The ways of the gods are natural, the ways of men unnatural, and there is nothing supernatural, except this: that if a man does a useless thing, none reproves him; if he does a harmful thing, few seek to restrain him; but if he seeks to imitate the gods and to encourage others, all those in authority accuse him of corruption. So it is more dangerous to teach truth than to enter a powder magazine with a lighted torch.
From the Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup.
CHAPTER XIV
THE SECOND ACT.
Although the first act was no more than a prologue, the second was long, constituting almost the entire play, followed by a short third act which was not much more than epilogue. For more than half an hour Ommony studied his part in silence, and the more he studied it the more its grim irony appealed to him. The saddhu typified intolerant self-righteousness and the beautifully written lines were jeremiads of abortive sanctity. Whatever else the Lama, or whoever wrote the play, might be, he was witty and aware of all the arguments of the accusers of mankind.
It appeared that, having refused to look at the magic jade while the mantra was being chanted, the saddhu alone went through the second act unchanged. The king, who had looked although warned not to look, became turned for a day and a night into an increditably wise man (which was just what he wanted to be) but surrounded by the sweetmeat seller, shoemaker and so on, transformed into members of his court, whose ignorance exasperated him to the verge of insanity. The soldier had become a general, who prated about patriotic duty. The camel-driver was a minister of commerce, who believed that the poor were getting their exact deserts and would be ruined by paternalism. The village headman was a nobleman with vast estates, who rack-rented his tenants and insisted that he did it by divine right. The farmers had become a minister of finance and his assistant, who conspired to bring about a better state of things by wringing the last realizable rupee from the merchant classes. The goatherd, strange to say, became a courtier pure and simple, who had no ambition but to make love to every woman who came within his range. The sweetmeat seller was a chancellor whose duty was to invent laws, and the shoemaker was a judge who had to apply them.
San-fun-ho, it seemed, had also looked into the magic jade, and had become a goddess, with her name unchanged, who came and went, heaping Puck-like irony on every one, king included, and engaging in acid exchanges of wit with the saddhu, who had much the worst of it.
The women with the water-jars had all become court favorites, who lolled on divans and complained of their tedious, unprofitable fate, inclining rather to the saddhu’s view of things but unwilling to give up sinecures for austerity (which they declared had gone out of fashion long ago) and cynically skeptical of the morals of the dancing women, who entered early in the second act to entertain the court. The long and the short of it was, that nobody was any happier for being changed, and least of all the king, who had only implored the Powers to make him fabulously wise, and who found his wisdom sterile because foolish people could not understand it.
The second act was supposed to take place at night, after a long day’s experience of the results of the sudden change of character, and at the close they all departed to the well, to greet the dawn and welcome a return to their former condition.