Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

by Will Levington Comfort

A FLOCK OF FLYING SWANS

One day (it was before he knew David Cairns) Bedient picked up the Bhagavad Gita from a book-stand in Shanghai. It was limp, little, strong, and looked meaty. As he raised his eyes wonderingly from a certain sentence, he encountered the glance of the fat old German dealer.

"Will this little book stand reading more than once, sir?" Bedient asked.

"Ja—but vat a little-boy question! Ven you haf read sefen times the year for sefen years—you a man vill haf become."

Bedient had been through the Song of the Divine One many times before he heard of it from anyone else. He had liked to think of it as a particular treasure which he shared with the queer old German, sick with fat. Now, it was the old Japanese sage who had turned the young man's mind to the comparative moderns—Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, and several others—and it was with a shock of joy he discovered that almost all of these light-bringers had lived with his little book. So queerly things happen…. However, the Bhagavad Gita gave him a brighter sense of the world under his feet, of a Force other than its own balance and momentum, and of its first fruits—the soul of man…. In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth—that morning star of Hebrew revelation was not at all dimmed; indeed, it shone with fairer lustre in the more spacious heavens of the Farther East.

Directly from his old Japanese teacher, and subtly from the Bhagavad Gita and the modern prophets, Bedient felt strongly urged to India. This culminated in 1903, when he was twenty-five years old. Hatred of Russia was powerfully fomenting through the Japanese nation at this time. Bedient grew sick at the thought of the coming struggle, but delayed leaving for several weeks, in the hope of seeing David Cairns, who, surely enough, was one of the first of the war-correspondents to reach Tokyo late that year. Cairns had put on pounds and power, and only Bedient knew at the end of certain fine days together, that the beauty of their first relation had not returned in its fullness…. They parted (a third time during five years) in the wintry rain on the water-front at Yokohama, Cairns remaining and Bedient taking ship for Calcutta.

Up into the Punjab he went with the new year; and there, all but lost trace of time and the world. He seemed to have come home—an ineffable emotion. When they told him quite seriously that the Ganges was sent from heaven, and had wandered a thousand years in the hair of Shiv before flowing down upon the plains with beauty and plenty and healing for sin-spent man—Bedient instantly comprehended the meaning of the figure: that the hair of Shiv was the Himalayas, whose peaks continually rape the rain-clouds. And the lotos—name, fragrance and sight of this flower—started a little lyrical wheel tinkling in his mind, turning off snatches of verses that sung themselves; and fluttering bits of romance, half-religious and altogether impersonal; and strange pictures, lovely, though all but effaced.

Indeed, he was one with the Hindus in a love for the bees, the silence, the mountains, rivers, the moon, and the heaven-protected cattle, in whose great soft eyes he found the completion of animal peace…. The legend that the bees had come from Venus, with the perfect cereal, wheat, as patterns of perfection from that farther evolved planet—fascinated, became the leit-motif of his thoughts for weeks. Earth had earned a special dispensation, it was said, and bright messengers came with a swarm and a sheaf, each milleniums advanced beyond any species of its kind here.

From a little boy he had loved the bees. Afternoons long ago (this was clear to him as the memory of that sinister hall-way of yellow-green light which returned on the afternoon of the great wind) he had lain upon the grass somewhere, and heard the hum of the honey-gatherers in thistle and clover. The hum was like the far singing of a child-choir, and the dreamings it started then were altogether too big for the memory mechanism of a little boy's head; but the vastness and wonder of those dreamings left a kind of bushed beauty far back in his mind. He had loved the bees as he had loved the Bhagavad Gita, thinking it peculiarly his own attraction, but when the world's great poets and prophets became known to him through their writings, he discovered, again with glad emotion, that bees had stirred the fancy of each, stimulated their conceptions of service and communistic blessedness; furnished their symbols for laws of beauty and cleanliness, brotherhood, race-spirit, the excellence of sacrifice—a thousand perfect analogies to show the way of human ethics and ideal performance…. But beyond all their service to literature, he perceived that these masters among men had loved the bees. This was the only verb that conveyed Bedient's feelings for them; and he found that they literally swarmed through Hindu simile in its expressions of song and story and faith.

Northward, he made his leisure way almost to the borders of Kashmir, before he found his place of abode—Preshbend, a little town of many Sikhs, which clung like a babe to the sloping hip of a mountain. He was taken on by the English of the forestry service, and liked the ranging life; liked, too, the rare meetings with his fellow-workers and superiors, quiet, steady-eyed men, quick-handed and slow of speech. With all his growth and knowledge of the finer sort, Bedient carried no equipment for earning a living—except through his hands. There was no hesitation with him in making a choice—between patrolling a forest, and the columns of a ledger. All the indoor ways of making money that intervene between the artisan and artist were to him out of the question. When asked his occupation, he had answered, "Cook."