly from far--off Delhi over the snowy Pir Panjal with
their Queens and courts for the perfect summer of Kashmir.

We moored by a low bank under a great wood of chenar trees, and saw the
little table in the wilderness set in the greenest shade with our chairs
beside it, and my pipe laid reverently upon it by Kahdra.

Across the glittering water lay on one side the Shalimar Garden known
to all readers of “Lalla Ruhk”--a paradise of roses; and beyond it
again the lovelier gardens of Nour-Mahal, the Light of the Palace, that
imperial woman who ruled India under the weak Emperor’s name--she whose
name he set thus upon his coins:

“By order of King Jehangir. Gold has a hundred splendours added to it by
receiving the name of Nour-Jahan the Queen.”

Has any woman ever had a more royal homage than this most royal
lady--known first as Mihr-u-nissa--Sun of Women, and later, Nour-Mahal,
Light of the Palace, and latest, Nour-Jahan-Begam, Queen, Light of the
World?

Here in these gardens she had lived--had seen the snow mountains change
from the silver of dawn to the illimitable rose of sunset. The life, the
colour beat insistently upon my brain. They built a world of magic where
every moment was pure gold. Surely--surely to Vanna it must be the same.
I believed in my very soul that she who gave and shared such joy could
not be utterly apart from me? Could I then feel certain that I had
gained any ground in these days we had been together? Could she still
define the cruel limits she had laid down, or were her eyes kinder, her
tones a more broken music? I did not know. Whenever I could hazard a
guess the next minute baffled me.

Just then, in the sunset, she was sitting on deck, singing under her
breath and looking absently away to the Gardens across the Lake. I could
catch the words here and there, and knew them.

  “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
   Where are you now--who lies beneath your spell?
   Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway far,
   Before you agonize them in farewell?”

“Don’t!” I said abruptly. It stung me.

“What?” she asked in surprise. “That is the song every one remembers
here. Poor Laurence Hope! How she knew and loved this India! What are
you grumbling at?”

Her smile stung me.

“Never mind,” I said morosely. “You don’t understand. You never will.”

And yet I believed sometimes that she would--that time was on my side.

When Kahdra and I pulled her across to Nour-Mahal’s garden next day, how
could I not believe it--her face was so full of joy as she looked at me
for sympathy?

“I don’t think so much beauty is crowded into any other few miles in
the world--beauty of association, history, nature, everything!” she said
with shining eyes. “The lotus flowers are not out yet but when they come
that is the last touch of perfection. Do you remember Homer--‘But whoso
ate of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, was neither willing to bring
me word again, nor to depart. Nay, their desire was to remain there
for ever, feeding on the lotus with the Lotus Eaters, forgetful of all
return.’ You know the people here eat the roots and seeds? I ate them
last year and perhaps that is why I cannot stay away. But look at
Nour-Mahal’s garden!”

We were pulling in among the reeds and the huge carven leaves of the
water plants, and the snake-headed buds lolling upon them with the
slippery half-sinister look that water-flowers have, as though their
cold secret life belonged to the hidden water world and not to ours. But
now the boat was touching the little wooden steps.

O beautiful--most beautiful the green lawns, shaded with huge pyramids
of the chenar trees, the terraced gardens where the marble steps climbed
from one to the other, and the mountain streams flashed singing and
shining down the carved marble slopes that cunning hands had made to
delight the Empress of Beauty, between the wildernesses of roses. Her
pavilion stands still among the flowers, and the waters ripple through
it to join the lake--and she is--where? Even in the glory of sunshine
the passing of all fair things was present with me as I saw the empty
shell that had held the Pearl of Empire, and her roses that still bloom,
her waters that still sing for others.

The spray of a hundred fountains was misty diamond dust in the warm air
laden with the scent of myriad flowers. Kahdra followed us everywhere,
singing his little tuneless happy song. The world brimmed with beauty
and joy. And we were together. Words broke from me.

“Vanna, let it be for ever! Let us live here. I’ll give up all the world
for this and you.”

“But you see,” she said delicately, “it would be ‘giving up.’ You use
the right word. It is not your life. It is a lovely holiday, no more.
You would weary of it. You would want the city life and your own kind.”

I protested with all my soul.

“No. Indeed I will say frankly that it would be lowering yourself to
live a lotus-eating life among my people. It is a life with which you
have no tie. A Westerner who lives like that steps down; he loses his
birthright just as an Oriental does who Europeanizes himself. He cannot
live your life nor you his. If you had work here it would be different.
No--six or eight weeks more; then go away and forget it.”

I turned from her. The serpent was in Paradise. When is he absent?

On one of the terraces a man was beating a tom-tom, and veiled women
listened, grouped about him in brilliant colours.

“Isn’t that all India?” she said; “that dull reiterated sound? It
half stupefies, half maddens. Once at Darjiling I saw the Lamas’ Devil
Dance--the soul, a white-faced child with eyes unnaturally enlarged,
fleeing among a rabble of devils--the evil passions. It fled wildly
here and there and every way was blocked. The child fell on its knees,
screaming dumbly--you could see the despair in the staring eyes, but
all was drowned in the thunder of Tibetan drums. No mercy--no escape.
Horrible!”

“Even in Europe the drum is awful,” I said. “Do you remember in the
French Revolution how they Drowned the victims’ voices in a thunder roll
of drums?”

“I shall always see the face of the child, hunted down to hell, falling
on its knees, and screaming without a sound, when I hear the drum. But
listen--a flute! Now if that were the Flute of Krishna you would have to
follow. Let us come!”

I could hear nothing of it, but she insisted and we followed the music,
inaudible to me, up the slopes of the garden that is the foot-hill of
the mighty mountain of Mahadeo, and still I could hear nothing. And
Vanna told me strange stories of the Apollo of India whom all hearts
must adore, even as the herd-girls adored him in his golden youth by
Jumna river and in the pastures of Brindaban.

Next day we were climbing the hill to the ruins where the evil magician
brought the King’s daughter nightly to his will, flying low under a
golden moon. Vanna took my arm and I pulled her laughing up the steepest
flowery slopes until we reached the height, and lo! the arched windows
were eyeless and a lonely breeze blowing through the cloisters, and the
beautiful yellowish stone arches supported nothing and were but frames
for the blue of far lake and mountain and the divine sky. We climbed
the broken stairs where the lizards went by like flashes, and had I the
tongue of men and angels I could not tell the wonder that lay before
us,--the whole wide valley of Kashmir in summer glory, with its scented
breeze singing, singing above it.

We sat on the crushed aromatic herbs and among the wild roses and looked
down.

“To think,” she said, “that we might have died and never seen it!”

There followed a long silence. I thought she was tired, and would not
break it. Suddenly she spoke in a strange voice, low and toneless;

“The story of this place. She was the Princess Padmavati, and her home
was in Ayodhya. When she woke and found herself here by the lake she was
so terrified that she flung herself in and was drowned. They held her
back, but she died.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a wandering monk came to the abbey of Tahkt-i-Bahi near
Peshawar and told Vasettha the Abbot.”

I had nearly spoilt all by an exclamation, but I held myself back. I saw
she was dreaming awake and was unconscious of what she said.

“The Abbot said, ‘Do not describe her. What talk is this for holy men?
The young monks must not hear. Some of them have never seen a woman.
Should a monk speak of such toys?’ But the wanderer disobeyed and spoke,
and there was a great tumult, and the monks threw him out at the command
of the young Abbot, and he wandered down to Peshawar, and it was he
later--the evil one!--that brought his sister, Lilavanti the Dancer, to
Peshawar, and the Abbot fell into her snare. That was his revenge!”

Her face was fixed and strange, for a moment her cheek looked hollow,
her eyes dim and grief-worn. What was she seeing?--what remembering? Was
it a story--a memory? What was it?

“She was beautiful?” I prompted.

“Men have said so, but for it he surrendered the Peace. Do not speak of
her accursed beauty.”

Her voice died away to a drowsy murmur; her head dropped on my shoulder
and for the mere delight of contact I sat still and scarcely breathed,
praying that she might speak again, but the good minute was gone. She
drew one or two deep breaths, and sat up with a bewildered look that
quickly passed.

“I was quite sleepy for a minute. The climb was so strenuous. Hark--I
hear the Flute of Krishna again.”

And again I could hear nothing, but she said it was sounding from the
trees at the base of the hill. Later when we climbed down I found she
was right--that a peasant lad, dark and amazingly beautiful as
these Kashmiris often are, was playing on the flute to a girl at his
feet--looking up at him with rapt eyes. He flung Vanna a flower as we
passed. She caught it and put it in her bosom. A singular blossom, three
petals of purest white, set against three leaves of purest green, and
lower down the stem the three green leaves were repeated. It was still
in her bosom after dinner, and I looked at it more closely.

“That is a curious flower,” I said. “Three and three and three. Nine.
That makes the mystic number. I never saw a purer white. What is it?”

“Of course it is mystic,” she said seriously. “It is the Ninefold
Flower. You saw who gave it?”

“That peasant lad.”

She smiled.

“You will see more some day. Some might not even have seen that.”

“Does it grow here?”

“This is the first I have seen. It is said to grow only where the gods
walk. Do you know that throughout all India Kashmir is said to be holy
ground? It was called long ago the land of the gods, and of strange, but
not evil, sorceries. Great marvels were seen here.”

I felt the labyrinthine enchantments of that enchanted land were closing
about me--a slender web, grey, almost impalpable, finer than fairy silk,
was winding itself about my feet. My eyes were opening to things I had
not dreamed. She saw my thought.

“Yes, you could not have seen even that much of him in Peshawar. You did
not know then.”

“He was not there,” I answered, falling half unconsciously into her
tone.

“He is always there--everywhere, and when he plays, all who hear must
follow. He was the Pied Piper in Hamelin, he was Pan in Hellas. You
will hear his wild fluting in many strange places when you know how to
listen. When one has seen him the rest comes soon. And then you will
follow.”

“Not away from you, Vanna.”

“From the marriage feast, from the Table of the Lord,” she said, smiling
strangely. “The man who wrote that spoke of another call, but it is the
same--Krishna or Christ. When we hear the music we follow. And we may
lose or gain heaven.”

It might have been her compelling personality--it might have been the
marvels of beauty about me, but I knew well I had entered at some mystic
gate. A pass word had been spoken for me--I was vouched for and might go
in. Only a little way as yet. Enchanted forests lay beyond, and perilous
seas, but there were hints, breaths like the wafting of the garments of
unspeakable Presences. My talk with Vanna grew less personal, and more
introspective. I felt the touch of her finger-tips leading me along
the ways of Quiet--my feet brushed a shining dew. Once, in the twilight
under the chenar trees, I saw a white gleaming and thought it a swiftly
passing Being, but when in haste I gained the tree I found there only
a Ninefold flower, white as a spirit in the evening calm. I would not
gather it but told Vanna what I had seen.

“You nearly saw;” she said. “She passed so quickly. It was the Snowy
One, Uma, Parvati, the Daughter of the Himalaya. That mountain is the
mountain of her lord--Shiva. It is natural she should be here. I saw her
last night lean over the height--her face pillowed on her folded arms,
with a low star in the mists of her hair. Her eyes were like lakes of
blue darkness. Vast and wonderful. She is the Mystic Mother of India.
You will see soon. You could not have seen the flower until now.”

“Do you know,” she added, “that in the mountains there are poppies of
clear blue--blue as turquoise. We will go up into the heights and find
them.”

And next moment she was planning the camping details, the men, the
ponies, with a practical zest that seemed to relegate the occult to the
absurd. Yet the very next day came a wonderful moment.

The sun was just setting and, as it were, suddenly the purple glooms
banked up heavy with thunder. The sky was black with fury, the earth
passive with dread. I never saw such lightning--it was continuous and
tore in zigzag flashes down the mountains like rents in the substance
of the world’s fabric. And the thunder roared up in the mountain gorges
with shattering echoes. Then fell the rain, and the whole lake seemed to
rise to meet it, and the noise was like the rattle of musketry. We were
standing by the cabin window and she suddenly caught my hand, and I
saw in a light of their own two dancing figures on the tormented water
before us. Wild in the tumult, embodied delight, with arms tossed
violently above their heads, and feet flung up behind them, skimming the
waves like seagulls, they passed. Their sex I could not tell--I think
they had none, but were bubble emanations of the rejoicing rush of the
rain and the wild retreating laughter of the thunder. I saw the fierce
aerial faces and their inhuman glee as they fled by, and she dropped my
hand and they were gone. Slowly the storm lessened, and in the west the
clouds tore raggedly asunder and a flood of livid yellow light poured
down upon the lake--an awful light that struck it into an abyss of fire.
Then, as if at a word of command, two glorious rainbows sprang across
the water with the mountains for their piers, each with its proper
colours chorded. They made a Bridge of Dread that stood out radiant
against the background of storm--the Twilight of the Gods, and the
doomed gods marching forth to the last fight. And the thunder growled
sullenly away into the recesses of the hill and the terrible rainbows
faded until the stars came quietly out and it was a still night.

But I had seen that what is our dread is the joy of the spirits of the
Mighty Mother, and though the vision faded and I doubted what I had
seen, it prepared the way for what I was yet to see. A few days later we
started on what was to be the most exquisite memory of my life. A train
of ponies carried our tents and camping necessaries and there was a
pony for each of us. And so, in the cool grey of a divine morning, with
little rosy clouds flecking the eastern sky, we set out from Islamabad
for Vernag. And this was the order of our going. She and I led the way,
attended by a sais (groom) and a coolie carrying the luncheon basket.
Half way we would stop in some green dell, or by some rushing stream,
and there rest and eat our little meal while the rest of the cavalcade
passed on to the appointed camping place, and in the late afternoon we
would follow, riding slowly, and find the tents pitched and the kitchen
department in full swing. If the place pleased us we lingered for some
days;--if not, the camp was struck next morning, and again we wandered
in search of beauty.

The people were no inconsiderable part of my joy. I cannot see what they
have to gain from such civilization as ours--a kindly people and happy.
Courtesy and friendliness met us everywhere, and if their labor was
hard, their harvest of beauty and laughter seemed to be its reward. The
little villages with their groves of walnut and fruit trees spoke of no
unfulfilled want, the mulberries which fatten the sleek bears in their
season fattened the children too. I compared their lot with that of
the toilers in our cities and knew which I would choose. We rode by
shimmering fields of barley, with red poppies floating in the clear
transparent green as in deep sea water, through fields of millet like
the sky fallen on the earth, so innocently blue were its blossoms,
and the trees above us were trellised with the wild roses, golden and
crimson, and the ways tapestried with the scented stars of the large
white jasmine.

It was strange that later much of what she said, escaped me. Some I
noted down at the time, but there were hints, shadows of lovelier things
beyond that eluded all but the fringes of memory when I tried to piece
them together and make a coherence of a living wonder. For that reason,
the best things cannot be told in this history. It is only the cruder,
grosser matters that words will hold. The half-touchings--vanishing
looks, breaths--O God, I know them, but cannot tell.

In the smaller villages, the head man came often to greet us and make
us welcome, bearing on a flat dish a little offering of cakes and fruit,
the produce of the place. One evening a man so approached, stately
in white robes and turban, attended by a little lad who carried the
patriarchal gift beside him. Our tents were pitched under a glorious
walnut tree with a running stream at our feet.

Vanna of course, was the interpreter, and I called her from her tent as
the man stood salaaming before me. It was strange that when she came,
dressed in white, he stopped in his salutation, and gazed at her in
what, I thought, was silent wonder.

She spoke earnestly to him, standing before him with clasped hands,
almost, I could think, in the attitude of a suppliant. The man listened
gravely, with only an interjection, now and again, and once he turned
and looked curiously at me. Then he spoke, evidently making some
announcement which she received with bowed head--and when he turned to
go with a grave salute, she performed a very singular ceremony, moving
slowly round him three times with clasped hands; keeping him always on
the right. He repaid it with the usual salaam and greeting of peace,
which he bestowed also on me, and then departed in deep meditation, his
eyes fixed on the ground. I ventured to ask what it all meant, and she
looked thoughtfully at me before replying.

“It was a strange thing. I fear you will not altogether understand,
but I will tell you what I can. That man though living here among
Mahomedans, is a Brahman from Benares, and, what is very rare in India,
a Buddhist. And when he saw me he believed he remembered me in a former
birth. The ceremony you saw me perform is one of honour in India. It was
his due.”

“Did you remember him?” I knew my voice was incredulous.

“Very well. He has changed little but is further on the upward path. I
saw him with dread for he holds the memory of a great wrong I did. Yet
he told me a thing that has filled my heart with joy.”

“Vanna-what is it?”

She had a clear uplifted look which startled me. There was suddenly a
chill air blowing between us.

“I must not tell you yet but you will know soon. He was a good man. I am
glad we have met.”

She buried herself in writing in a small book I had noticed and longed
to look into, and no more was said.

We struck camp next day and trekked on towards Vernag--a rough march,
but one of great beauty, beneath the shade of forest trees, garlanded
with pale roses that climbed from bough to bough and tossed triumphant
wreaths into the uppermost blue.

In the afternoon thunder was flapping its wings far off in the mountains
and a little rain fell while we were lunching under a big tree. I was
considering anxiously how to shelter Vanna, when a farmer invited us to
his house--a scene of Biblical hospitality that delighted us both. He
led us up some break-neck little stairs to a large bare room, open to
the clean air all round the roof, and with a kind of rough enclosure on
the wooden floor where the family slept at night. There he opened our
basket, and then, with anxious care, hung clothes and rough draperies
about us that our meal might be unwatched by one or two friends who had
followed us in with breathless interest. Still further to entertain us
a great rarity was brought out and laid at Vanna’s feet as something
we might like to watch--a curious bird in a cage, with brightly barred
wings and a singular cry. She fed it with fruit, and it fluttered to her
hand. Just so Abraham might have welcomed his guests, and when we left
with words of deepest gratitude, our host made the beautiful obeisance
of touching his forehead with joined hands as he bowed. To me the whole
incident had an extraordinary grace, and ennobled both host and guest.
But we met an ascending scale of loveliness so varied in its aspects
that I passed from one emotion to another and knew no sameness.

That afternoon the camp was pitched at the foot of a mighty hill, under
the waving pyramids of the chenars, sweeping their green like the robes
of a goddess. Near by was a half circle of low arches falling into
ruin, and as we went in among them I beheld a wondrous sight--the huge
octagonal tank or basin made by the Mogul Emperor Jehangir to receive
the waters of a mighty Spring which wells from the hill and has been
held sacred by Hindu and Moslem. And if loveliness can sanctify surely
it is sacred indeed.

The tank was more than a hundred feet in diameter and circled by a
roughly paved pathway where the little arched cells open that the
devotees may sit and contemplate the lustral waters. There on a black
stone, is sculptured the Imperial inscription comparing this spring to
the holier wells of Paradise, and I thought no less of it, for it rushes
straight from the rock with no aiding stream, and its waters are fifty
feet deep, and sweep away from this great basin through beautiful low
arches in a wild foaming river--the crystal life-blood of the mountains
for ever welling away. The colour and perfect purity of this living
jewel were most marvellous--clear blue-green like a chalcedony, but
changing as the lights in an opal--a wonderful quivering brilliance,
flickering with the silver of shoals of sacred fish.

But the Mogul Empire is with the snows of yesteryear and the wonder has
passed from the Moslems into the keeping of the Hindus once more, and
the Lingam of Shiva, crowned with flowers, is the symbol in the little
shrine by the entrance. Surely in India, the gods are one and have no
jealousies among them--so swiftly do their glories merge the one into
the other.

“How all the Mogul Emperors loved running water,” said Vanna. “I can see
them leaning over it in their carved pavilions with delicate dark faces
and pensive eyes beneath their turbans, lost in the endless reverie of
the East while liquid melody passes into their dream. It was the music
they best loved.”

She was leading me into the royal garden below, where the young river
flows beneath the pavilion set above and across the rush of the water.

“I remember before I came to India,” she went on, “there were
certain words and phrases that meant the whole East to me. It was an
enchantment. The first flash picture I had was Milton’s--

   ‘Dark faces with white silken turbans wreathed.’

and it still is. I have thought ever since that every man should wear a
turban. It dignifies the un-comeliest and it is quite curious to see how
many inches a man descends in the scale of beauty the moment he takes it
off and you see only the skull-cap about which they wind it. They wind
it with wonderful skill too. I have seen a man take eighteen yards of
muslin and throw it round his head with a few turns, and in five or six
minutes the beautiful folds were all in order and he looked like a king.
Some of the Gujars here wear black ones and they are very effective and
worth painting--the black folds and the sullen tempestuous black brows
underneath.”

We sat in the pavilion for awhile looking down on the rushing water, and
she spoke of Akbar, the greatest of the Moguls, and spoke with a curious
personal touch, as I thought.

“I wish you would try to write a story of him--one on more human lines
than has been done yet. No one has accounted for the passionate quest
of truth that was the real secret of his life. Strange in an Oriental
despot if you think of it! It really can only be understood from the
Buddhist belief, which curiously seems to have been the only one he
neglected, that a mysterious Karma influenced all his thoughts. If I
tell you as a key-note for your story, that in a past life he had been a
Buddhist priest--one who had fallen away, would that in any way account
to you for attempts to recover the lost way? Try to think that out, and
to write the story, not as a Western mind sees it, but pure East.”

“That would be a great book to write if one could catch the voices of
the past. But how to do it?”

“I will give you one day a little book that may help you. The other
story I wish you would write is the story of a Dancer of Peshawar. There
is a connection between the two--a story of ruin and repentance.”

“Will you tell it to me?”

“A part. In this same book you will find much more, but not all. All
cannot be told. You must imagine much. But I think your imagination will
be true.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because in these few days you have learnt so much. You have seen the
Ninefold Flower, and the rain spirits. You will soon hear the Flute of
Krishna which none can hear who cannot dream true.”

That night I heard it. I waked, suddenly, to music, and standing in the
door of my tent, in the dead silence of the night, lit only by a few low
stars, I heard the poignant notes of a flute. If it had called my name
it could not have summoned me more clearly, and I followed without a
thought of delay, forgetting even Vanna in the strange urgency that
filled me. The music was elusive, seeming to come first from one side,
then from the other, but finally I tracked it as a bee does a flower by
the scent, to the gate of the royal garden--the pleasure place of the
dead Emperors.

The gate stood ajar--strange! for I had seen the custodian close it that
evening. Now it stood wide and I went in, walking noiselessly over the
dewy grass. I knew and could not tell how, that I must be noiseless.
Passing as if I were guided, down the course of the strong young river,
I came to the pavilion that spanned it--the place where we had stood
that afternoon--and there to my profound amazement, I saw Vanna, leaning
against a slight wooden pillar. As if she had expected me, she laid one
finger on her lip, and stretching out her hand, took mine and drew me
beside her as a mother might a child. And instantly I saw!

On the further bank a young man in a strange diadem or miter of jewels,
bare-breasted and beautiful, stood among the flowering oleanders, one
foot lightly crossed over the other as he stood. He was like an image
of pale radiant gold, and I could have sworn that the light came from
within rather than fell upon him, for the night was very dark. He held
the flute to his lips, and as I looked, I became aware that the noise
of the rushing water was tapering off into a murmur scarcely louder than
that of a summer bee in the heart of a rose. Therefore the music rose
like a fountain of crystal drops, cold, clear, and of an entrancing
sweetness, and the face above it was such that I had no power to turn my
eyes away. How shall I say what it was? All I had ever desired, dreamed,
hoped, prayed, looked at me from the remote beauty of the eyes and with
the most persuasive gentleness entreated me, rather than commanded to
follow fearlessly and win. But these are words, and words shaped in the
rough mould of thought cannot convey the deep desire that would have
hurled me to his feet if Vanna had not held me with a firm restraining
hand. Looking up in adoring love to the dark face was a ring of woodland
creatures. I thought I could distinguish the white clouded robe of a
snow-leopard, the soft clumsiness of a young bear, and many more, but
these shifted and blurred like dream creatures--I could not be sure of
them nor define their numbers. The eyes of the Player looked down upon
their passionate delight with careless kindness.

Dim images passed through my mind. Orpheus--No, this was no Greek.
Pan-yet again, No. Where were the pipes, the goat hoofs? The young
Dionysos--No, there were strange jewels instead of his vines. And then
Vanna’s voice said as if from a great distance;

“Krishna--the Beloved.” And I said aloud, “I see!” And even as I said it
the whole picture blurred together like a dream, and I was alone in the
pavilion and the water was foaming past me. Had I walked in my sleep, I
thought, as I made my way hack? As I gained the garden gate, before me,
like a snowflake, I saw the Ninefold Flower.

When I told her next day, speaking of it as a dream, she said simply;
“They have opened the door to you. You will not need me soon.

“I shall always need you. You have taught me everything. I could see
nothing last night until you took my hand.”

“I was not there,” she said smiling. “It was only the thought of me, and
you can have that when I am very far away. I was sleeping in my tent.
What you called in me then you can always call, even if I am--dead.”

“That is a word which is beginning to have no meaning for me. You have
said things to me--no, thought them, that have made me doubt if there is
room in the universe for the thing we have called death.”

She smiled her sweet wise smile.

“Where we are death is not. Where death is we are not. But you will
understand better soon.”

Our march curving took us by the Mogul gardens of Achibal, and the
glorious ruins of the great Temple at Martund, and so down to Bawan
with its crystal waters and that loveliest camping ground beside them.
A mighty grove of chenar trees, so huge that I felt as if we were in a
great sea cave where the air is dyed with the deep shadowy green of the
inmost ocean, and the murmuring of the myriad leaves was like a sea at
rest. I looked up into the noble height and my memory of Westminster
dwindled, for this led on and up to the infinite blue, and at night
the stars hung like fruit upon the branches. The water ran with a great
joyous rush of release from the mountain behind, but was first received
in a broad basin full of sacred fish and reflecting a little temple of
Maheshwara and one of Surya the Sun. Here in this basin the water lay
pure and still as an ecstasy, and beside it was musing the young Brahman
priest who served the temple. Since I had joined Vanna I had begun with
her help to study a little Hindustani, and with an aptitude for language
could understand here and there. I caught a word or two as she spoke
with him that startled me, when the high-bred ascetic face turned
serenely upon her, and he addressed her as “My sister,” adding a
sentence beyond my learning, but which she willingly translated
later.--“May He who sits above the Mysteries, have mercy upon thy
rebirth.”

She said afterwards;

“How beautiful some of these men are. It seems a different type of
beauty from ours, nearer to nature and the old gods. Look at that
priest--the tall figure, the clear olive skin, the dark level brows, the
long lashes that make a soft gloom about the eyes--eyes that have the
fathomless depth of a deer’s, the proud arch of the lip. I think there
is no country where aristocracy is more clearly marked than in India.
The Brahmans are aristocrats of the world. You see it is a religious
aristocracy as well. It has everything that can foster pride and
exclusiveness. They spring from the Mouth of Deity. They are His word
incarnate. Not many kings are of the Brahman caste, and the Brahmans
look down upon them from Sovereign heights. I have known men who would
not eat with their own rulers who would have drunk the water that washed
the Brahmans’ feet.”

She took me that day, the Brahman with us, to see a cave in the
mountain. We climbed up the face of the cliff to where a little tree
grew on a ledge, and the black mouth yawned. We went in and often it was
so low we had to stoop, leaving the sunlight behind until it was like
a dim eye glimmering in the velvet blackness. The air was dank and
cold and presently obscene with the smell of bats, and alive with
their wings, as they came sweeping about us, gibbering and squeaking.
I thought of the rush of the ghosts, blown like dead leaves in the
Odyssey. And then a small rock chamber branched off, and in this, lit by
a bit of burning wood, we saw the bones of a holy man who lived and died
there four hundred years ago. Think of it! He lived there always, with
the slow dropping of water from the dead weight of the mountain above
his head, drop by drop tolling the minutes away: the little groping feet
through the cave that would bring him food and drink, hurrying into
the warmth and sunlight again, and his only companion the sacred Lingam
which means the Creative Energy that sets the worlds dancing for joy
round the sun--that, and the black solitude to sit down beside him.
Surely his bones can hardly be dryer and colder now than they were then!
There must be strange ecstasies in such a life--wild visions in the
dark, or it could never be endured.

And so, in marches of about ten miles a day, we came to Pahlgam on the
banks of the dancing Lidar. There was now only three weeks left of the
time she had promised. After a few days at Pahlgam the march would turn
and bend its way back to Srinagar, and to--what? I could not believe it
was to separation--in her lovely kindness she had grown so close to me
that, even for the sake of friendship, I believed our paths must run
together to the end, and there were moments when I could still half
convince myself that I had grown as necessary to her as she was to me.
No--not as necessary, for she was life and soul to me, but a part of her
daily experience that she valued and would not easily part with. That
evening we were sitting outside the tents, near the camp fire, of pine
logs and cones, the leaping flames making the night beautiful with gold
and leaping sparks, in an attempt to reach the mellow splendours of the
moon. The men, in various attitudes of rest, were lying about, and one
had been telling a story which had just ended in excitement and loud
applause.

“These are Mahomedans,” said Vanna, “and it is only a story of love and
fighting like the Arabian Nights. If they had been Hindus, it might
well have been of Krishna or of Rama and Sita. Their faith comes from an
earlier time and they still see visions. The Moslem is a hard practical
faith for men--men of the world too. It is not visionary now, though it
once had its great mysteries.”

“I wish you would tell me what you think of the visions or apparitions
of the gods that are seen here. Is it all illusion? Tell me your
thought.”

“How difficult that is to answer. I suppose if love and faith are strong
enough they will always create the vibrations to which the greater
vibrations respond, and so make God in their own image at any time or
place. But that they call up what is the truest reality I have never
doubted. There is no shadow without a substance. The substance is beyond
us but under certain conditions the shadow is projected and we see it.

“Have I seen or has it been dream?”

“I cannot tell. It may have been the impress of my mind on yours, for I
see such things always. You say I took your hand?”

“Take it now.”

She obeyed, and instantly, as I felt the firm cool clasp, I heard the
rain of music through the pines--the Flute Player was passing. She
dropped it smiling and the sweet sound ceased.

“You see! How can I tell what you have seen? You will know better when I
am gone. You will stand alone then.”

“You will not go--you cannot. I have seen how you have loved all this
wonderful time. I believe it has been as dear to you as to me. And every
day I have loved you more. I depend upon you for everything that makes
life worth living. You could not--you who are so gentle--you could not
commit the senseless cruelty of leaving me when you have taught me to
love you with every beat of my heart. I have been patient--I have held
myself in, but I must speak now. Marry me, and teach me. I know nothing.
You know all I need to know. For pity’s sake be my wife.”

I had not meant to say it; it broke from me in the firelight moonlight
with a power that I could not stay. She looked at me with a disarming
gentleness.

“Is this fair? Do you remember how at Peshawar I told you I thought it
was a dangerous experiment, and that it would make things harder for
you. But you took the risk like a brave man because you felt there were
things to be gained--knowledge, insight, beauty. Have you not gained
them?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Then, is it all loss if I go?”

“Not all. But loss I dare not face.”

“I will tell you this. I could not stay if I would. Do you remember the
old man on the way to Vernag? He told me that I must very soon take up
an entirely new life. I have no choice, though if I had I would still do
it.”

There was silence and down a long arcade, without any touch of her hand
I heard the music, receding with exquisite modulations to a very great
distance, and between the pillared stems, I saw a faint light.

“Do you wish to go?”

“Entirely. But I shall not forget you, Stephen. I will tell you
something. For me, since I came to India, the gate that shuts us out at
birth has opened. How shall I explain? Do you remember Kipling’s ‘Finest
Story in the World’?”

“Yes. Fiction!”

“Not fiction--true, whether he knew it or no. But for me the door has
opened wide. First, I remembered piecemeal, with wide gaps, then more
connectedly. Then, at the end of the first year, I met one day at
Cawnpore, an ascetic, an old man of great beauty and wisdom, and he was
able by his own knowledge to enlighten mine. Not wholly--much has come
since then. Has come, some of it in ways you could not understand
now, but much by direct sight and hearing. Long, long ago I lived in
Peshawar, and my story was a sorrowful one. I will tell you a little
before I go.”

“I hold you to your promise. What is there I cannot believe when you
tell me? But does that life put you altogether away from me? Was there
no place for me in any of your memories that has drawn us together now?
Give me a little hope that in the eternal pilgrimage there is some bond
between us and some rebirth where we may met again.”

“I will tell you that also before we part. I have grown to believe that
you do love me--and therefore love something which is infinitely above
me.”

“And do you love me at all? Am I nothing, Vanna--Vanna?”

“My friend,” she said, and laid her hand on mine.

A silence, and then she spoke, very low.

“You must be prepared for very great change, Stephen, and yet believe
that it does not really change things at all. See how even the gods pass
and do not change! The early gods of India are gone and Shiva, Vishnu,
Krishna have taken their places and are one and the same. The old
Buddhist stories say that in heaven “The flowers of the garland the
God wore are withered, his robes of majesty are waxed old and faded;
he falls from his high estate, and is re-born into a new life.” But he
lives still in the young God who is born among men. The gods cannot die,
nor can we nor anything that has life. Now I must go in.”

I sat long in the moonlight thinking. The whole camp was sunk in sleep
and the young dawn was waking upon the peaks when I turned in.

The days that were left we spent in wandering up the Lidar River to the
hills that are the first ramp of the ascent to the great heights.
We found the damp corners where the mushrooms grow like pearls--the
mushrooms of which she said--“To me they have always been fairy things.
To see them in the silver-grey dew of the early mornings--mysteriously
there like the manna in the desert--they are elfin plunder, and as a
child I was half afraid of them. No wonder they are the darlings of
folklore, especially in Celtic countries where the Little People move in
the starlight. Strange to think they are here too among strange gods!”

We climbed to where the wild peonies bloom in glory that few eyes see,
and the rosy beds of wild sweet strawberries ripen. Every hour brought
with it some new delight, some exquisiteness of sight or of words that
I shall remember for ever. She sat one day on a rock, holding the
sculptured leaves and massive seed-vessels of some glorious plant that
the Kashmiris believe has magic virtues hidden in the seeds of pure rose
embedded in the white down.

“If you fast for three days and eat nine of these in the Night of No
Moon, you can rise on the air light as thistledown and stand on the peak
of Haramoukh. And on Haramoukh, as you know it is believed, the gods
dwell. There was a man here who tried this enchantment. He was a changed
man for ever after, wandering and muttering to himself and avoiding all
human intercourse as far as he could. He was no Kashmiri--A Jat from the
Punjab, and they showed him to me when I was here with the Meryons, and
told me he would speak to none. But I knew he would speak to me, and he
did.”

“Did he tell you anything of what he had seen in the high world up
yonder?”

“He said he had seen the Dream of the God. I could not get more than
that. But there are many people here who believe that the Universe as
we know it is but an image in the dream of Ishvara, the Universal
Spirit--in whom are all the gods--and that when He ceases to dream we
pass again into the Night of Brahm, and all is darkness until the Spirit
of God moves again on the face of the waters. There are few temples to
Brahm. He is above and beyond all direct worship.”

“Do you think he had seen anything?”

“What do I know? Will you eat the seeds? The Night of No Moon will soon
be here.”

She held out the seed-vessels, laughing. I write that down but how
record the lovely light of kindliness in her eyes--the almost submissive
gentleness that yet was a defense stronger than steel. I never knew--how
should I?--whether she was sitting by my side or heavens away from me in
her own strange world. But always she was a sweetness that I could not
reach, a cup of nectar that I might not drink, unalterably her own and
never mine, and yet--my friend.

She showed me the wild track up into the mountains where the Pilgrims go
to pay their devotions at the Great God’s shrine in the awful heights,
regretting that we were too early for that most wonderful sight. Above
where we were sitting the river fell in a tormented white cascade,
crashing and feathering into spray-dust of diamonds. An eagle was
flying above it with a mighty spread of wings that seemed almost
double-jointed in the middle--they curved and flapped so wide and free.
The fierce head was outstretched with the rake of a plundering galley as
he swept down the wind, seeking his meat from God, and passed majestic
from our sight. The valley beneath us was littered with enormous
boulders spilt from the ancient hollows of the hills. It must have
been a great sight when the giants set them trundling down in work
or play!--I said this to Vanna, who was looking down upon it with
meditative eyes. She roused herself.

“Yes, this really is Giant-Land up here--everything is so huge. And when
they quarrel up in the heights--in Jotunheim--and the black storms
come down the valleys it is like colossal laughter or clumsy boisterous
anger. And the Frost giants are still at work up there with their great
axes of frost and rain. They fling down the side of a mountain or make
fresh ways for the rivers. About sixty years ago--far above here--they
tore down a mountain side and damned up the mighty Indus, so that for
months he was a lake, shut back in the hills. But the river giants are
no less strong up here in the heights of the world, and lie lay brooding
and hiding his time. And then one awful day he tore the barrier down and
roared down the valley carrying death and ruin with him, and swept away
a whole Sikh army among other unconsidered trifles. That must have been
a soul-shaking sight.”

She spoke on, and as she spoke I saw. What are her words as I record
them? Stray dead leaves pressed in a book--the life and grace dead. Yet
I record, for she taught me what I believe the world should learn, that
the Buddhist philosophers are right when they teach that all forms of
what we call matter are really but aggregates of spiritual units, and
that life itself is a curtain hiding reality as the vast veil of
day conceals from our sight the countless orbs of space. So that the
purified mind even while prisoned in the body, may enter into union with
the Real and, according to attainment, see it as it is.

She was an interpreter because she believed this truth profoundly. She
saw the spiritual essence beneath the lovely illusion of matter, and the
air about her was radiant with the motion of strange forces for which
the dull world has many names aiming indeed at the truth, but falling--O
how far short of her calm perception! She was indeed of a Household
higher than the Household of Faith. She had received enlightenment. She
beheld with open eyes.

Next day our camp was struck and we turned our faces again to Srinagar
and to the day of parting. I set down but one strange incident of our
journey, of which I did not speak even to her.

We were camping at Bijbehara, awaiting our house boat, and

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