“You will not be needed,” said the Lama, and at a sign from him, as if they had known from the first what to expect, three Tibetans seized Dawa Tsering and led him away to a small room at the rear where his roars of protest were inaudible.
That was all that was needed. Even the vainglorious Maitraya forced himself into a careful frame of mind, and the second act began as the first had done, with everybody striving to deliver each line as the Lama wished it.
Quite early in the second act the girls came on to dance and entertain the king’s court. They were preceded by mysterious music, quiet and rhythmic, pulsing with a tomtom under-throb that made the audience breathe in time to it and sway unconsciously.
They floated on to the stage, barefooted, swinging so perfectly in unison that each seemed to reflect the other. Lowered lights produced a filmy, other-world effect. What little sound they made was swallowed by the pulsing subdued music, until one radong boomed an arresting note and they began to sing, never changing the dance step, weaving in and out and around and around as reflections mirrored in the water weave interminably. Song, step and dimness were all in harmony. There was one mysterious, monotonous refrain that held a hint of laughter, and yet such sadness as is felt when the wild-fowl cry across treeless wastes under a rainy sky.
And there was no more than just enough of it to make the audience feel that it had not had enough—no encore, although the stifling theater became a pandemonium of acclamation and the king’s next speech had to be twice repeated from the throne (the Lama, underneath the throne, insisted on it, lest the audience should miss one word of the thought-laden lines).
Diana had only one line in the second act. When the king, worried and perplexed by the ignorant disputing of his courtiers, exclaimed, “Oh, who is wise enough to tell these idiots what to do?” Diana walked up to the throne, turned at a signal from Ommony to face the audience, and from under the throne the Lama croaked:
“A wise dog chooses its own master and obeys him. It saves lots of trouble!”
Then she walked off, swaying her long tail contentedly as if she had solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Because of the heat, that made the grease-paint on the actors’ faces run, her tongue lolled out and she seemed to be grinning in response to the applause as she vanished into the wings.
About midway through the second act Dawa Tsering was set free from durance vile and allowed to resume his ghoulishness, now somewhat chastened by conviction that after all he was not indispensable. There was nothing prearranged about his entrances, whenever a line fell flat or the action seemed to drag a little the Lama signaled for the devil to dance on and arouse laughter. He was particularly useful when Maitraya remembered he was an actor instead of acting the part of a king; the devil was immediately summoned then to take the conceit out of him by burlesque antics.
There was nothing in the play an audience could misinterpret, for it mirrored their own melancholy to them and their own confusion, while Samding in the Chinese robes of San-fun-ho laughed at it triumphantly, his golden voice repeating lines that suggested, hinted, vaguely alluded to a way out of all the difficulties that he knew all about, even if nobody else did. All through the second act Samding’s lines were mockingly destructive, as one actor after another, from king to saddhu, tortured imagination with his own ideas of how to make the world convenient to live in. Between them they proposed almost every solution that has ever passed current in the realm of politics, and the saddhu seasoned the stew with peppery religious nostrums; but when, before the curtain fell, they all decided they were better off as shoemakers and goatherds Samding still mocked them. Nevertheless, there was a hint in his last line of a solution if they chose to look for it: