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Page 6
The whole of Asia was appalled. The rajahs of the native states
in India prepared a memorial and sent it to the British
Government.
The thing came out after the mysterious, incredible tragedy. I
should not have written that final sentence. I want you to
think, just now, about the great hulk of a man that sat in his
big chair beyond me at the window.
It was like Rodman to turn up with an outlandish human creature
attending him hand and foot. How the thing came about reads like
a lie; it reads like a lie; the wildest lie that anybody ever put
forward to explain a big yellow Oriental following one about.
But it was no lie. You could not think up a lie to equal the
actual things that happened to Rodman. Take the way he died!....
The thing began in India. Rodman had gone there to consult with
the Marchese Giovanni concerning some molecular theory that was
involved in his formulas. Giovanni was digging up a buried
temple on the northern border of the Punjab. One night, in the
explorer's tent, near the excavations, this inscrutable creature
walked in on Rodman. No one knew how he got into the tent or
where he came from.
Giovanni told about it. The tent-flap simply opened, and the big
Oriental appeared. He had something under his arm rolled up in a
prayer-carpet. He gave no attention to Giovanni, but he salaamed
like a coolie to the little American.
"Master," he said, "you were hard to find. I have looked over
the world for you."
And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Rodman's camp stool.
Now, that's precisely the truth. I suppose any ordinary person
would have started no end of fuss. But not Rodman, and not, I
think, Giovanni. There's the attitude that we can't understand
in a genius - did you ever know a man with an inventive mind who
doubted a miracle? A thing like that did not seem unreasonable
to Rodman.
The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the
present that the creature brought Rodman in his prayer-carpet.
They wanted to know where the Oriental got it, and that's how his
story came out.
He was something - searcher, seems our nearest English word to it
- in the great Shan Monastery on the southeastern plateau of the
Gobi. He was looking for Rodman because he had the light - here
was another word that the two men could find no term in any
modern language to translate; a little flame, was the literal
meaning.
The present was from the treasure-room of the monastery; the very
carpet around it, Giovanni said, was worth twenty thousand lire.
There was another thing that came out in the talk that Giovanni
afterward recalled. Rodman was to accept the present and the man
who brought it to him. The Oriental would protect him, in every
way, in every direction, from things visible and invisible. He
made quite a speech about it. But, there was one thing from
which he could not protect him.
The Oriental used a lot of his ancient words to explain, and he
did not get it very clear. He seemed to mean that the creative
Forces of the spirit would not tolerate a division of worship
with the creative forces of the body - the celibate notion in the
monastic idea.
Giovanni thought Rodman did not understand it; he thought he
himself understood it better. The monk was pledging Rodman to a
high virtue, in the lapse of which something awful was sure to
happen.
Giovanni wrote a letter to the State Department when he learned
what had happened to Rodman. The State Department turned it over
to the court at the trial. I think it was one of the things that
influenced the judge in his decision. Still, at the time, there
seemed no other reasonable decision to make. The testimony must
have appeared incredible; it must have appeared fantastic. No
man reading the record could have come to any other conclusion
about it. Yet it seemed impossible - at least, it seemed
impossible for me - to consider this great vital bulk of a man as
a monk of one of the oldest religious orders in the world. Every
common, academic conception of such a monk he distinctly
negatived. He impressed me, instead, as possessing the ultimate
qualities of clever diplomacy - the subtle ambassador of some new
Oriental power, shrewd, suave, accomplished.
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