Читать книгу A Digit of the Moon - Bain Francis William - Страница 2

A Digit of the Moon is the sixteenth part of a much longer work, entitled The Churning of the Ocean of Time2. A well-known Hindoo legend recounts how the gods and antigods assembled to churn the ocean of milk3 for the nectar of immortality. After throwing in herbs of various kinds, they churned it with Mount Mandara, and obtained the nectar, with certain other things, one of which was the MOON, who by the way is often called 'the Lord of Herbs.'

But in Sanskrit, the Moon, like the Sun, is a male. Hindoo poets get over this difficulty, when they want a female Moon, by personifying his attributes, or making a part do duty for the whole. Thus, his disc is divided into sixteen parts, called 'streaks' or 'digits' and a beautiful woman is 'a digit of the moon.'

The whole work, then, called 'The Churning of the Ocean of Time,' is, like the Moon, divided into sixteen parts, each named after one of the digits of the Moon. The one now before the reader is called A Digit of the Moon, turned red by the rays of the dawning Sun4. The point lies in the play on the word red, which in the original also means 'enamoured,' 'in love.' That is to say, that the heroine of the story 'turns red,' i. e. falls in love with the hero, whose name, it will be found, is Süryakánta, or 'Sunstone.'

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I little thought, ten years ago, that it would ever be my lot to play, as it were, the part of Boccaccio, and bring forth meat from the eater, stories from a plague. Yet here also the unexpected came about, in the following way.

Considering how recently Europe has become aware of the very existence of a Sanskrit literature, I had often wondered whether there might not be hidden away, here and there, in the vast ocean of India, literary treasures still undiscovered, which future 'churning' might bring up. But I did not expect that my question would ever receive a practical answer. However, a few years ago, when the plague was decimating the city of Poona, carrying off its victims by hundreds a day, personal acquaintance with some of the officers appointed by Government to cope with the enemy put it into my power to do a slight service to an old Marátha Brahman, whose name, by his own particular desire, I suppress. My 'service' was indeed a mere trifle, a thing of which no Englishman would have thought twice. Hindoos, however, look on these matters with very different eyes. An Englishman's house may be his castle, but a Hindoo's house is a shrine, a holy of holies, which for unhallowed footsteps to invade is desecration. I was amused to find that my old Brahman regarded me almost as though I had preserved his family from nameless and everlasting infamy. And when he subsequently discovered that I was a humble student of the 'polished, sacred' language, and could make shift to admire his beloved Kálidás in the original, his esteem for me rose to a degree almost embarrassing. He came two or three times to see me, and took an obvious pleasure in dilating on the beauties of his ancient authors to one who was at least a good listener. But it struck me as curious, that every time he went away he seemed as it were labouring to deliver himself of some important communication, which nevertheless he shrank from discovering to me; and he always eventually departed, with an air of some confusion, and his secret left untold. I thought at the time that he was only nerving himself to make some request of me, of which he doubted the reception, and was unable to screw his courage to the sticking-point. But I was mistaken.

Our interviews came to an abrupt conclusion. The plague stepped in and swept his family clean away, carrying off his wife, all his children, and various others of his kin, leaving him alone untouched – but not for long. One evening, when I came home late, having been out nearly all day, I found on my doorstep a messenger who had been waiting for me, with the inexhaustible patience of an Oriental, for many hours. The plague had remembered my old Brahman at last, and he had sent to ask me to come and see him, 'on business of importance.' I went off accordingly to a segregate camp, whither he had been removed, and, much to my relief, arrived in time to find him conscious: for he was a fine old gentleman, and when a Brahman is a gentleman, he is a striking type of humanity. He confused me by thanking me, for the hundredth time, for my good offices, adding, however, that they had been, in a certain sense, wasted, as he was the only one left of his family, and now he also, he was glad to say, was going the same way. He said, that he had been anxious to see me before he died, because he had something of value to give me. Hereupon he produced what the uninitiated might have taken for a packet of ladies' long six-button gloves, pressed together between two strips of wood about the size of a cheroot box, and tied round with string; but which from experience I knew to be a manuscript5. He handed it to me, observing that it had been in the possession of his family from a time beyond memory, and that nothing would ever have induced him to part with it, had any of that family remained to possess it; but as they were all gone, and as, moreover, it would certainly be burned by the plague authorities as soon as he was dead, it was mine, if I cared to accept it. If not, he said, with an effort to smile, no matter: it could, like a faithful wife, enter the fire on the death of its owner: yet that would be a pity, for it was worth preserving. I accepted his present, and he bade me farewell. I took leave of the old man, not without emotion, for grief and approaching death had converted his face to the very incarnation of misery; and I learned on enquiry that he died, about thirty-six hours afterwards, in the early morning.

Notwithstanding the hints let fall by its former owner, I own I was dubious as to the value of my MS., for Hindoos will admire anything in Sanskrit. But when – after having redeemed it with difficulty from the ordeal of fire and the plague authorities by subjecting it to severe fumigations – I fell to examining it6, I apologised to the manes of my old Brahman for doubting his judgment, and blessed him for his present, which is, I will venture to say, unique in literature. But I will leave the reader to judge of it for himself7, warning him only that no language loses so much by translation as the Sanskrit; and advising him, for his own sake, to read it consecutively through, or he will lose much8. I cannot refrain from observing, however, that it differs from the general run of classical Sanskrit productions in two very striking particulars – the simplicity of its style, and the originality of its matter. As to the last, every body knows that classical Sanskrit authors have no originality. They do but rhetorically reset and embellish notorious themes: such originality as they exhibit lying, not in their subject, but its treatment. Our author is an exception. Whoever he was, he must have possessed the gift of imagination: for though the plan of the story was doubtless suggested by the Wétála-panchawimshatiká, yet so novel and poetical is the use made of it that it may fairly claim to owe but little to its source, while all the particular stories are curious and original. The book differs, again, in a remarkable manner from other classical products of the Hindoo Muse in the simplicity of its style. The author would seem to have deliberately chosen the epic9 rather than the classic style as his model. We find here none of that artificiality, that straining and effort at style for its own sake, that perverse elaboration, those insipid intolerable shléhas and interminable compounds which reach a climax in the appalling concatenations of e.g. the Kédambarí. Mature Hindoo literature exhibits precisely the same tendency as its architecture: ornament is piled on ornament with aimless, tasteless extravagance, till the whole becomes nauseous, and all unity is smothered and annihilated under a load of rhetorical gewgaws. Just as the rank and luxuriant growth of a creeper will sometimes drain of its juices, dry up, and destroy the tree it was designed to adorn, so the over development of gaudy rhetorical blossoms and effeminate literary prettinesses has desiccated and broken the spring of the Hindoo mind. The best things in the literature are just those which are simplest, and therefore as a rule oldest. Literary arabesque nearly always indicates and springs from the absence of anything to say; a poverty of creative ideas. But our author has really a story to tell, and can therefore afford to exhibit it in naked unadorned simplicity.

Finally, the words which stand as a motto on the title-page have a history of their own. They are the closing lines of the Shakuntalá, and they mean, briefly: O Shiwa, grant that I may never be born again. There is a curiosa felicitas in their application to the conclusion of the story, where indeed I found them, scribbled in the margin by another hand; and though it cannot be proved, I am convinced that they were placed there by my old Brahman himself (who had Kálidás by heart), when he took his farewell of the MS., in an access of grief and despair at feeling his family annihilated and himself deprived of all that had made his life worth living, by the plague. Let us hope that the old man has had his wish, and that 'the purple-tinted god' has 'destroyed his rebirth.'

Mahábaleshwar, 1898.