The Rose of Tibet (16 page)

‘Yerss.’

‘It’s a very common name in England. Thousands of people are called Houston. Millions, probably.’

‘Quite. The thing is, you’re the only one who has turned up. And just when expected, you see. Our oracle here warned that you would be coming – oh, many years ago now. The time was fixed fairly spot-on.’

Houston regarded him with silent passion. He had the impression he had fallen among lunatics whom he must convince in their own terms. He said, ‘Look – this man Hu- Tzung, he was a Chinaman, was he?’

‘A sort of. He was a prince who came with a
horde
about two hundred years ago, and did rather a lot of damage. What is worse, the abbess is reputed to have fallen in love with him. People are still pretty keyed-up about it,’ he said, shaking his ear-ring.

‘Do I look to you like a Chinaman?’

‘Ah, I see your point. Of course, I’m hardly the person to expound this – the abbot is your man – but all that is provided for. The oracle spoke of an incarnation “from beyond the sunset”. This would seem to indicate from the west. Of course, nobody took it to mean quite so far to the west. The lama has the feeling he has been bowled rather a fast one. The poor chep is very puzzled,’ said the duke, shaking his head. ‘All the same, you know, an incarnation knows no frontiers. One could just as easily be born in Timbuctoo as Tibet. Or even in – what was it, Balance Cord?’

‘Baron’s Court.’

‘Quite.’

‘Look,’ Houston said, trying to sit up. ‘This is mad. Any number of people in Tibet know about me. Your man in Kalimpong does. The people in the Foreign Ministry in Lhasa – I’ve been worrying them for months about my brother. My name is on letters and telegrams. I can show you it on my passport if I had it.’

‘Where is your passport?’

‘In Calcutta. I sent it to the Great Eastern Hotel there with all my papers when I set out for here.’

‘Pity.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘It’s not what I believe,’ the duke said, picking a fleck of silk from his robe. ‘You’ve got to look at it from the other chep’s point of view. A chep comes here and gives his name as Hu-Tzung –’

‘I’ve told you. I never did.’

‘– He comes bang on time. He comes from the west. And he picks out all the right objects in the test. Well! What do you expect a chep to think?’

‘The test was a joke,’ Houston said weakly. ‘I picked out one of each, Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan. I didn’t pick them out because they meant anything.’

‘Oh, quite. Of course, some cheps might think you were therefore meant to pick them out.’

‘Do you think that?’

‘I’m only giving you the strength of the opposition, old chep. Strange things happen in this country. I’ve seen them myself.’

Houston looked at him and tried to gather his forces. His head was racketing so much that he could hardly think. He said, ‘All right. Look at it this way. This man, Hu-Tzung – what is he supposed to come here for?’

‘We can’t go into that, old chep.’

‘He’s not looking for a brother, is he?’

‘I really –’

‘So if someone comes here who is looking for one, whose only thought is to find him and go away again right away, without bothering anyone – he couldn’t be Hu-Tzung.’

The sloe-black eyes, which had been regarding him amiably, blinked a little.

‘So it might appear. Unfortunately, one or two things have happened – rather odd things – which tend to connect the two stories.’

‘What things?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘What’s happening to my brother?’

‘I’m merely a bystander, old chep. I really can’t say anything.’

‘Why is he being kept here?’

‘I never said he was, old chep.’

‘I know he is. He’s in the third monastery.’

‘Splendid,’ the duke said, and stood up.

Houston saw the interview was at an end. He said quickly, ‘Can’t you at least give me some idea what the hell is to happen to me?’

The young man smoothed his robe and rapped on the door. ‘That rather depends on who the hell you are, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘Only the governor can tell us now.’

‘The governor?’

‘In order to get the crowds away. The village is still packed. They won’t leave. It’s all been very tricky. Very tricky indeed,’ he said, as the door opened. ‘Still, we should know by tomorrow. The old chep is getting here just as quickly as he can.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Houston said. ‘How is he supposed to say who I am when nobody else can?’

‘Oh … he has his methods, you know,’ the duke said. He looked unhappy for a moment. ‘I shouldn’t think about it, old chep. Try and get a bit of rest now.’

Houston did think about it. He thought about nothing else all day. They brought Ringling in to see him in the afternoon. The boy had improved a little, and the burns on his feet were now bandaged; Houston could not take his eyes off them.

He fell asleep, still wondering about the governor’s methods.

T
HE
governor of Hodzo, at 67, did not account himself a cruel man. In the course of duty, certainly, he had had to exact some cruel penalties. Several hundred tongues and noses and eyes had been removed at his behest over the years. But these, essentially, were tributes to tradition; the governor had the highest regard for tradition. He was happy to think that he would sooner remove the entire organs of an individual, or of a generation of individuals, than alter one whit or title of the divine corpus of tradition that related their functions in society. In this he considered himself a reasonable man: he wished only to leave things as he found them.

He was not, however, feeling particularly reasonable as he transferred from his horse to his official palanquin two miles from Yamdring. He was feeling old and vengeful and frustrated. He had been in Hodzo for precisely four hours when the message had arrived; long enough to hear of the misdeeds of his youngest wife, but not to beat her for them. He wanted to beat her. She was 17 and beautiful and he had not been able to enjoy her for a long time. He had not been able to enjoy any of his three wives, and he thought he would like to beat them all.

In the past year the governor had been able to exercise only the sketchiest kind of control over his private affairs. It had been one of the worst of his life; an endless succession of worrying problems and uncomfortable journeys and bad smells. The fact that he knew himself partly to blame was merely an additional aggravation.

A devoutly religious man, the governor knew that all action led to suffering: it was the first law of Karma. He had observed the law at work in his own life. Cause was followed by effect, and the tendency of effect was to become, with the years, increasingly unpleasant.

A year before the governor had wished to retire. He had known very well what he wanted to do in retirement. He had
planned it with care. He wanted a pleasant house with a park outside Hodzo; he had bought it. He wanted a library of three thousand volumes and a domestic priest; he had acquired them. He wanted to spend the nights in a manner suitable for an old gentleman of regular but sluggish appetites; he had taken a luscious new wife.

And he had been dissuaded. The Regent had spoken of the threatening years ahead, of the governor’s unrivalled knowledge of affairs, of his statesmanlike judgement. And the governor had listened. His vanity had been tickled. He had stayed.

This was Cause, and all the unpleasant effects of the past year could be traced directly to it. For the honeyed words had wound the wheel, and the governor’s vanity cocked it; Karma had begun to run it down again at once.

First the Europeans had come. Then four of them had stayed. Then one of them had become curious. And then the governor had felt bound to exercise his statesmanlike judgement… .

It was an aberration he had never ceased to regret. For if he had reported the matter at once to Lhasa, as ordinary common sense had demanded, Lhasa would have taken it off his shoulders. (He would, however, have had himself to travel to Lhasa: it had been the thought of ten nights’ absence from the tormenting and ingenious new occupant of his bed that had deflected the governor from the course of common sense.)

So, carnal desire had brought about the conspiracy; and the conspiracy another stranger to worry him from half-way round the world; and the stranger a series of events that had set a final term to the governor’s desire.

This was the way Karma worked, one wheel turning another to achieve its ultimate refinements.

The governor thought of some of these refinements as he dismounted stiffly from his horse in the chilly evening; in particular of the series that had begun with the conspiracy. They formed a pattern so grimly ironic that he groaned a little to himself as he climbed painfully into his palanquin.

If he had not become involved in the conspiracy, he need not have undertaken his subsequent journeys. If he had not gone on the journeys, he need not have suffered so keenly
at the thought of pleasures missed. If he had not missed these pleasures, he need not have hurried home so precipitately on horseback to resume them.

All that the governor’s haste on horseback had got him was a hernia. With the hernia he could not enjoy his pleasures.

The hernia was only the latest of the ironies of Karma, but it was the one most on the governor’s mind as he eased himself gently on to the air cushion in his palanquin. He had bought the air cushion on a journey to India earlier in the year; it had struck him at the time as the most worthwhile, if not the only, contribution made so far by western science to the art of living, and he had been looking forward for several hours to supporting his hernia on it. He realized instantly, however, that even this comfort was to be denied him. His youngest wife, in an effort to conciliate him and show her love, had blown it up herself. She had blown it up too hard. He could not find the nipple to let the air out, and had to sit down heavily upon it as the palanquin was borne aloft and carried briskly along on the uneven track.

The governor had preserved a stoic silence in the saddle, but in the relative privacy of the palanquin permitted himself to hiss rhythmically with pain. The drum-tight surface of the cushion thrummed against him like a tennis racket, transmitting with perfect fidelity every irregularity of the track direct to his hernia. He was reminded, in the blinding firecracker flashes of pain, of a Chinese torture he had witnessed once in the year 1911. All the same, he could not bring himself to order a reduction of speed, for it was an article of faith with him that the business of the State came before that of the individual; and even now speed was important.

He could see the glare of the butter lamps from Yamdring over the brow of a hill, and shortly afterwards, the village itself – still crowded four days after the festival. A stop would have to be put to this.

The governor was well aware that he was the only official in Tibet who could say for certain whether the latest arrival at the monastery was the person he claimed to be or an impostor. He rather hoped there would be room for doubt. His mind had become centred with peculiar persistence on the Chinese torture. He had never tried it himself, for it was not
among the measures listed in the penal code. But he could not see that tradition would be violated by a genuine piece of research into its efficacy.

He thought he might be conducting this research quite shortly, and the prospect gave him some satisfaction. It was the governor’s only source of satisfaction as, balancing on his vibrant cushion and hissing with pain, he was borne briskly through the butter-lit streets to the monastery.

Two monks lifted Houston out of his bed and on to a stretcher. Neither of them spoke to him, and he did not bother to ask the reason. He thought he knew the reason; he had not been able to eat any supper through thinking about it.

Despite his mental unease, his physical improvement had continued apace. He could sit up. The chief medical monk – an excellent doctor of a keenly scientific turn of mind, with whom he was now on the best of terms – had told him that his ribs were not broken but only cracked. His bruises were changing from purple to yellow. And he could see through both eyes.

With their aid he was able to observe now that he had been kept in considerable isolation. His cell was at the end of a long and narrow corridor; there were no other cells in the corridor, and two guards were posted at its outlet.

The guards allowed the stretcher through and he was carried across a long stone hall and through a pair of gates into the main hall. He began to get an idea of his bearings then. These were the gates he had looked through days before to see the lines of priestesses sitting on the floor.

The main doors of the monastery were locked, and the lights were being snuffed. Several priestesses were engaged on this task and they gazed curiously round at him as he passed. There was a hushed air about the cavernous place that set his heart thudding more strongly still. He could feel it drumming in his ears with the awful pre-operation dread of childhood. But that operation had been carried out with anaesthetics. He doubted if this one would be.

He passed rapidly through hall and corridor in the shadowy
labyrinth of the building in a silence broken only by the scuffing felt boots of the monks; and as they came to the end of a corridor heard a sudden stamping of feet. As they rounded the corner he saw the reason. A body of men was lined up before a doorway. The men were dressed in a uniform he had not seen before. Houston realized this must be the governor’s retinue. He had arrived at last.

At first, after the darkness outside he was almost blinded by the glare within. Some hundreds of butter lamps shone; they shone from every nook and cranny of the walls and ceiling, and two enormous candelabra fitments of them were suspended above a long table. Two men sat at the table, in silks and jewels, with braided hair and long turquoise ear-rings; and for a moment, recalling his entry into another brilliant room with other jewelled men, he had the nightmarish impression that on his journey through the monastery he had in some occult way been carried back in time to the house of the Tibetan consul in Kalimpong; an impression so strongly confirmed by the tortoise-shell cat look of one of the men that he looked wildly round from the stretcher to see if Michaelson was not also in the room.

Michaelson was not in the room, and neither had Houston been carried back in time. The abbot was there. The deputy abbot was there. The vast priestess in the tricorn was there. And so, too, was the Duke of Ganzing; he was seated at the table. Also at the table was the man with the face of a tortoise- shell cat.

Houston looked at him more closely. The man’s hair bristled with combs. His little slit eyes were creased in a smile that was belied by the tight cat mouth. His diminutive hands were folded one on top of the other like little paws. And he was regarding Houston intently, in just the way that the man in Kalimpong had regarded him. In the same moment, realizing who this man must be, Houston felt an enormous weight lifting from him.

He said with incredulity, ‘But – but I’ve met him before.’

All eyes were upon him in the brilliant room.

‘I met him in Kalimpong. I met him in the house of the consul. Ask him,’ he said urgently to the abbot. ‘Ask him if he doesn’t remember me.’

The abbot had already begun to speak, before he had finished, and Houston watching the cat-like face, saw a shadow cross it – a shadow of disappointment, almost of bitter annoyance. The man was seated, for some reason, on an enormous pile of cushions and he moved on them, hissing slightly, so that it seemed he was going to deny having met him. But after another long and searching look he nodded slowly and spoke a few curt words.

The abbot turned and snapped his fingers. The monks, who had laid the stretcher on a table, picked it up again. Houston saw with confusion that he was being taken back.

He said, ‘Just a minute. What’s happening? What’s been decided?’

‘Nothing has been decided,’ the abbot said. He walked over and looked down at Houston on the stretcher. ‘You should not have come.’

‘What do you mean? What’s going on here?’

The abbot’s eyes glowed sombrely. ‘You have brought it on yourself,’ he said.

He snapped his fingers once more. The stretcher-bearers turned. Houston said in exasperation from the stretcher, ‘Look here, what the devil – I’ve got a right to know –’ but had to finish his protest in the corridor.

Moments later he was returning at a brisk shuffle through the dark monastery, through the complex of halls and corridors, to his cell, to his bed. The door was closed, the bolt shot, the corridor lamp snuffed, and he was alone, in darkness.

He lay there, bewildered, perturbed; and yet at the same time most powerfully relieved. For he was back at least in one piece, and he had not expected to be. And but for the miracle of the Kalimpong meeting he knew he would not have been. He thought he could see, dimly, how this miracle might have come about; and more dimly still the nature of the predicament in which it had placed the monastery authorities. But he could not see into the peculiar menace of the abbot’s last words. They worried him.

It was a long time before he slept that night, and when he did he dreamed that searchlights were turned on him and that his very soul was being investigated, and he awoke just before dawn, chilled and afraid. He seemed to know with
complete nightmarish certainty that his future had just then been settled. He wondered how he knew this, and what his future was, but at the same time told himself there was no point in worrying. Someone would tell him soon enough next day what his future was.  

In this, Houston was wrong. No one told him anything. He waited all that day, and the next, and the one after, for some official tidings. No tidings came. His only visitor was an old priestess, who, though tending him most solicitously and with the greatest respect, would neither talk nor listen to him. It took him some time to realize why: the old creature was both deaf and dumb. He wondered if she had been chosen for this reason.

During these three days of perfect seclusion, with nothing to occupy him – for they had taken away all his possessions – Houston got to know his cell pretty well. He could recall it in later years with peculiar vividness.

It was twelve feet long by eight wide. It was constructed entirely of eighty-one stone slabs. It contained no furniture of any sort apart from his bed, which was made up on a stone shelf, and the butter lamp fixture on the wall. He had a view of the sky through an outside grille that was too high for him to reach, and one of the corridor through the grille in the door: apart from this his view was circumscribed by the ninety-six square feet of cell.

He got out of bed and measured it. He did this with his forefinger. He also measured his bed; and finding that the snuffer of the butter lamp was operated by a cord, measured that, too; and tied several hundred knots in it, and untied them again. Between times, he exercised his trunk. This was now giving him so little discomfort that he doubted if his ribs were cracked at all; he felt in most respects perfectly fit, eye back to normal, bruises fading fast.