“I am famous! I am known wherever we will go. Men will mock me! Am I to be a common mountebank? Vishnu! Vishnu! Why engage me, if you won’t listen when I tell you the proper way to do a thing, and what the public will accept and what it will not accept?”
The Lama listened patiently, not changing his expression, which was bland and gently whimsical.
“All ways are proper in their proper place. Men will usually take what they receive for nothing,” he answered after a pause. “As for your dissatisfaction, you may go, my son. You may go to Benjamin, and he shall pay you one week’s money.”
“I have a contract!” Maitraya retorted, posturing like Ajax defying lightning.
“That is true,” said the Lama gently. “There would be merit in observing the terms of it.”
Maitraya smote his breast, disheveled his turban desperately and turned to throw an appealing gesture to the troupe. But they were a hungry-looking lot, more interested in being fed and paid than in Maitraya’s artistic anxieties. The Lama looked kind and spoke gently. In silence, with eye-movements, they took the Lama’s side of the dispute.
“Prostitutes!” exclaimed Maitraya in a frenzy. “You will make apes of yourselves for the sake of two months’ wage! Oh, very well. I will out-ape you! I will be a worse ape than the one who ate the fruit out of the Buddha’s begging-bowl! Behold me—Maitraya, the prostitute! I will be infamous, to fill your miserable bellies!” Then, facing the Lama again with a gesture of heartbroken anguish: “But this that you ask is impossible! It is not done—never! My genius might overcome a difficulty, but how can these fools do what they have never learned?”
“How does the wolf-cub know where to look for milk?” the Lama answered, and all laughed, except Maitraya, who tried to rearrange his turban. A woman finished the business for him, grinning in his face as boldly as if there were the slats of a zenana window in between.
“Do you observe that woman?” Dawa Tsering whispered to Ommony. “Now if she were in Spiti there would be knife-work within the day. She lacks awareness of what might be!”
Aware that he, too, lacked that most desirable of assets at the moment, Ommony frowned for silence. There was just a chance that he might pick up a clue to a part of the mystery if he should attract no attention to himself. Maitraya—supposing he knew anything—was in a frame of mind to explode a secret at any moment. He was blowing up again.