Adventure Magazine Cover, October 30, 1924 — page 131: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Om sung to Manjusri, Lord and Teacher, ‘‘free from the twofold mental gloom,” as redo- lent 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 win- dow-slats. And that brought another prob- lem 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 solu- tion. 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, Om- mony 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. “TI 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 recess- es 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 smelled as fresh as if it had come from “F2T 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 Ben- jamin’s confession it was next to impossible to believe the old lama was a miscreant. Because of the story of traffic in white chil- dren reason argued that the lama wasa fiend. Intuition, which ignores deduction, told him otherwise; and memory began to reassert itself. There was, for instance, some twenty years of correspondence from the lama, mostly in English, with reference to the business of the Tilgaun mission; not one word of it was less than altruistic, practical and sane; there had never been a hint of-compromise with even those conventional lapses from stern principle that most institutions find themselves compelled to make. In fact, he admitted to himself that the lama’s letters, more than anything else during his life in India, had helped him to see straight and to govern himself uprightly. And now this play. And Samding. Could a man who made a business of white slavery so educate a chela as that one evidently had been educated? . Youth takes on the taint of its surroundings. Samding had the calm self-possession of one who knew the inherent barrenness of evil and therefore could not be tempted by it. And would a man, who permitted himself to outrage humanity by dealing in children, write such a play as this one, or approve of it, or stage it at his own expense? The play was not only ingeniously moral, it was rad- ically sound and aimed equally at mockery of wrong ideals and the presentation of a manly view of life. A saint might have written the play, and a reckless “angel’’ might finance it, but a criminal or a man with personal ambitions, hardly. Then again there was the mystery of the lama’s treatment of himself. How much had Benjamin told? The old Jew had sent the trunk, so there had been plenty of chance to send a message with it. Ben- jamin might have brought the trunk in person. MICLOOOK C© in