For a wonder, there was electric light, although none too much, and the switchboard was a mystery, painted red and labeled in English “Keep away!”
At the rear of the theater and along both sides was a balcony for women, screened off with narrow wooden slats that left openings about four inches square. The orchestra “pit” was a platform, three feet lower than the stage, in full view of the audience. The musicians were already squatting there—Tibetans to a man; four were armed with radongs[[34]]; four more had tomtoms; the remaining dozen were provided with stringed instruments. The radongs blew a fog-horn blare to greet the Lama as he stepped on to the stage.
In the opposite wing, no longer in white or in stockings, protected by three stalwart Tibetans, who lounged in the flies, were the women of mystery. They were in costume, which so orientalized them that Ommony almost doubted recognition. Memory plays strange tricks; his took him back to the day when he and Benjamin had played a part at Chota Pegu and the nautch-girls had been wild with inquisitive mischief—ready to betray the chief-priest at a nod. These girls now, in gauzy draperies, less naked, but as subtle in their motions, so resembled those nautch-girls at first glance that he was not sure they were the same he had seen in the room among the Hindu ladies until he noticed that they laughed and chattered on a comparatively low note instead of a high-pitched dissonance.
The Lama clapped his hands and sat down inside the well, where he could see out through holes in the painted cloth. Then he told Ommony to make Diana sit down almost exactly in front of the well, and the rehearsal began at once, as if preordained from the beginning of time, the girls in their Indian costume mingling with the stage crowd, and so well versed in their part that they pushed the other actors into place, needing no direction by the Lama.
Ommony had plenty of chance to observe some of them closely, for three had been told to engage the saddhu in mock-conversation during parts of the first act. One—the Gretchen-girl—put an offering into his begging-bowl. But though he missed his cue twice through trying to engage her in real whispered conversation, he failed; she was as evasive as abstract thought—as apparently engaging and as actually distant as a day-dream. She turned every advance he made into an excuse of by-play for the imaginary audience’s benefit, and all Ommony accomplished was to draw the Lama’s irony from behind the well:
“Some saddhus hide lascivious hearts under robes of sanctity, but you are supposed to be one who has truly forsaken the pursuit of women, Gupta Rao!”
When the laugh that followed that rebuke had died down Ommony was still not sure of the Gretchen-girl’s real nationality. He had tried her with English, French, German and two or three Indian languages, watching her face, but detecting no expression that suggested she had understood him. As for the others, one might be a Jewess; but there are many well-bred women, for instance in Rajputana, and in Persia, who are fair-skinned and who resemble Jewesses in profile. Even fair hair was no proof of their origin; most eastern women, but by no means all, have dark hair.
The only really convincing evidence that they were Europeans was their behavior, and even that was offset by the fact that some of them were certainly Tibetans, whose manner was equally unembarrassed in the presence of men, yet equally free from familiarity. The difference from their behavior and that of Maitraya’s actresses grew more and more noticeable as the professionals became aware of an atmosphere to which they were utter strangers. They tried at first to imitate it; then grew resentful and sneered; resorting at last to low jests in loud whispers and attempts to scandalize by bold advances to the men—until at last the Lama stood up in the well like a priest in a pulpit and beckoned those three women to come and stand in front of him.
“I could show you your secret hearts,” he said, in a kind voice that was much more withering than scorn, “and ye would die in horror at the sight. It is not good to slay, not even with the rays of truth. So I show you instead what ye may become.” Mildly, patiently, a little wearily, as if he had done the same thing very often, he included all his own mysterious family in a gesture that conveyed diffidence and hesitation. “Life after life ye shall struggle with yourselves before ye shall come as these. And these are nothing—nothing to what ye may become. The road is long, and there are difficulties; but ye must face it. Take advantage of the moment, for it is easier to imitate than to find the way alone. Ye can not undo the past, nor can all the gods, nor He who rules the gods, undo it. But now, this moment, and the next one, and the next, for ever, ye yourselves by thought and act create the very hair’s-breadths of your destiny.—Now let us begin again, from the beginning.”
They began again so meekened and subdued that for a while the first act suffered. But that was overcome by Diana, who produced such peals of laughter that the Lama had difficulty in restoring order and had to reprimand the musicians for thrusting their heads above the level of the stage to watch. At a signal from Ommony standing near the wings, Diana’s mouth opened and the Lama from inside the well croaked words that sounded, even on the stage, as if the dog were speaking them.