Out of India (9 page)

Daphne was fortunate enough to be chosen as his secretary in this undertaking. Hitherto, she had observed, his method of writing had been very strange, not to say wonderful: he would sit there on his silken couch, surrounded by people, talk with them, laugh with them, and at the same time he would be covering, effortlessly and in a large flowing hand, sheets of paper with his writing. When he chose her as his secretary, he presented these sheets to her and told her to rewrite them in any way she wanted. “My English is very poor, I know,” he said, which made Helga exclaim, “Swamiji! Your English! Poor? Oh if I could only speak one tiniest bit as well, how conceited I would become!” And it was true, he did speak well: very fluently in his soft voice and with a lilting Indian accent; it was a pleasure to hear him. Daphne sometimes wondered where he could
have learned to speak so well. Surely not in his mountain cave? She did not know, no one knew, where he had been or what he had done before that.

Strangely enough, when she got down to looking through his papers, she found that he had not been unduly modest. He did not write English well. When he spoke, he was clear and precise, but when he wrote, his sentences were turgid, often naive, grammatically incorrect. And his spelling was decidedly shaky. In spite of herself, Daphne's Oxford-trained mind rose at once, as she read, in judgment; and her feelings, in face of this judgment, were ones of embarrassment, even shame for Swamiji. Yet a moment later, as she raised her burning cheeks from his incriminating manuscript, she realized that it was not for him she need be ashamed but for herself. How narrow was her mind, how tight and snug it sat in the strait-jacket her education had provided for it! Her sole, pitiful criterion was conventional form, whereas what she was coming into contact with here was something so infinitely above conventional form that it could never be contained in it. And that was precisely why he had chosen her: so that she could express him (whose glory it was to be inexpressible) in words accessible to minds that lived in the same narrow confines as her own. Her limitation, she realized in all humility, had been her only recommendation.

She worked hard, and he was pleased with her and made her work harder. All day she sat by his side and took down the words that he dictated to her in between talking to his disciples and to his other numerous visitors; at night she would sit by the dim bulb in the little room she shared with Helga to write up these notes and put them into shape. Helga would be fast asleep, but if she opened her eyes for a moment, she would grumble about the light disturbing her. “Just one minute,” Daphne would plead, but by that time Helga had tossed her big body to its other side and, if she was still grumbling, it was only in her sleep. Very often Daphne herself did not get to sleep before three or four in the morning, and then she would be too tired to get up early enough for her meditation.

She could not take this failure as lightly as Helga took her own. When Helga boasted to Swamiji, “Today I've been naughty again,” Daphne would hang her head and keep silent, unable to confess. Once, though, Helga told on her—not in malice, but rather in an excess of good humor. Having just owned up to her own fault and been playfully scolded for it by Swamiji, she was brimming with fun
and her eyes danced as she looked around for further amusement; they came to rest on Daphne, and suddenly she shot out her finger to point: “There's another one just as bad!” and when she saw Daphne blush and turn away, rallied her gaily, “No pretending, I saw you lie snug in bed, old lazybones!”

Daphne felt awkward and embarrassed and wondered what Swamiji would say: whatever it was, she dreaded it, for unlike Helga she took no pride in her shortcomings nor did she have a taste for being teased. And, of course, Swamiji knew it. Without even glancing at Daphne, he went on talking to Helga: “If you manage to do your morning meditation three days running,” he told her, “I shall give you a good conduct prize.” “Swamiji! A prize! Oh lucky lucky girl I am!”

But the next time they were alone together—not really alone, of course, only comparatively so: there were just a few visitors and they sat at a respectful distance and were content with looking at and being near him—as Daphne sat cross-legged on the floor, taking dictation from him, her notebook perched on her knee, he interrupted his fluent flow of wisdom to say to her in a lower voice: “You know that private meditation is the—how shall I say?—the foundation, the cornerstone of our whole system?”

After a short pause, she brought out, “It was only that I was—” she had been about to say “tired,” but checked herself in time: feeling how ridiculous it would be for her to bring forward her tiredness, the fact that she had sat up working till the early hours of the morning, to him who was busy from earliest morning till latest night, talking to people and helping them and writing his book and a hundred and one things, without ever showing any sign of fatigue but always fresh and bright as a bridegroom. So she checked herself and said, “I was lazy, that's all,” and waited, pencil poised, hoping for a resumed dictation.

“Look at me,” he said instead.

She was too surprised to do so at first, so he repeated it in a soft voice of command, and she turned her head, blushing scarlet, and lifted her eyes—and found herself looking into his. Her heart beat up high and she was full of sensations. She would have liked to look away again, but he compelled her not to.

“What's the matter?” he said softly. He took a petal from the pile of flowers lying at his feet and held it up to his nose. “Why are you like that?” he asked. She remained silent, looking into his face.
Now he was crushing the petal between his fingers, and the smell of it, pungent, oversweet, rose into the air. “You must relax. You must trust and love. Give,” he said and he smiled at her and his eyes brimmed with love. “Give yourself. Be generous.” He held her for a moment longer, and then allowed her at last to look away from him; and at once he continued his dictation which she endeavored to take down, though her hands were trembling.

After that she was no longer sure of herself. She was an honest girl and had no desire to cheat herself, any more than she would have desired to cheat anyone else. She felt now that she was here under false pretenses, and that her state of elation was due not, as she had thought, to a mystic communion with some great force outside herself, but rather to her proximity to Swamiji, for whom her feelings were very much more personal than she had hitherto allowed herself to suspect. Yet even after she admitted this, the elation persisted. There was no getting away from the fact that she was happy to be there, to be near him, working with him, constantly with him: that in itself was satisfaction so entire that it filled and rounded and illumined her days. She felt herself to be like a fruit hanging on a bough, ripening in his sunshine and rich with juices from within. And so it was, not only with her, but with everyone else there too. All had come seeking something outside of themselves and their daily preoccupations, and all had found it in or through him. Daphne noticed how their faces lit up the moment they came into his presence—she noticed it with Klas, a very fair, rather unattractive boy with thin lips and thin hair and pink-rimmed eyes; and the two Scottish schoolteachers, dumpy, dowdy little women who, before meeting Swamiji, had long since given up any expectations they might ever have had—all of them bloomed under his smile, his caressing gaze, his constant good humor. “Life,” he once dictated to Daphne, “is a fountain of joy from which the lips must learn to drink with relish as is also taught by our sages from the olden times.” (She rewrote this later.) He was the fountain of joy from which they all drank with relish.

She was working too hard, and though she would never have admitted it, he was quick to notice. One day, though she sat there ready with notebook and pencil, he said, “Off with you for a walk.” Her protests were in vain. Not only did he insist, but he even instructed her for how long she was to walk and in what direction. “And when you come back,” he said, “I want to see roses in your
cheeks.” So dutifully she walked and where he had told her to: this was away from the populated areas, from the throng of pilgrims and sadhus, out into a little wilderness where there was nothing except rocky ledges and shrubs and, here and there, small piles of faded bricks where once some building scheme had been begun and soon abandoned. But she did not look around her much; she was only concerned with reckoning the time he had told her to walk, and then getting back quickly to the ashram, to his room, to sit beside him and take down his dictation. As soon as she came in, he looked at her, critically: “Hm, not enough roses yet, I think,” he commented, and ordered her to take an hour-long walk in that same direction every day.

On the third day she met him on the way. He had evidently just had his bath, for his hair hung in wet ringlets and his robe was slung around him hastily, leaving one shoulder bare. He always had his bath in the river, briskly pouring water over himself out of a brass vessel, while two of his disciples stood by on the steps with his towel. They were coming behind him now as he—nimbler, sprightlier than they—clambered around ledges and stones and prickly bushes. He waved enthusiastically to Daphne and called to her: “You see, I also am enjoying fresh air and exercise!”

She waited for him to catch up with her. He was radiant: he smiled, his eyes shone, drops of water glistened on his hair and beard. “Beautiful,” he said, and his eyes swept over the landscape, over the rocky plateau on which they stood—the holy town huddled on one side, the sky, immense and blue, melting at one edge into the mountains and at another into the river. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated and shook his head and she looked with him, and it was, everything was, the whole earth, shining and beautiful.

“Did you know we are building an ashram?” he asked her.

“Where?”

“Just here.”

He gave a short sweep of the hand, and she looked around her, puzzled. It did not seem possible for anything to grow in this spot except thistles and shrubs: and as if to prove the point, just a little way off was an abandoned site around which were scattered a few sad, forgotten bricks.

“A tiptop, up-to-date ashram,” he was saying, “with air-conditioned meditation cells and a central dining hall. Of course it will be costly, but in America I shall collect a good deal of funds. There are
many rich American ladies who are interested in our movement.” He tilted his head upward and softly swept back his hair with his hand, first one side and then the other, in a peculiarly vain and womanly movement.

She was embarrassed and did not wish to see him like that, so she looked away into the distance and saw the two young men who had accompanied him running off toward the ashram; they looked like two young colts, skipping and gamboling and playfully tripping each other up. Their joyful young voices, receding into the distance, were the only sounds, otherwise it was silent all round, so that one could quite clearly hear the clap of birds' wings as they flew up from the earth into the balmy, sparkling upper air.

“I have many warm invitations from America,” Swamiji said. “From California especially. Do you know it? No? There is a Mrs. Fisher, Mrs. Gay Fisher, her husband was in shoe business. She often writes to me. She has a very spacious home that she will kindly put at our disposal and also many connections and a large acquaintance among other ladies interested in our movement. She is very anxious for my visit. Why do you make such a face?”

Daphne gave a quick, false laugh and said, “What face?”

“Like you are making. Look at me—why do you always look away as if you are ashamed?” He put his hand under her chin and turned her face toward himself. “Daphne,” he said, tenderly; and then, “It is a pretty name.”

Suddenly, in her embarrassment, she was telling him the story of Daphne: all about Apollo and the laurel tree, and he seemed interested, nodding to her story, and now he was making her walk along with him, the two of them all alone and he leaning lightly on her arm. He was slightly shorter than she was.

“So,” he said, when she had finished, “Daphne was afraid of love . . . I think you are rightly named, what do you say? Because I think—yes, I think this Daphne also is afraid of love.”

He pinched her arm, mischievously, but seeing her battle with stormy feelings, he tactfully changed the subject. Again his eyes shone, again he waved his hand around: “Such a lovely spot for our ashram, isn't it? Here our foreign friends—from America, like yourself from U.K., Switzerland, Germany, all the countries of the world—here their troubled minds will find peace and slowly they will travel along the path of inner harmony. How beautiful it will be! How inspiring! A new world! Only one thing troubles me,
Daphne, and on this question now I want advice from your cool and rational mind.”

Daphne made a modest disclaiming gesture. She felt not in the least cool or rational, on the contrary, she knew herself to have become a creature tossed by passion and wild thoughts.

But “No modesty, please,” he said to her disclaimer. “Who knows that mind of yours better, you or I? Hm? Exactly. So don't be cheeky.” At which she had to smile: on top of everything else, how nice he was, how terribly, terribly nice. “Now can I ask my question? You see, what is troubling me is, should we have a communal kitchen or should there be a little cooking place attached to each meditation cell? One moment: there are pros and cons to be considered. Listen.”

He took her arm, familiar and friendly, and they walked. Daphne listened, but there were many other thoughts rushing in and out of her head. She was very conscious of his hand holding her arm, and she kept that arm quite still. Above all, she was happy and wanted this to go on forever, he and she walking alone in that deserted place, over shrubs and bricks, the river glistening on one side and the mountains on the other, and above them the sky where the birds with slow, outstretched wings were the only patterns on that unmarred blue.