The third act found them at the well-side, changed again, and San-fun-ho, once more a Chinese woman, took them to task for having failed to see the future seeded in themselves, depending for fruition solely on their own use of each passing moment. Because the saddhu had to interject remarks, the whole of San-fun-ho’s last speech was written on Ommony’s scroll, and as he read he chuckled at the saddhu’s vanquishment. He loved to see cant and pseudo-righteousness exploded. He could imagine the saddhu, typifying all he most loathed, slinking off-stage, brow-beaten, ashamed—and just as bent as ever on attaining Heaven by the exercise of tyranny, self-torture and contempt of fun.
Then San-fun-ho’s last lines—a mantra—sung to Manjusri, Lord and Teacher, “free from the two-fold mental gloom,” as redolent, and ringing with immortal hope as sunshine through the rain.
He was reading that when the gong sounded—a reverberating, clanging thing of brass whose din drowned thought and drove the wasps in squadrons through the window-slats. And that brought another problem that invited very serious attention. As a Brahman—even a Bhat-Brahman, who is not supposed to be above committing scores of acts the orthodox would reckon unclean—he might not eat in company with actors, nor even in the Lama’s company, nor in any room in which non-Brahmans were. He began to exercise his wits to find a way out of the difficulty—only to find that the Lama had foreseen it and had provided the solution.
Long-robed servants entered from the courtyard bearing bowls of hot food for the actors, but none for Ommony or Dawa Tsering or the dog. Instead, a tall Tibetan came, announcing that a meal cooked by a Brahman would be served in a ritually clean room, if his honor would condescend to be shown the way to it.
The room turned out to be a small one at the far corner of the cloister, and no more ritually clean than eggs are square, nor had the meal been cooked by a Brahman; but the actors were none the wiser. Dawa Tsering’s food was heaped in a bowl on a mat outside the door, and he, having no caste prejudices, squatted down to gorge himself, with a wary eye on Diana. Ommony relieved his mind:
“She eats only at night. She won’t touch food unless I give permission.”
Dawa Tsering promptly tried to tempt the dog, but she turned up her nose at the offer, and the Hillman grinned.
“I think you have more than one devil in you, Gupta Rao! However, maybe they are not bad devils!” He nodded to himself; down in the recesses of his mind there was an evolution going on, that was best left to take its own course.
Ommony left him and the dog outside and shut himself into the small square room. There was only one door; one window. He was safe from observation. There was a plain but well-cooked meal of rice and vegetables laid out on a low wooden bench with a stool beside it, and a pitcher of milk that smelt as fresh as if it had come from a model dairy; also a mattress in a corner, on which to rest when the meal was finished—good monastic fare and greater ease than is to be had in many an expensive hostelry.
He finished the meal and sprawled on the mattress, confessing to himself that in spite of the Lama’s having avoided him for twenty years, in spite of the evidence of an astonishingly perfect spy-system that had enabled the Lama so infallibly to trace and recover the jade, and even in spite of Benjamin’s confession, it was next to impossible to believe the old Lama was a miscreant. Because of the story of traffic in white children, reason argued that the Lama was a fiend. Intuition, which ignores deduction, told him otherwise; and memory began to reassert itself.