"'Tis not our fault, brother," suggested a decrepit old Brahmin, with a wrinkled forehead all seamed with white markings, who--squatted in the gutter--was extolling the virtue of the sacred sâlig râmas, made unblushingly out of the ball stoppers of soda-water bottles, which lay exposed for sale on a handkerchief in front of him; a Manchester-made handkerchief, printed in the best style with the loves of Krishna. "We get no more than in the old days; nay, less. For, see you, the third-class ticket takes so much. And that is the Huzoors' fee. They send it all over the black water to make a mountain of silver in the streets of their big city, London. Oh, pious ones! Buy! Buy a sacred sin-expeller!"
The monotonous cry was caused by the appearance of a priest-led band of pilgrims; for, as yet, the great throng was not, when the whole narrow street would be a sea of heads, when even the saffron robes would be lost to sight, and the only thing visible would be the patient, anxious faces seeking redemption. That would come on the morrow,--the great day.
Meanwhile, reverent eyes turned to the bottle-stoppers, and one or two hands wandered to the little hoard set aside for regeneration, which was diminishing so rapidly under the claims of chaplets, lights, caste-markings, sprinkling, and miracles.
"There be too many, I say," reiterated a radical seller of drugs. "If the Sirkar puts a tax on my medicine for the body, why not on thine for the soul?"
"Nay, pinsari-jee!" chuckled the privileged wit and gossip of the bazaar, a cobbler who sat--by reason of his low caste--at a decent distance even from the crowd of customers which was awaiting a patch on the coverings of feet already worn and weary with their search after righteousness; "'tis a miracle when folk buy of you; and that comes not too often."
Even the pilgrims laughed; for laughter at a ready gibe comes easily in India. Yet they, too, felt inclined to agree with the drug-seller. One can get blasé even in miracles.
Therefore, naturally enough, when there was a choice, they chose the newest ones. And the newest of all was jogi Gorakh-nâth's promise of defying tampions, and locks, and chains, and, as in other years, blessing the crowd of worshippers from his self-inflicted penitentiary, inside the "Teacher of Religion."
And what was more, he had kept his promise. That very dawn, as a kind of walk over the course, he had performed the miracle before a select band of pilgrims, mostly jogies of his own sect who were now engaged in telling the tale to all and sundry in the city. What had occurred was briefly this. He had received his followers squatted on the stone steps in front of the gun, and had treated them to a dissertation on the mysteries of Yoga. Other less eminent practitioners in the art of miracles, he said, might have found it necessary to withhold the sight of the sacred person from devoted eyes. He, however, meant to show them his absolute independence of the body. He would leave it lying there, dead, while his soul went inside the gun, and blessed the pious ones. Accordingly his jaw had dropped; he had become rigid, callous apparently to the prickings of pins with which his assistants strove to make him wince, and, just as one of them withdrew a dagger, covered, of course, with gore from his very heart, a muffled voice of blessing had come from the very bowels of the gun.
If that was not a miracle, what was?
Anyhow, it caught on, so that as the day grew, the growing tide of pilgrims passed by the side-shows run in connection with the Pool of Immortality by its priests, and drifted off to the opposition show, leaving the impresarios behind them in a state of rage and despair. Rage, for if this sort of thing continued on the morrow they would lose their year's harvest, since the Host of God-seekers were ever the natural prey of priests; despair, because exposure of what experience told them must be a fraud, would only result in counter exposure. There must be honour among thieves to make the profession a lucrative one.