Kim
play just ended; forgetting St Xavier’s; forgetting his white blood;
forgetting even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan-fashion, to
touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple. “My teaching I
owe to thee. I have eaten thy bread three years. My time is finished. I
am loosed from the schools. I come to thee.”
“Herein is my reward. Enter! Enter! And is all well?” They passed to
the inner court, where the afternoon sun sloped golden across. “Stand
that I may see. So!” He peered critically. “It is no longer a child,
but a man, ripened in wisdom, walking as a physician. I did well—I did
well when I gave thee up to the armed men on that black night. Dost
thou remember our first day under Zam-Zammah?”
“Ay,” said Kim. “Dost thou remember when I leapt off the carriage the
first day I went to—”
“The Gates of Learning? Truly. And the day that we ate the cakes
together at the back of the river by Nucklao. Aha! Many times hast thou
begged for me, but that day I begged for thee.”
“Good reason,” quoth Kim. “I was then a scholar in the Gates of
Learning, and attired as a Sahib. Do not forget, Holy One,” he went on
playfully. “I am still a Sahib—by thy favour.”
“True. And a Sahib in most high esteem. Come to my cell, _chela_.”
“How is that known to thee?”
The lama smiled. “First by means of letters from the kindly priest whom
we met in the camp of armed men; but he is now gone to his own country,
and I sent the money to his brother.” Colonel Creighton, who had
succeeded to the trusteeship when Father Victor went to England with
the Mavericks, was hardly the Chaplain’s brother. “But I do not well
understand Sahibs’ letters. They must be interpreted to me. I chose a
surer way. Many times when I returned from my Search to this Temple,
which has always been a nest to me, there came one seeking
Enlightenment—a man from Leh—that had been, he said, a Hindu, but
wearied of all those Gods.” The lama pointed to the Arhats.
“A fat man?” said Kim, a twinkle in his eye.
“Very fat; but I perceived in a little his mind was wholly given up to
useless things—such as devils and charms and the form and fashion of
our tea-drinkings in the monasteries, and by what road we initiated the
novices. A man abounding in questions; but he was a friend of thine,
_chela_. He told me that thou wast on the road to much honour as a
scribe. And I see thou art a physician.”
“Yes, that am I—a scribe, when I am a Sahib, but it is set aside when I
come as thy disciple. I have accomplished the years appointed for a
Sahib.”
“As it were a novice?” said the lama, nodding his head. “Art thou freed
from the schools? I would not have thee unripe.”
“I am all free. In due time I take service under the Government as a
scribe—”
“Not as a warrior. That is well.”
“But first I come to wander with thee. Therefore I am here. Who begs
for thee, these days?” he went on quickly. The ice was thin.
“Very often I beg myself; but, as thou knowest, I am seldom here,
except when I come to look again at my disciple. From one end to
another of Hind have I travelled afoot and in the _te-rain_. A great
and a wonderful land! But here, when I put in, is as though I were in
my own Bhotiyal.”
He looked round the little clean cell complacently. A low cushion gave
him a seat, on which he had disposed himself in the cross-legged
attitude of the Bodhisat emerging from meditation; a black teak-wood
table, not twenty inches high, set with copper tea-cups, was before
him. In one corner stood a tiny altar, also of heavily carved teak,
bearing a copper-gilt image of the seated Buddha and fronted by a lamp,
an incense-holder, and a pair of copper flower-pots.
“The Keeper of the Images in the Wonder House acquired merit by giving
me these a year since,” he said, following Kim’s eye. “When one is far
from one’s own land such things carry remembrance; and we must
reverence the Lord for that He showed the Way. See!” He pointed to a
curiously-built mound of coloured rice crowned with a fantastic metal
ornament. “When I was Abbot in my own place—before I came to better
knowledge I made that offering daily. It is the Sacrifice of the
Universe to the Lord. Thus do we of Bhotiyal offer all the world daily
to the Excellent Law. And I do it even now, though I know that the
Excellent One is beyond all pinchings and pattings.” He snuffed from
his gourd.
“It is well done, Holy One,” Kim murmured, sinking at ease on the
cushions, very happy and rather tired.
“And also,” the old man chuckled, “I write pictures of the Wheel of
Life. Three days to a picture. I was busied on it—or it may be I shut
my eyes a little—when they brought word of thee. It is good to have
thee here: I will show thee my art—not for pride’s sake, but because
thou must learn. The Sahibs have not _all_ this world’s wisdom.”
He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow
Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of Indian ink. In cleanest,
severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes,
whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger,
and Lust), and whose compartments are all the Heavens and Hells, and
all the chances of human life. Men say that the Bodhisat Himself first
drew it with grains of rice upon dust, to teach His disciples the cause
of things. Many ages have crystallized it into a most wonderful
convention crowded with hundreds of little figures whose every line
carries a meaning. Few can translate the picture-parable; there are not
twenty in all the world who can draw it surely without a copy: of those
who can both draw and expound are but three.
“I have a little learned to draw,” said Kim. “But this is a marvel
beyond marvels.”
“I have written it for many years,” said the lama. “Time was when I
could write it all between one lamp-lighting and the next. I will teach
thee the art—after due preparation; and I will show thee the meaning of
the Wheel.”
“We take the Road, then?”
“The Road and our Search. I was but waiting for thee. It was made plain
to me in a hundred dreams—notably one that came upon the night of the
day that the Gates of Learning first shut that without thee I should
never find my River. Again and again, as thou knowest, I put this from
me, fearing an illusion. Therefore I would not take thee with me that
day at Lucknow, when we ate the cakes. I would not take thee till the
time was ripe and auspicious. From the Hills to the Sea, from the Sea
to the Hills have I gone, but it was vain. Then I remembered the
_Jâtaka_.”
He told Kim the story of the elephant with the leg-iron, as he had told
it so often to the Jam priests.
“Further testimony is not needed,” he ended serenely. “Thou wast sent
for an aid. That aid removed, my Search came to naught. Therefore we
will go out again together, and our Search sure.”
“Whither go we?”
“What matters, Friend of all the World? The Search, I say, is sure. If
need be, the River will break from the ground before us. I acquired
merit when I sent thee to the Gates of Learning, and gave thee the
jewel that is Wisdom. Thou didst return, I saw even now, a follower of
Sakyamuni, the Physician, whose altars are many in Bhotiyal. It is
sufficient. We are together, and all things are as they were—Friend of
all the World—Friend of the Stars—my _chela!_”
Then they talked of matters secular; but it was noticeable that the
lama never demanded any details of life at St Xavier’s, nor showed the
faintest curiosity as to the manners and customs of Sahibs. His mind
moved all in the past, and he revived every step of their wonderful
first journey together, rubbing his hands and chuckling, till it
pleased him to curl himself up into the sudden sleep of old age.
Kim watched the last dusty sunshine fade out of the court, and played
with his ghost-dagger and rosary. The clamour of Benares, oldest of all
earth’s cities awake before the Gods, day and night, beat round the
walls as the sea’s roar round a breakwater. Now and again, a Jain
priest crossed the court, with some small offering to the images, and
swept the path about him lest by chance he should take the life of a
living thing. A lamp twinkled, and there followed the sound of a
prayer. Kim watched the stars as they rose one after another in the
still, sticky dark, till he fell asleep at the foot of the altar. That
night he dreamed in Hindustani, with never an English word...
“Holy One, there is the child to whom we gave the medicine,” he said,
about three o’clock in the morning, when the lama, also waking from
dreams, would have fared forth on pilgrimage. “The Jat will be here at
the light.”
“I am well answered. In my haste I would have done a wrong.” He sat
down on the cushions and returned to his rosary. “Surely old folk are
as children,” he said pathetically. “They desire a matter—behold, it
must be done at once, or they fret and weep! Many times when I was upon
the Road I have been ready to stamp with my feet at the hindrance of an
ox-cart in the way, or a mere cloud of dust. It was not so when I was a
man—a long time ago. None the less it is wrongful—”
“But thou art indeed old, Holy One.”
“The thing was done. A Cause was put out into the world, and, old or
young, sick or sound, knowing or unknowing, who can rein in the effect
of that Cause? Does the Wheel hang still if a child spin it—or a
drunkard? _Chela_, this is a great and a terrible world.”
“I think it good,” Kim yawned. “What is there to eat? I have not eaten
since yesterday even.”
“I had forgotten thy need. Yonder is good Bhotiyal tea and cold rice.”
“We cannot walk far on such stuff.” Kim felt all the European’s lust
for flesh-meat, which is not accessible in a Jain temple. Yet, instead
of going out at once with the begging-bowl, he stayed his stomach on
slabs of cold rice till the full dawn. It brought the farmer, voluble,
stuttering with gratitude.
“In the night the fever broke and the sweat came,” he cried. “Feel
here—his skin is fresh and new! He esteemed the salt lozenges, and took
milk with greed.” He drew the cloth from the child’s face, and it
smiled sleepily at Kim. A little knot of Jain priests, silent but
all-observant, gathered by the temple door. They knew, and Kim knew
that they knew, how the old lama had met his disciple. Being courteous
folk, they had not obtruded themselves overnight by presence, word, or
gesture. Wherefore Kim repaid them as the sun rose.
“Thank the Gods of the Jains, brother,” he said, not knowing how those
Gods were named. “The fever is indeed broken.”
“Look! See!” The lama beamed in the background upon his hosts of three
years. “Was there ever such a _chela?_ He follows our Lord the Healer.”
Now the Jains officially recognize all the Gods of the Hindu creed, as
well as the Lingam and the Snake. They wear the Brahminical thread;
they adhere to every claim of Hindu caste-law. But, because they knew
and loved the lama, because he was an old man, because he sought the
Way, because he was their guest, and because he collogued long of
nights with the head-priest—as free-thinking a metaphysician as ever
split one hair into seventy—they murmured assent.
“Remember,”—Kim bent over the child—. “this trouble may come again.”
“Not if thou hast the proper spell,” said the father.
“But in a little while we go away.”
“True,” said the lama to all the Jains. “We go now together upon the
Search whereof I have often spoken. I waited till my _chela_ was ripe.
Behold him! We go North. Never again shall I look upon this place of my
rest, O people of good will.”
“But I am not a beggar.” The cultivator rose to his feet, clutching the
child.
“Be still. Do not trouble the Holy One,” a priest cried.
“Go,” Kim whispered. “Meet us again under the big railway bridge, and