She shook her head. “You were going to tell me about the archery,” she said.
“Was I?” He turned his face away to look out over the park again. “Are you sure? It is a long, boring story.”
She did not answer him. She sat still and waited until at last he pushed himself to an upright sitting position on the blanket, crossed his legs at the ankles, and draped his hands over his knees.
“Well,” he said. “It all began when I was in India and decided to go on a hike with a couple of holy men.”
Chapter Six
Matthew waited hopefully for her to laugh, to tell him that if he could only talk nonsense, then she did not want to hear it and it was time to make their way back home anyway.
It did not happen.
But he might have known better than to expect she had changed. She had always waited for him to speak when she knew he had something to say. She had always listened to him too—really listened. In those long-ago days of their childhood, it had seemed to him that she was the only one who ever did.
He turned his head to glance at her. She was slightly behind him but very close. The blanket had determined that. She was hugging her knees and looking steadily back at him. And, Lord, she was more beautiful than any woman her age had a right to be. And full of vitality. She had walked here stride for stride with him, talking and laughing with him and twirling that garish parasol behind her head, making him forget that she was no longer that girl he had loved once upon a time. Just as he was no longer that boy.
“I will try to make a long, boring story as short as I can,” he said as he turned his head back to look out over the park. “After a few more years in Europe, first learning carpentry, then working at whatever job I could find to support myself, I thought I would probably end up coming home, though I never felt I was quite ready. I just did not know what ready would look like. Then I made the acquaintance of Joe Hopkins, who was a bit like myself—a wanderer, a man with itchy feet, as he liked to describe himself. We were soon firm friends, and off we set for the East. He had an uncle in northern India who had a senior position with the East India Company. Joe was confident he would offer us employment and enable us to make our fortunes. Not that either of us was particularly interested in being rich. It took us a long time to get there, but we did eventually arrive and miraculously were offered work with the company—as the lowliest of lowly clerks.”
Matthew had hated it. The supposed superiority of the white man. The contempt for all things Indian—its people, its customs, its religions. Especially its religions. To company men, even God was white and superior and contemptuous of all that was not white or superior or a worshiper of the English God. Matthew had soon grown almost ashamed of being white and English. He saw himself as an interloper in the country of these people, and he found himself wanting to get to know them—but from their point of view, not from that of his fellow countrymen.
Fortunately for him, Joe felt much the same way, and together they plunged into the life of India as it was lived by the Indian people. They acquired some friends and friendly acquaintances and a gradual knowledge and understanding of a culture very different from their own but just as richly steeped in history. Perhaps more so. It was a civilization far older than theirs. They acquired a smatteringof the language so they would not have to rely wholly upon the services of an interpreter.
“I was particularly intrigued,” Matthew said, “by the holy men who roamed the streets and the countryside, begging for their food with bowls they held out whenever they were hungry, but with never a word of pleading and always a murmur of thanks when food was given. They were seen as dirty, lazy beggars by my own people, of course, but they were treated with deep respect, even reverence, by their own people. There was something about them that fascinated me. I never could quite put my finger upon what it was. They seemed always to be content and at peace, though they apparently had nothing beyond their robes and sandals and begging bowls. They never seemed to feel the urge to do anything or go anywhere. They just were wherever they happened to be. They spoke to people who spoke to them, but never in the form of lengthy sermons or speeches. They gave blessings when asked for them. They sometimes sat unmoving for long hours, seeming to stare into space, though they never looked bored or as though they were simply daydreaming. They never seemed to fall asleep. I had the impression they were very present at every moment. When Joe told me one day that two of them were about to return to their monastery in the mountains north of India and that he had decided to go with them, I chose to go too, abandoning the job I so hated. I expected it to be an interesting adventure for a week or two.” He paused, turning to look at her. “I must be boring you horribly, Clarissa.”
He had been droning on for what seemed a long time. He turned back to gaze out over the park spread below him, and marveled as he often did at the green serenity of England, which he had taken so much for granted as a boy.
“You are not,” she said, and he turned his head to glance at her again.
“The monastery was a long way into the mountains,” he told her. “It took more than two weeks of rough walking and rugged scrambling to get there. It was cold and stark. There was little to eat, and even water was not always easy to find. The pace was very un-British. We took longer breaks than I expected, sometimes not moving onward after a night’s rest until almost noon by my watch, stopping again when there was still an hour or more of daylight left. Sometimes we went a whole day, once two days, without moving onward at all, though there was never any apparent reason for the delay. I had to learn the rhythms of their lives. Life was not always about getting somewhere. One was not at the mercy of time. What was time anyway? I grew less and less impatient as the days went by, so much of them apparently wasted. But we arrived eventually, and Joe and I were accepted without question. We were each given a tiny room in which to set our things and sleep. We were fed twice a day with everyone else. We were given mats upon which to sit cross-legged alongside all the monks for hours on end, meditating while staring at a blank wall a couple of feet or so in front of us.”
He had been a bit taken aback at first. They were neither questioned nor treated as temporary visitors or curiosity seekers. It was assumed they had come to seek something specific.Enlightenmentwas the word Joe had used. And so Matthew had sat and tried to meditate and achieve enlightenment.
“We were supposed to still the body and the mind,” he said. “We were to listen to the ebb and flow of our own breath and, if necessary, chant a mantra silently to ourselves until we moved into a state of understanding. We were not told what that was exactly orhow we would recognize it when we got there. It was nothing to do with what we would call God, since they did not seem to see God as an entity separate from all else. To them it was not helpful to use that word to describe the divine, since it immediately made of it a separate being, someone to be worshiped. No one could tell me what the divine was, however. In fact they did not even use that word. The whole experience of enlightenment could apparently not be described in words. And it could never be achieved if one thought in terms of success and failure. It could not be willed. The more one strove to achieve it, the more one moved back into one’s mind, and that never worked.”
He must be sounding like a madman.
“Why did I persist?” he said. “Why did I want to achieve something no one could even explain to me? It was not as though I was being forced. I was not stranded in that monastery. After the first couple of weeks or so, a small group was going down to the plains to bring back supplies, and Joe went with them, his curiosity satisfied. I do not know which of us was the more surprised, him or me, when I chose to stay. By then I was deeply frustrated and more and more determined to succeed at all costs. Why? It seemed to me that I was searching for the missing link that would make me whole after all my years of rebellion and restless wandering. And it seemed to me that the answer lay there. I would not leave until I had found it.”
He fell silent again, wondering ruefully why he seemed unable to cut the story short, as he had promised to do. He had never told this story to anyone else and very much doubted he ever would again. But he had always told her everything. Well, almost everything.
There was one monk at the monastery who was deeply revered by all the others. He rarely emerged from his small room. Matthew had never seen him. He apparently spent his days and most nightsdeep in meditation. One day Matthew was summoned into his presence. Until then he had thought of the man as a sort of mythical being.
“I knew at that moment,” he said to Clarissa, “that I was a failure, a nuisance, that I was about to be dismissed, asked to leave. I sat cross-legged, facing him, on a mat identical to his own and no fancier than those in the meditation room. I was on the verge of tears. I did not understand why. I was not interested in their religion or any other. I did not want to join them permanently. But when he spoke, it was not to reprimand me. He told me that for some people, particularly Europeans, stilling the mind in meditation was a near impossibility. Our culture frowned upon stillness, he said, which it equated with laziness and a waste of precious time.”
Do not send me back, Matthew had begged him. He had been quite abject, to the point of self-pity.I have been in pain all my life. I need to find peace.
I do not have the power, nor do I want it, to send you anywhere, he was told.Those who come here to seek may stay until they find or until they choose to leave of their own free will. There are other ways of stilling the mind, however, ways that involve a disciplined exercise of the body. You may wish to try one of these ways. Have you ever shot an arrow?
Matthew had raised his eyes to look in surprised puzzlement at the monk.With a bow, you mean?he had asked foolishly.No.
We have a master of the art living with us at present, he was told.He has helped a few men like yourself who desperately seek but cannot find because they cannot let go of their desperation. He is willing to instruct you if it is something you wish to try.
It is, Matthew had said eagerly, though he had not for the life of him been able to imagine what archery of all things had to do with this monastery or his search for inner peace.
“And what did it have to do with your search?” Clarissa asked, and he realized he had been talking aloud.
“I was embarrassingly awful at it for a long, long time,” he said. “I could not hit a target to save my life. More often than not, my arrows died an ignominious death at my feet. Even when I improved, I could still shoot only one arrow before having to stop and set up all over again. I watched my teacher in despair. His arrows flew straight and true and so close together, one after the other, that it was hard to see where one ended and the next began. But I did improve—over a long, long time, though I could not see how what I was learning was helping in my search. My teacher explained it to me—but only after I had become proficient with my bow. When I understood, he explained, that the bow, the arrow, the target, the air through which the arrow flew, my arm that held the bow, the arm that fitted and shot the arrow, my stance, my eyes, my whole person, were, in fact, all one, then I would understand everything. And then suddenly, one day, it happened. I no longer had to think of what I was doing. I no longer had to think of success or failure. I was one with the whole process. Unfortunately, it is an experience impossible to explain adequately in words. Or perhaps it is not unfortunate, for if we could explain it, we could also manipulate it and change it, personalize it, make some sort of monument of it.”
