* * * * *
Two days afterwards I met Blanche Mainguy and her husband riding in
Annandale and, seeing talk in her eye, I dismounted under the deodars.
She was a beautiful horsewoman and looked very much better in coat and
breeches than in her appalling lounging kit. Her vivacious ugliness was
really attractive under the shifting lights and shades of those glorious
trees. Mainguy and his horse were one also. . . . They looked a
steady-going English pair in those surroundings.
“And when are _you_ off?” she hailed me. “And where?”
“Tomorrow. Kashmir.”
“To the Dunbars?”
“Of course. Didn’t you settle it yourself?”
She made a grimace. “Didn’t I warn you? Don’t I warn you now? Lucia
Dunbar and her _entourage_—not to mention Lance—get hold of people in
the most amazing way. Nobody’s the same after they’ve known them. They
cease to be good fellows and become—”
She halted for the right word, and I suggested, “Prigs.” She meditated.
“Not exactly. Worse—and better! I’ll diagnose more clearly when I see
you after you’ve undergone the process. I only hope they don’t get hold
of the prince. I heard him saying he would dearly like to run up to
Baltar. It gave me the creeps. Imagine if he returned a yogi!”
Mainguy burst into one of his sudden guffaws, making his horse start and
sidle. “He might! That woman can do anything with anybody. Did you ever
see the pretty Canadian, Cardonald?”
Mrs. Mainguy sniffed. “Pretty indeed! _That’s_ not the word. She’s like
a cold-storage marble bust of a young Greek empress.”
“They hadn’t empresses!” Mainguy interjected.
“Never mind. That’s what she looks like. They lunched with us before
starting, and then we all went up to Observatory Hill to say good-by to
her Ex. I give you my word Miss Ingmar never uttered a word all the time
except to refuse the cutlets. I said to Lucia, ‘My goodness, you _have_
got hold of a lemon this time! Don’t ask me to Baltar while that young
lady’s around!’”
“Did she agree with you?” I asked curiously.
“She laughed and asked me to come up in the summer. She never says
anything but just what she pleases, and does the same. If she wants you
to marry the Canadian you’ll do it as sure as you stand there.”
It was my turn to laugh then. I knew too much of life to contemplate
marriage with any interest, and except in the anatomical sense was
conscious of a vacuum where the heart should be. A man whose nearest
relations are a bunch of cousins and not attractive ones at that hasn’t
had the right drill for heart development. I told her so and she nodded
with a grimace.
“That’s all right! People all say the same sort of thing, but it
invariably ends in the same way—they do what Lucia wants. I tell you
there’s something uncanny up at Baltar. That’s all right too, but it
would have been better for you if you’d been inoculated at eighteen.
Dine with us before you go? So sorry! Well, at all events write and tell
us what you think.”
I promised vaguely and stood watching while they cantered off laughing
and talking loudly. My next visitors beneath the deodars were their
Excellencies, riding alone and enjoying the cool sunshine, shading into
deep green light like sea water under the innermost boughs. They also
pulled up, and their talk also was of Baltar. It seemed to me that all
the world was thinking of Lucia Dunbar, and naturally the talk would be
as different as the talkers. Her Excellency, fair, wholesome, a little
unimaginative, but “good bread” all through as the French say, had a
different angle from Blanche Mainguy’s.
“Happy person! So you are going to Baltar! I want to go of all things.
Colonel Hutchinson was there the other day and he says it is the most
extraordinary thing he ever saw in his life. The most wonderful quiet.”
“Considering who is the guiding spirit that’s scarcely surprising,” his
Excellency put in. “I have known Lady Lucia since she was two and—well,
she doesn’t grow on every bush. Do you go on up into Little Tibet
afterwards?”
I told him yes, and that I had a permit for the Hunza country, and we
talked awhile of that and other things; and then they too went off, she
leaning down and saying earnestly, “My love to her. My dear love,” as
the horses put on speed.
Well, these are the preliminaries! My story really begins when after
reaching the Happy Valley of Kashmir and to my mind the loveliest spot
of the world, surrounded by its snow peaks, I began camping up from
Gunderbal at the mouth of the Sind Valley. One talks of valleys there,
but the Happy Valley itself is over five thousand feet above sea-level,
and the mountain valleys with their tumbling rivers are a climb into the
higher heights through pine woods to the lonely and sparkling snows.
I had hired the usual ponies and their men, and my personal servants led
the van with me; and so, in due patriarchal order, we went up by the
river, camping the first night at Kangan and beyond that in two marches
to Gund and Gagangair. There next day we left the Sind route for Baltar.
It is scarcely possible to describe that four days’ march, the stedfast
beauty of pines climbing the heights to the stars, the exultant joy of
rushing rivers. An extraordinary exhilaration swept over me as we
mounted higher and higher and the clean strong air filled my lungs like
some strange wine of the gods. At higher heights it overpowers poor
humanity and leaves it sick and stunned. Here it was divine, shot
through with golden sunshine and flavored with the pure aroma of pines
in their ranked marching myriads. Through every glade was a glimpse of
awful peaks guarding a mystery wonderful beyond even their own wonders.
And still we climbed, gradually but surely, beside the river rushing
from the cold heart of a far-away glacier.
The track was lonely but not solitary. We met a few loaded ponies with
black-browed traders beside them, men who know the dangerous heart of
Central Asia and the hard secret ways that lead to and fro, men to whom
all life is danger and adventure, who scorn the life of ease and look to
meet their last hour in some brawl in a wayside caravanserai or in the
vast solitudes of the eternal snow.
They shot their keen black gaze at me as I passed, gaging the English
sahib to a hair and wondering if money was to be made out of the
Feringhi. Many of such men I came to know afterwards and liked them
well—excellent company, hardy, good-tempered fellows, and if a little
unscrupulous, better the direct thrust you are prepared for than the sly
honey-tipped dart of civilized exploitation.
And then there were the pilgrims, holy men making their way to the
ruined temple of Shiva placed on a crag above the river. It was out of
my way to Baltar, but I would not miss it, and we followed the narrow
way through pines and rocks and great slumbrous ferns until we came to a
crag above the thundering river, madly plunging for freedom among the
rocks. There, set in deep glades of trees, was one of the most beautiful
things I have ever seen in my life or shall see, a temple, relic of the
great old days of Kashmir when mighty kings ruled her and scholars
traveled from China and India that they might kneel at her feet and
implore the crumbs of her unearthly wisdom.
In every crevice and niche of broken stone irises and ferns had rooted,
and the blue of the iris was better than jewels. It was as though the
long dream, water-lulled, of ancient stones had broken forth into
loveliness of blossom. I looked through the ancient doorway into a sunk
quadrangle with carved niches about it, where once devotees had sat
tranced in meditation, looking down into the water at their feet, and
marveled once more at the hidden beauties of this divine world.
While I sketched it the man at my elbow told me it had first been a
temple to the wise and half-divine Snake-people of legend, who dwelt in
Kashmir and loved to mirror their beauty in calm water; and when the day
of their worship passed it became sacred to the Great God who meditates
upon the starriest heights of the mountains with the crescent moon for a
jewel in his hair. And now it has fallen into ruin and no priest does
service at the broken lingam of the little shrine, though still the
faithful pilgrims come to mutter prayers and finger rosaries and pour
libations from a small stream that sings through the quadrangle before
it slips into the thundering glee of the river below.
I turned reluctantly away. It seemed to me that nothing at Baltar could
be so lovely, and I would willingly have camped there for days in the
sun-shot shade. But we went on steadily, doing about twelve miles daily,
and after four days the woods grew denser and the river louder and the
way among moss-grown fern-plumed rocks narrower. The ponies had to be
checked and encouraged with many shouts of “_Khabar dar_”—“Take
care!”—to look to their footing with wary instinct, and Faz-ul-din
striding beside my pony said with emphasis:
“We now draw near to the residence of Dumba Sahib, the great English
lord who beautifies the mountains with his countenance. And since the
Presence is his friend I desire to remit the customary present which is
made in addition to the contracted charge for ponies and men.”
Here I own myself to have been almost too staggered for utterance. Not
for nothing had a relation of my own, impelled into poetry by extortion,
proclaimed:
“If you gave a Kashmiri both heaven and hell,
He would ask for another five annas as well.”
And this renunciation was the strongest tribute to the Dunbars which had
yet assailed my senses. I received it in silence, uncertain how to meet
it.
My first impression was quiet and deep green shade, and the sound of
running waters which intensifies quiet itself—the heart of a great
forest diversified into glades where flitting shadows of wild creatures
might pass at their ease. High up the side of a mighty hill—a mountain
in lesser lands—was a glorious spring pouring down in cascades half
hidden in maidenhair, and this, known as the Peri’s or Fairy’s Spring,
they told me fed the house with water and electricity. One drinks wild
water with caution in India, but there was no need for caution here. It
broke pure as crystal from the strong heart of the hills.
And the deodars with tilted boughs upon which woodland spirits might lie
and swing were magnificent in height and sweep, and where the glades
opened were tall rhododendrons mingling masses of fiery blossom with the
velvet background of the deodars—and below them beds of golden and
white violets embedded in moss and fern—the small things as lovely as
the great.
My God, what beauty; what a home! I thought, and how far from “roaring
London, raving Paris,” and how blessed in its remoteness! Would one ever
weary of it?
“Down that way is a little village of people all in the service of the
great sahib, and the water is piped to their houses as to his own so
that there shall be no sickness, and the children here grow up straight
and tall like the children of the sahibs.” So spoke Faz-ul-din, willing
to overwhelm me with marvels, but I, rapt on the unknown, returned no
answer.
The forest was opening its arms and beyond soared the awful peak of one
of the mightiest mountains of the Himalayan range—not golden nor white,
but some miraculous blending of both into a color unnamable and
glorious. It stood alone—a divine presence between earth and heaven,
dominating all the world about it or rather gathering it up as an
offering to something far and high, to be felt but never spoken.
And now we were slightly descending the rocky path, and the river which
we had almost lost in the wild woods was nearing again, and before me I
saw half hidden in deodar and rhododendron an immensely long house built
of hewn logs, brown-roofed, widely windowed, with a great rustic
portico, and a garden that opened my eyes wide with delight and
astonishment—lawns, smooth as green velvet, and flowers I had never
seen grouping with those that spoke of home in happy companionship. To
right and left, farther back among the trees were two more houses of the
same build, but a little smaller, and high up on the vast hillside a
fourth house, long, brown-roofed, with what I should have guessed was a
detached chapel on ground a little higher.
“That great long palace-house is the house of the sahibs!” said
Faz-ul-din with showman’s pride, pointing a grimy finger. “Within are
rugs and noble chairs and divans worthy of the Maharaja of Kashmir
himself. Have not these eyes seen it? And beds formed of rare woods and
brass and other shining metals. And lights are furnished by the river
even as in the city of Srinagar, and it is said—but this may or may not
be truth—that even the cooking is done by the river’s light, which if
it be so is a marvel of the jinn. To the right is a house equally
splendid for those guests of Dumba Sahib who are followers of the
Prophet and the true faith. To the left is a noble house for Hindu
guests to whom the eating of the cow is abomination—a craze which is
not to be understood. But it is a thing to be remarked that here no meat
is given for food, yet no person can desire slain meats, so glorious is
the table spread for all. And I speak from knowledge for the sahib has
provided a caravanserai for me and my ponies and those like me, and here
we rest for the night as his guests and receive noble treatment and such
food as is served to true believers in Paradise, and the very ponies
have a stable worthy of king’s horses and their food is princely.”
He had halted me that I might have the full benefit of this oration and
it flowed like the river itself from his lips.
“Truly the law of guest-right is in this man’s open hand!” I said
gravely, and indeed needed to feign no astonishment, so wonderful was
the picture, so amazing the setting. Men were passing to and fro between
the houses on various errands, in white with scarlet _cummerbunds_ after
the manner of Indian servants; but here and there was a stranger
sight—two or three men bare-headed, shaven, with robes of a dull
yellow. One, unmistakably a Chinese, stood not far off, watching my
arrival with interest; another, as evidently English, was coming up from
the river, book in hand; a third—but why continue? It was an
astonishing place—the threshold of a new world.
Faz-ul-din resumed his discourse.
“And here, when the ponies have delivered the honorable baggage to the
servants of the house, I desire permission of the sahib to depart to the
caravanserai, hoping that he will sign this chit attesting my good
behavior in men and ponies on the road.”
I rode slowly along the approach to the great portico of rough-hewn logs
with the bark left on—a palace for Pan, and with what unknown recesses
within!
A tall, fair-haired Englishman with two delightful Scotch terriers at
his heels came forward; he was light and strongly built, with the air of
woods and large spaces upon him, and a quick sensitive way with him that
won me. He wore coat and breeches of the rough Kashmiri puttoo which
seems as much a part of the surroundings as heather on a Scotch moor,
and looked to the manner born—even in the clear ring of his voice.
“Welcome to Baltar. You’re Cardonald, aren’t you? My wife and Miss
Ingmar rode up the valley and haven’t got back yet. No—don’t
bother—the men will see to your stuff. Yes—you want to settle with
Faz-ul-din? He’s a very decent fellow.”
I settled with Faz-ul-din, and as I hope to be believed he refused any
sort of tip; stoutly, steadily refused it. He accepted, on pressure, a
box of cigarettes, but immediately tendered a pouch of leather
ornamented with brass, a tinder-box with flint and steel which he had
had from a Yarkhandi trader above the pass. I had to take it and so with
salaams we parted, and the train of ponies wound off among the trees.
“But how can I get hold of him again when I start? Is it worth while for
a few days——”
The other man laughed.
“We can always get him by wire to Gunderbal. I have my own line. But as
to a few days—everyone who comes here stays just as long as he is
inclined to give us the pleasure of his company. We are in wonderful
country here, wonderful in many ways, and most people find something to
interest them. Do feel at home. Will you come in now, or stroll about
and see the place?”
I elected for the stroll and lighted up, and we went slowly about the
lawns, and by the stream that not only watered the garden but filled it
with woodland singing. We approached the little cascade where the
Chinese I had noticed before stood in a position of silent abstraction
by a cascade falling from a beautiful rock in threads of silver among
the maidenhair. He looked up smiling as we drew near, and Dunbar made
the introduction.
“Shan-tao, this is my friend Mr. Cardonald. He also is a painter and
hopes to do some work here. I’m sure you will allow him to see some of
your landscapes.”
To my amazement the reply after a deep Chinese salute was in good enough
English with little more than a foreign inflection.
“That will be honor for me. I am most glad. I hope also to see.”
It was promised and we passed on.
“But why, who, what?” I demanded in bewilderment. “What on earth is a
Chinese doing here, and an English-speaking one at that! And why the
yellow robe?”
“Didn’t you hear at Simla?” Dunbar said good-humoredly. “No—you
probably wouldn’t. There’s a monastery in China, some days’ journey
north of Peking, and I do a lot of work for them at old manuscripts,
translating and editing them with the more learned monks. They come out
into the world to spread the teachings of pure Buddhism and are men of
different races, but all English-speaking, because English goes further
in Asia than other foreign tongues. Well—we are at work on some
wonderful manuscripts now which have been buried for over sixteen
hundred years in a Chinese monastery in the mountains, and Shan-tao is
here for that reason, and another monk named Haridas whom I think you
will like. But there are others as well, all of the same community. We
have made a rest house for them, and they come here when they crock up
or need rest. We have two Burmese there now, and one from Ceylon, and a
Tibetan lama—and that last is interesting for a reason I’ll tell you
later.”
But it was all interesting—so much so that I scarcely knew on what to
focus my thoughts.
“And are they all Buddhists?”
“All. But don’t be frightened. They won’t force it on you, and they’re
all men who have seen a good deal of the world, and a queer world. I
believe it will interest you.”
I reflected. “I say—I do hope you won’t think it rude, but the Mainguys
said at Simla that you were a Buddhist yourself. Is it true?”
“Quite true. Several of us are, but don’t bother your head about that.
What does it matter? We have about ten different brands of religion
here, and for all I know you may add an eleventh. But all the same we
are quite like other people.”
If there was one thing of which I was convinced it was that the Dunbars
were extremely unlike other people, but it was not the moment to press
the point; and we wandered on from one beauty to another stopping at
last by the glade commanding the mighty presence of the mountain
solemnly fronting the sunset.
It was an entranced silence—the ecstasy of a blessed spirit in serenest
heights of exaltation. Gold flushed slowly into a diviner rose as if
from the glow of an enkindling spirit within. It deepened sublimely into
an adoration of surging hues that made the mountain one with the skies
swimming in splendors about the peak—chorded colors, unutterable in any
words and inspiring belief in hues incredible until the eyes open on
eternity. How long we stood I did not know. Beside us was the Chinese
monk with an Indian beside him, caught up into the same ecstasy.
So, uplifted into the glory of the heavens, seeing things not lawful
because impossible to be uttered, we stood and watched it fade slowly
into the gray mystery of twilight and the past; and when a young
crescent moon hung like a faint lamp in the pines, we turned slowly
toward the beautiful dim house, lighted now like a magic lantern with
strange shadowgrams of human life reflected on the blinds.
The two brothers were slowly ascending the hill to their dwelling,
shadows among the trees.
“My wife must have come back long since. Let us go in,” said Dunbar,
quickening his steps, and for a moment I envied the man who owned so
much, round whom so many interests clustered and crowded.
I said as much and he smiled with kindly eyes.
“And you an artist? If I had your gift I should ask no more of earth or
heaven. It includes both.”
We returned as no strangers. That communion with beauty had built a
bridge between us, and thought went to and fro in happy certainty of
welcome.
* * * * *
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