ROSS LAKE
It has been mentioned that the pump was subject to chronic and mysterious ailments, on which every skilled opinion in the country was brought to bear, while the water famine was sore in the land, and the turf-boys plied with buckets and bewailings between the lake and the cook, and unearthly pronged creatures gyrated in the water-bottles. It was during one of these visitations, when the back yard was torn up into entrenchments, and the pump lay two miles away at the forge, that the Garrygillihy horse races were held, and with this event the revolt of the turf-boys broke forth. On the previous day they concealed themselves in an old limekiln and mended their trousers; on the morning itself they made the simple statement that "if the servants was to die dancing for turf and wather they'll not get it to-day," after which ultimatum they were seen no more. Many things happened in their absence, not at first sight connected with it; the cook went to bed in the afternoon, the hens walked upstairs to the pantry, and picked out the inside of a plum cake, and a cow got into the coach-house, and ate the cushion of the car. The cook gave warning next day, the kitchenmaid, in tears, followed suit, because the cook had called her a "jumper" (i.e., a pervert to Protestantism); the housemaid, also in tears, asserted that the kitchenmaid "had a spleen agin her," and the stableman was heard darkly soliloquising over the cleaning of the bits that "a lie was something, but there was no dealing with a d—d lie." All these things were subsequently traced by tortuous ways to the grand central fact that the turf-boys had gone to the Garrygillihy races.
There came at length a notable crisis, when the pump showed that it had, like most of its countrymen, a power of rising to the occasion. It was on a bright morning in May that the kitchen chimney caught fire, an event of yearly occurrence, and by no means displeasing to the authorities. The big shaft roared with furnace heat up its eighty feet, the ugly blaze wavered from the chimney top; a few buckets of water were poured down, and all became quiet. It had happened in the immemorial manner, but just once too often. Four hours later, in the stillness of the hot afternoon, the voice of the fire was heard again, a soft, busy crackling in the timbers of the roof, a muffled booming sound that grew above it; a tongue of flame through the slates, a drip of melted lead from the eaves, and the house was full of shouts and rushing feet. An hour afterwards the battle was over, and the toilers could fling themselves down, breathless, to realise an incredible escape, and the clang of the pump handle ceased. Throughout that hour of stress none of the pump's repertoire of evil symptoms was exhibited, nor did it fail to respond to the astonishing variety of receptacles presented to its grim beak. Next day it gasped forth the mud of the bottom of the well, and fell into a fractious disorder from which it has never rallied; but none the less the old house at its back owes its life to the allegiance of its comrade of a hundred years.
HUNTING MAHATMAS
Many people have learnt from "Kim" what it is to be a "Chela," and there was a time, not long ago, when every self-respecting evening paper and most of the magazines had something sufficiently—or self-sufficiently—illuminating to say about Karma or the Mahatma. I am not skilled in Buddhism, but I have assimilated a fact or two about Mahatmas, and in so doing have become aware of wider issues.
A Mahatma, I believe, implies primarily a teacher, an instructor, a sage or hermit with intermittently social tendencies; it also implies the possession of many useful endowments. Matter and space appear to be negligible accidents to the competent Mahatma. As a mere after-dinner triviality he will summon you a cigarette from infinity and will materialise it on the table; moving to higher things, he can produce a copy of the Times in the remoter parts of Tibet on the day on which it appears in London, advertisements and all, but exclusive, I fancy, of library privileges. Transcending these lighter accomplishments, however, is his power of transporting himself to a chosen place at a chosen time without visible means of progression. He, we are assured, can fade from the landscape with the beautiful elusiveness of a rainbow, and can develop himself elsewhere, in or out of the landscape, with a precision with which the rainbow cannot hope to compete.
There is a matter that seems to me to have escaped observation—it certainly is not generally admitted—that in society not notably occult, in what, in fact, are often spoken of as Hunting Circles (though why circles, save with a very bad fox, it is hard to say), these privileged beings are found. Unsuspected, unappreciated, his high gifts often despised, even disliked, the Mahatma blooms in what might seem the uncongenial soil of many a hunting country.
There is a difference, distinct and, in my mind, well defined, between the people who hunt and the people who go hunting. The people who hunt are the professionals; serious, impassioned even, but with subdued emotion; fanatics who live only to conjugate the verb To Hunt in all its moods and tenses; recognising implicitly the force of its imperative, accepting its future with joy, its past with loquacity. For them hunt numbers are compiled, and runs recorded with geographical accuracy and microscopic detail; they cut out the work, they give the time. Yet it is not among their thrusting ranks that the Mahatma is found. He is evolved, in perfect response to the need for him, among the wider brotherhood of those who go hunting. These are the true free lances of the chase. Having cast off the fear of public opinion, and purged themselves of the love of display, they have no conventions to respect and no position to lose. Hand in hand with their devotion to sport goes the most saving good sense. How despicable to these enfranchised minds must be the meaningless twists, the desperate endeavours of the zealots who, infatuated as a string of ants, surmount unwaveringly every obstacle that lies in their path! As, from a pleasant hill side, the Mahatma views these struggles, he must surely feel how well it is with him, and how useful a thing it is to combine moral courage with intelligence.
"THE HOVERING HORDE VACILLATES NO LONGER"