Mr. Barria from the rear of the shop watched Janey, sitting among the Annuals and looking out on Cripple Street. He had not entered on the Path himself as a cure for sorrow and suffering; he had come to it from another direction. Yet the first purpose of its system had been the solution of these. It was written:
“Sorrow and suffering will be overcome when this thirst for life is quenched, which makes for continuance, and that desire of separateness and hunger after selfhood are put aside. They will fall away as drops from a lotus leaf.”
And Janey was a type of them as they walk abroad. The measure of her trouble was the measure of the yearning and attainment that had been hers.
“Desire not more then of yearning or attainment, of sight or touch, of life in variety or abundance, but desire none at all, and turning within, the dwelling you build there dwell in it, until both desire and separateness shall in turn disappear.”
He went forward and drew a chair beside her.
“Little Jhana,” he said, “there wass once a woman and young who brought her dead child to the wisest of men, and asked so of him, 'Do you know one medicine that will be good for this child?' It was the custom then for the patients or their friends to provide the herbs which the doctors require, so that when she asked what herbs he would wish, and he answered, 'Mustard-seed,' she promised with haste to bring it, for it wass a common herb. 'And it must come,' he said, 'only from some house where no child, no hussband, no wife, no parent, no friend hass died.' Then she went in great hope, carrying the dead child; but everywhere they said, 'I have lost,' and again, 'We have lost,' and one said, 'What iss this you say; the living are few but the dead are many.' She found so no house in that place from which she might take the mustard-seed. Therefore she buried the child, and came, and she said, 'I have not found it; they tell me the living are few and the dead many.' And he showed her how that nothing endured at all, but changed and passed into something else, and each wass but a changing part of a changing whole, and how, if one thought more of the whole, one so ceased to be troubled much of the parts, and sorrow would fade away quietly.” Janey stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. There was a certain comfort always in Mr. Barria himself, however oddly he might talk. She dropped her head on his knee and whispered:
“I don't know about all that. I want Tommy and the baby.”
He touched her hair with thin fingers gently. “Then I wonder, little Jhana,” he said, looking to the magazines and Annuals, “if you have found among these one, a poet of the English, who calls it to be better to love and lose than not to love.”
“I don't know. I don't remember.”
He smoothed her hair again and went away. The winter passed and the spring came with a scatter of sunshine and little showers. Janey still sat by the window. If she had been able to generalize, to see that Tommy and the baby represented hunger after life, and that this was the root of sorrow, it would perhaps have still seemed to her that love and loss were the better choice. Perhaps not. But she could not generalize. Her thoughts were instincts, fancies, and little shining points of belief. She could not see herself in any figure of speech; that she was one of a multitude of discordant notes in the universe, whose business it was to tune themselves to the key of a certain large music and disappear in its harmony, where alone was constant happiness. It did not seem to mention Tommy or the baby, and if not there was no point in it.