CHAPTER IIIHIS SOLITUDE
When Oman woke, the sun was high in the heavens, and the bird had gone. During his sleep some one—his mother, doubtless—had covered him with a pliable mat, and had placed something soft under his head. Full consciousness returned by degrees. A sense of physical discomfort was the first thing he knew. Then came a faint memory of what had happened before the dawn. Sunrise and the bird were inextricably mingled in his mind. In his heart he believed that the bird and the peace it brought had been a dream. Now that he was fully awake, there was no peace. He was hot with fever; and soon his body began to ache again, with a dull, numb pain that was hard to bear in silence. Moreover, he panted for water. It was not long, however, before Kota came out into the veranda, her little boy clinging to her skirts and retarding her progress. Disengaging the child, who fell backward disconsolately, she bent over the sick one, felt the burning of his hands and head, drew from him confession of his pain and also of his hunger and thirst, and at once retired into the house, to return in a few moments with a bowl of millet and milk. She found the babysitting beside Oman, who was talking to it in his mellow, gentle voice. Kota hastily set the bowl upon the ground, picked up the baby, carried him inside, and, on coming back once more, found Oman lying on his face, shaken with sobs; nor could she, for a long time, persuade him to turn his face to the light and take the nourishment he needed.
Despite his mother’s furtively loving care, and the cessation of his exacting duties, Oman did not grow better of his sickness. Instead, his fever increased till delirium came, and for days he was out of his mind. In his times of pain he would become violent, screaming and struggling when any one approached him. He talked much. Snatches of Vedic text, old Sutras and Mantras, philosophical premises, and suggestions of his own self-struggle were jumbled together in wildest chaos. Gokarna, dreading to have a woman’s ears hear the holy words that are forbidden to women, dreading still more the alternative of a masculine Sudra nurse, sure to carry gossip, had Oman carefully guarded and tended within the house. In his heart, the father, bitter with grief and worse than grief at the outcome of Oman’s student-life, repeated many times his prayer for the child’s death; and had he been in a state to realize anything, Oman would have echoed that prayer with all his heart.
Desire, however, was vain. For four weeks Oman lay fever-stricken, and then, suddenly, began to convalesce, and in a fortnight more was about as usual. Spring was now nearly gone, and summer, with itsmurderous heat, upon the town again. The crops were up, and the business of irrigation begun in the fields; for all the luxuriant foliage of the wild was withered and dry, parched for the rains that were not yet to come for a month or more. Among the townsfolk, in the evening, the great subject of gossip was always: “The Child of Gokarna—called Oman.” “He has given up the life of the Snataka.” “No more does he study the sacred books.” “Yet the ceremony of the cessation of study has not taken place.” “Ah, yes, something is wrong. It is very strange.”
Oman still wore the sacred cord of the Brahman. How should he, knowing so much of the holy Vedas, remove it? But he moved through his native town a wanderer, an outcast, addressing none of the townspeople, who would scarcely have answered him for fear of defiling their caste. How this situation had come about, Oman could not have told. It had been a gradual and natural growth. During his convalescence it had occurred to him that his father and mother were ashamed of him. This idea he tested in various ways, and found it to be true. Up to that time he had been ashamed of himself: furiously, bitterly rebellious concerning his weakness. But now, at once, the spirit of self-protection rose hot within him. Others, his own parents, were ashamed of him. Should he turn against himself? Never. The masculine instinct of self-defence turned inward toward that other timid, shrinking nature that he longed so to conceal. And when, at length, he was about again, his parentsfound him wrapped in an impenetrable mantle of—was it pride?—was it stupidity?—was it temper?—arrogance? He was unapproachable and unsociable. He took not the slightest notice of those around him, never speaking of his own accord, and doing his best to prevent the address of others.
Gokarna held many periods of self-communion with himself as to his duty toward this child, and especially about the matter of the sacred cord. But time passed, and no special action was taken. Oman seemed to have marked out his life for himself; and the father, bewildered, let him pursue the course he would, and finally ceased to torment himself with questions.
Through the rainy season, Oman spent most of his time close to his father’s house. There was a place for him there, such as it was, where he was never molested. In the first weeks of his recovery, his over-worked mind found some delight in simple freedom from burdensome tasks. Idleness, silence, absence of rules and binding regulations, were sweet to him. He had the true Hindoo faculty for dreams, and would sit for hours lost in contemplation of unknowable and unfathomable things. Little objects—the bluish curl of smoke over a house-roof, the distant, flickering flame of sacrificial fires at dusk, a flight of heron toward the southern hills, the notes of the bulbul or the koïl—such things brought him infinite pleasure, and formed subjects for long contemplation. These were the periods when his mind was freest from its burden. But there were hours—days—weeks, when the world gavenothing to him; when melancholy held him for her own. At these times life seemed a burden too terrible for any mortal, and the continuance of such suffering as his, a thing beyond the endurance of spirits of the blessed.
When the rains were over, and August came in, Oman began to spend much time wandering through the countryside, returning to the village only to eat and sleep:—sometimes not that. The country around Bul-Ruknu was broken, fertile, and unusually picturesque for India. To the east and southeast, at a distance of three or four miles, rose the northernmost hills of the Vindhya range, which extended thence, southward, to the Narmáda plain, fifty miles away. To the north and west were stretches of fertile fields, fringed with woods, and watered by a little stream fed by mountain brooks and springs, that went meandering through bottom-lands, and was used by farmers for purposes of irrigation. Very early in the course of his wanderings, Oman came upon this little river. During his childhood he had exhibited the curious trait of marked aversion to running water; but he found now that the old dread of it lingered only in a half-fascinating fear lest some day, out of very wantonness, he should plunge into the little stream and resistlessly let himself be overwhelmed in its lucent depths. This fascination did not diminish with time. He loved to explore its windings through the countryside, and follow it up a little way into its mountain fastnesses. In the hills, one day, he came upon a shadowy glade,turfed with kusa-grass and canopied with a giant banyan grove, a tree of a hundred trunks, that overspread two acres of ground. Here, in the green twilight, in a spot to which human beings never penetrated, Oman found his haven:—a haven of solitude where, for three or four years, he spent the greater part of his time.
Of the struggles, the wretched inward conflicts of this isolated mortal developing alone, unaided, avoided by humankind, it were terrible to speak. Physical maturity had come before the mental; and it was here, in this scene of lonely beauty, that he passed through the first, fierce stages of the new awakening. He was most miserably human; and all the faults of humanity raged within him, unrestrained and uncomprehended. He yearned constantly for that of which he could know nothing; and, helpless and half-mad, he was tossed upon a sea of morbid and lonely imaginings. At such times, the fact that he was an outcast seemed to him hideous and impossible. Rebelling, he would rise up and curse himself and the God of his creation. Then, when he had spent himself in tragical invective, the other side of him would take possession of his mind, and he would melt into tremulous weeping: weeping so piteous, so forlorn, that it would have melted the heart of any woman hearing it. Again, Oman was filled with a gentle and eager desire for something on which to expend affection:—a dog, a kitten, a bird,—any living thing that would accept his love. But nothing came to him. It seemed as if the very beasts avoided his haunts. A few apes were occasionally seenwithin the banyan grove; but no other living thing passed through there, nor even a snake slept in the shadow of its stones. Yet the hills beyond were alive with wild creatures. By night lions cried through the great darkness. Immense troops of monkeys chattered in the trees. Both the tiger and the bear dwelt in the ravines; and the buffalo and antelope found pasturage on sunny hillsides. The steepest crags were the resort of myriad wild goats, and birds of all kinds winged their way over the heights and found their nests by hundreds in the jungle trees. But in the midst of all this wild, free life, Oman dwelt alone, unsought, lost in the wilderness of his solitude.
How, through three long years, he managed so to occupy his mind as to keep at bay the madness that besets the absolutely solitary, he himself knew best. Probably the first months seemed longest. The hours were dismissed, one by one, while he busied himself over little things; for, at his age, he was not able to create a systematic pursuit. His mind worked in unaccustomed spheres, conning, vaguely and indefinitely, problems that put him at a more or less safe distance from himself. In time, the atmosphere of the deep banyan shade, with the near tinkling and flashing of the brook, and the dim, greenish sunlight that slipped through the interwoven foliage, became so beautifully familiar that it was home to him. He bathed and floated in the chilly water, and afterwards kindled a sacrificial fire and sat before it on his knees, delighting in the high-leaping flames,feeling that the play of the two elements satisfied his bent of mind. And during this time, by unconscious cerebration, what Oman had learned in his five years of studentship, all that mass of inert, half-decayed knowledge, concentrated into living truths that fixed themselves firmly in his brain and lay waiting to be used. Something further still came out of the solitude:—a self-dependence, a strength, and a fortitude without which, at a later period, he could not have lived.
Thus, until his sixteenth year, Oman spent his days. Then a change came upon him, and he felt this life unendurable. Insensibly, a scene from one of the old, heroic epics that he had read in his student days, came to him, fastened itself in his mind, and would not be dislodged. It was the picture of the “Sinner’s Road”, described with ghastly vividness by a long-dead writer:
“A burning forest shut the roadside inOn either hand; and mid its crackling boughsPerched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumesAnd beaks of iron; and these grisly fowlScreamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouthsThat hungered, but were never full.”
“A burning forest shut the roadside inOn either hand; and mid its crackling boughsPerched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumesAnd beaks of iron; and these grisly fowlScreamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouthsThat hungered, but were never full.”
“A burning forest shut the roadside inOn either hand; and mid its crackling boughsPerched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumesAnd beaks of iron; and these grisly fowlScreamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouthsThat hungered, but were never full.”
“A burning forest shut the roadside in
On either hand; and mid its crackling boughs
Perched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—
Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumes
And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl
Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,
Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths
That hungered, but were never full.”
Here, in the land where these dim spirits dwelt, Oman, in perilous despair, beheld himself. He must die as he had lived, and live in death as he had lived in life—miserable, desolate, desperate, without hope of betterment. And then, as the days scourged him, hewas finally driven to take a stand, for sanity’s sake. Thus, one noontide, he girded himself up and returned to Bul-Ruknu, and there, within his father’s house, sought an interview with Gokarna.
It was a long and solemn talk. Since the days of his sickness, three years before, Oman and his father had spoken scarcely a dozen words together. True, he usually slept at home, and his mother always left him food for the day in a corner of the veranda. But he was not of his family. In the village he had come to be looked on as a recluse, almost a hermit; and as such was in some measure respected. Now, however, Oman had come to demand one of two things: speedy death, or a place in the world. Gokarna was taken aback, demurred, finally offered his son a menial position among the priests, which Oman straightway refused.
“My brain is sick of religion and the gods. My power of worship is spent. Let me work.”
“Work! You are a Brahman.”
“Thou knowest I am not—cannot be.”
Gokarna glared at him, and muttered some sort of insult; whereupon Oman rose and left his father, and within twelve hours apprenticed himself to a weaver in the town, thereby renouncing caste and becoming one of the Vaisyas, the lowest order to whom was granted the right of re-birth and investiture with the sacred cord. Yet, in the village, Oman was now regarded as a privileged being; and, after a week of banishment from his home, during which time he worked steadily and well, Kota went to him, and begged him to return tohis father’s house, to sleep and eat as he had been wont to do; and when Gokarna sent a message to the same effect, Oman, for his mother’s sake, consented, and resumed the old relations with his people. He could not, of course, eat in their presence, nor sleep in the same room with one of them, nor take part in the Agnihotra. But at night he was there, in the veranda, as of old; and the heart of his mother was at peace.
Now, in the endless sunshine, Oman Ramasarman worked at his trade: first combing and carding the wool, later dyeing it, then learning how to mix the different threads for warp and woof, and finally sitting down to the loom, where, under his skilful manipulation, the cloth was turned off, smooth and strong and useful. And now, at last, Oman’s thoughts were taken from himself, and he was like a busy child, playing at work, working at play, till two swift years had rolled round again, and it was the spring of the year 1224, with Oman in his eighteenth year of expiative life.