The Rose of Tibet (22 page)

Houston’s days were passing at this time in a curious manner. The weather had grown hot in the valley and he found it hard to stay awake in the afternoons. It was unbearably steamy beside the lake, unbearably odorous in the village. He stayed in his cell and slept. He slept every afternoon, an
arrangement which proved entirely satisfactory to Miny and Mo, who brought a couple of rugs into the cell and slept with him.

These were dreamy days. They were intoxicating nights. For he was never wholly free of her now, sleeping or waking. He felt as if he were in a kind of trance, and less and less as the airless days of July drifted into August did he want to come out of it. A number of things were working, however, to bring him out of it.

‘Chao-li, Chao-li, you’re not listening.’

‘To every word, little rose.’

‘Little Daughter
knows
– she knows something.’

‘What does she know?’

‘I don’t know. And they are worried how you came to hear of the greenstones. … Oh, Chao-li, you’re not thinking.’

‘I am thinking.’

‘You’re not thinking hard.’

‘I can’t think hard when I am with you.’

‘Then go away from me. … Ah, no, Chao-li, don’t go. …  Think when you are away from me.’   

He thought when he was away from her.

He went to see the abbot.

‘Yes,
trulku
, you have asked to see me?’

‘I am troubled in my mind, Abbot.’

‘You have dreamed again?’ said the abbot, loweringly.

‘I have dreamed again. I cannot understand my dreams.’

‘Tell me them.’

Houston did so. There was a surprising similarity about his dreams, for in each the Mother either nodded to him or beckoned or called. He thought sometimes that he spoke to her, and that she answered; but he couldn’t tell, when he awoke, whether it had been a dream or a real meeting, so clear was the apparition. Was it possible, he asked the abbot, for one to project himself physically to another place while he slept?

That such a phenomenon was not only possible, but indeed most comprehensively documented was an elementary part of every young monk’s training: the abbot gazed at him searchingly. He wished most keenly that he had the benefit
of the governor’s advice, but the governor had come and gone.

He decided to employ one of the governor’s methods: he changed the subject.

He said, ‘Well now,
trulku
, how did you find your – your compatriots?’

‘Very well, Abbot, thank you,’ Houston said, cautiously. ‘They have no complaints.’

‘The one who is mad – it was an unfortunate accident.’

‘Quite unavoidable.’

‘Yes. Yes,’ the abbot said, bewildered by this ready understanding. ‘And you have quite lost your desire to return home with them?’

‘I have not lost it,’ Houston said carefully. ‘I still have it. It’s very strange. … I want to go and yet I want to stay. I have a feeling there is something for me to do here.’

The abbot looked at him, and changed his tack.

He said slowly, ‘Tell me,
trulku
– you have seen the abbess only once, during the festival.’

‘That is so.’

‘It was for you a most unusual sight.’

‘Most.’

‘Perhaps you think of it again sometimes.’

‘Frequently. I’ve even tried to sketch it once or twice from memory.’

‘Then isn’t it possible,’ the abbot said, with an attempt at a smile, ‘that you think of it also while you sleep – that your mind goes on making these – these sketches?’

Houston shook his head. He said, ‘It’s an explanation that has occurred to me, naturally. But the dreams are so real, Abbot. … One has the strangest feeling sometimes. … And yet, what other explanation is there? Perhaps you are right. You might be.’

‘But still – wait. Wait a moment,’ the abbot said hastily, as he rose. ‘Dreams after all are sent to guide us. Perhaps we should examine other aspects. You think that in your dreams the abbess calls to you and that you go to her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it that you go?’

Houston frowned. ‘To an unearthly place … a tomb …
a place I have never seen before. There are candles and effigies. … I can’t describe it.’

‘Where do you think it is, this place?’

‘I don’t know,’ Houston said. ‘Perhaps, as you say, in my head. Perhaps in a picture I have seen and remembered. What other explanation is there?’

The abbot, who could think of several, gazed at him sombrely. ‘
Trulku
,’ he said at last, ‘I must take counsel on these dreams. It may be that the Mother has need of you. It may be that she is herself unaware of it. We will talk of it again.’

They talked of it three days later. Houston spent the intervening nights in his cell. He talked a good deal in his sleep during these nights; and he knew that Mei-Hua did the same, for so they had planned it.

And the news the governor brought him at length was not unexpected.

Houston had been granted the free run of the monastery towards the end of July: it was just over a month before the Second Festival. He looked back on it later as, literally, the most marvellous month of his life, for every day brought him something to marvel at. He had ready access, day or night, to the abbess, and was utterly and entirely infatuated with her. He could see his brother and the other members of the party whenever he wished, and did so every day. And he was regarded with awe, if not indeed veneration, by all but one of the monks and priestesses in the monastery. (This one, alas, he was to encounter later in circumstances rather less marvellous.)

Ringling was better now, too, and accompanied him everywhere. Miny and Mo were no longer in attendance, although some supervision was maintained over the other Europeans, and guards were sent out with them on the outings that they took with Houston.

The outings were frequent. They spent a two-day trip collecting orchids and herbs in the hills; they spent three days with the Duke of Ganzing; and many days more working with the priestesses in the fields.

The monastery owned much land, several times as much as could be worked even by its large free labour force, and yet – apart from little prayer wheels and flags – it produced nothing at all for outside consumption. It was, in a sense, a vast hospice, dispensing service. It gave a medical service to half the province; it gave a ‘burial’ service, a mobile corps of priestesses always out on their dismembering and occult assignments (they stayed some days after the dismemberment to see that the newly freed soul was properly directed to its destination); and it gave a spiritual service. Although it was, in one sense, a government institution, its hierarchy was by no means government-appointed. From the abbess downwards, every departmental head was self-perpetuating; ‘recognized,’ as children, they took over from Former Bodies.

Because of the presence of the she-devil and the establishment’s supernatural origin, pure State lamaism was not practised (a dispensation it enjoyed with some half-dozen other major monasteries, Houston learned from the abbot); there were traces of an earlier religion in the dogma and the form of worship, and local deities supplemented the national ones.

Houston was fascinated by these details. He pried at will, and though he came up occasionally against some reserve, no mystery was denied him.

His relations with Ringling and with his brother were less successful. The boy didn’t know what to make of him; he was uneasy in himself with a suspicion that someone or something was being made a fool of. He didn’t want the fool to be himself, or Houston, or the occult powers of the monastery; he didn’t know what to think. But Houston had hired him, and had gone through much with him, and he gave him therefore a certain wistful devotion.

Houston thought he could cope with this, but he didn’t know how he was going to cope with his brother. He had the strangest aversion to explaining his relations with Mei-Hua, and when Hugh asked him he gave him guarded replies. It had brought an awkward duality to their relations.

Hugh said to him one day, ‘Look here, Charles, what the hell is going on? Why can’t we talk together properly?’

‘When we get away we’ll talk properly. Be patient, Hugh.’

‘Why can’t your abbess get her finger out and see that we get away? She runs the works here, doesn’t she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s come over you? You surely don’t believe this bloody
trulku
nonsense, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t. But they do. We’ve got to wait until the prophecies work themselves out.’

‘What have you got to do with the —prophecies?’

‘Not a — thing,’ Houston said, using the same term in an attempt at intimacy. ‘But they think I have. Just wait till everything works out.’

With Sheila Wolferston and Meiklejohn he was on somewhat easier terms, for here there was no lost intimacy to be regained. Meiklejohn, it was true, regarded him with a certain sardonic amusement and had taken to calling him St Charles, which he found after a time very trying; but with the girl he was able to establish something like a normal relationship. For he had a bond with her; before leaving he had been to see her mother, in a damp little cottage in Godalming, Surrey; and they talked for hours of her mother.

‘She does everything herself, you know. It isn’t so easy with her leg.’

‘What’s the matter with her leg?’

‘She’s lame – didn’t you notice?’

‘I never did.’

‘No, she doesn’t like people. She tries to conceal it. … It’s so silly. I wanted her to come and live in a flat in town, you know – no stairs – but she wouldn’t. She’s so obstinate. … It isn’t as if she really knows anybody in Godalming. Daddy was the convivial one. She merely
clings
. I suppose it’s because she hasn’t got very much to cling to.’

He had noticed the somewhat mournful strain in the girl that he had noticed in the mother; he saw the mother’s blunt nose, and the mother’s head-shaking ghost of a smile.

They were sitting on his shirt in the stubble of a barley field at the time: a yak with a deep bell round its neck was passing with a sled piled high with tawny stooks, and far below them the green lake and the seven gold roofs swam in the rising air currents. … All a long, long way from damp,
soft Godalming with its mushy autumnal leaves underfoot and its dark green trains commuting to Waterloo.

She said, shaking her head, ‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it? We’re almost literally out of the world. They think we’re dead. And it’s all going on there still.’

‘I know,’ he said for he felt it himself, and, moved by something, took her hand. She had cut her hair short. She wore an orange sun top and skirt, dark glasses, no shoes. Her skin was tanned brown; he thought her very fine and wholesome in a warm, blunt kind of way. He said, quietly, ‘I hope all is going well with you and Hugh, Sheila.’

‘It’s a bit of a strain.’

‘Is it?’

‘We’re on top of each other all the time, and yet not able to be really alone ever.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Some of us are never without company,’ she said lightly. ‘I understand you’re not hampered in that way yourself.’

‘No.’

The dark glasses were turned curiously upon him.

‘You don’t want to talk about it much, do you?’

‘Not much.’

‘All right. Only you won’t forget that our future is in your hands, will you?’

He liked her.

But he liked Mei-Hua more. He liked her more than he had ever liked anyone in the world, and he didn’t think that anything could come about that would make him view her differently. That was before the Second Festival, of course.

The Second Festival of the Monkey began that year on 1 September, two weeks before it was normally due; this was because, owing to a second earthquake (on 15 August) which caused much damage in Lhasa, the omens had become suddenly more threatening than ever; the Oracle had indeed indicated that if it were not held early it might not be held at all.

Like the Spring Festival, the celebrations lasted seven days.
Houston stayed for only four of them, for on the fifth, badly shocked, he left Yamdring and went to stay with the Duke at Ganzing and didn’t return for a fortnight.

He left on the day of the emerald ceremony, after participating in it. He had been up very early that day, for the deputy abbot had wakened him at four o’clock to take him to a large chapel in the first monastery where the ceremony was due to take place.

He found the abbot already there, sitting over the emeralds: he had carried the bags down himself from the top monastery, and had watched over them all night. Apart from the abbess, he was the only person who could open and seal these bags.

Houston knew that he was himself to be a supernumerary guardian of the emeralds, but had learned very little more. Mei-Hua had told him that he must not come to her during the week of the festival, for it was to be devoted entirely to remembrances of the monkey; but had refused to tell him anything else. It was not spoken of, she said. He would see for himself.

Houston waited with the keenest interest to do so.

He sat with the two silent men and the eight sacks of emeralds for the best part of an hour, listening to a chanted mass that was going on elsewhere in the monastery. There was a sickly smell of flowers above the incense in the candlelit chapel; it seemed to be coming from a large jade ornament in a far corner. His two companions had fallen into a meditative trance, however, so he did not disturb them with questions but merely sat on his own two sacks and awaited events.

At five o’clock a little handbell was rung, and complete silence fell. In the silence, the abbess was brought down through the seven monasteries. She was brought down on a litter, and deposited outside the gates by four bearers, who left immediately. Little Daughter and the Mistress of Ceremonies had come down with her, and now, with the abbot and the deputy abbot to help, the litter was raised again and brought inside the chapel, and the gates closed.

Houston watched in fascination. She had her devil’s mask on. She had been newly anointed: he had smelt it right away. But now as Little Daughter took off her robe, he saw it, too: the abbess stood, quite naked, gleaming all over in
the candlelight. She walked to the jade ornament, the small procession following.