My master bowed respectfully and quickly arranged for O-san to go and find a rickshaw. When it arrived, the old man delivered the expectedly long-winded speech of departure and, having settled his bowler hat comfortably over his top-knot, left. Waverhouse stayed behind.
“So that’s your famous uncle.”
“The very one.”
“Quite so,” said my master who, reseating himself on a cushion, then sank back into thought with his hands tucked back in his bosom.
“Isn’t he an astonishing old fellow? I’m lucky to have such an uncle.
He carries on like that wherever he goes. You must have been a bit surprised, eh?” Waverhouse evidently likes the idea that my master should have been taken aback.
“No, not at all surprised.”
“If that old uncle of mine didn’t at least startle you, you must have uncommonly steady nerves.”
“It seems to me that there’s something magnificent about your uncle.
For instance, one could but admire, admire and deeply respect, his insistence on the necessity of training the mind.”
“You think that admirable? Maybe when you’re well into your sixties, like my uncle, you will be able to afford to be old-fashioned. But for the time being you’d do better to keep your wits about you. You’ll do yourself no good if you get yourself known as devoted to old-fashioned notions.”
“You worry too much about being considered old-fashioned.
Sometimes, in particular cases, being old-fashioned is far more admirable than being up-to-date. Modern education, for instance, attempts too much, and people, ever grasping for more and more, never once question the wisdom of its limitless spread. By comparison, a traditional, even an old-fashioned, Oriental education is less aggressive and, by its very passivity, produces a more discriminating taste. For the traditional education trains the mind itself.” Glibly exact, my master trots out as his own views the twaddle that he has only recently picked up from his philosophizing friend.
“This,” said Waverhouse in genuine concern, “is getting serious. You sound like Singleman Kidd.”
At mention of that name a look of real shock came over my master’s face. For the sage philosopher who so recently visited the Cave of the Sleeping Dragon and who, having there converted my master to new styles of thinking, then serenely went upon his way, bore that very name. And Waverhouse had been dead right in his comparison, for my master’s words, solemnly spoken as his own original conclusions, were in fact all straight cribs from Kidd’s unhinging homily. Since my master had not realized that Waverhouse knew Kidd, the speed with which Waverhouse attributed such ideas to their true source reflected unflatteringly on the superficiality of my master’s grasp of them. Indeed, my master actually seems bright enough to regard Waverhouse’s comment as a slight upon himself. To establish how much Waverhouse really knew, my master point blank asked him, “Have you ever heard him explaining his ideas?”
“Have I ever heard him! That man’s ideas haven’t changed one whit in the long ten years since first I heard them in our own undergraduate days.”
“Since truth does not change, perhaps that very lack of variance at which you sneer is, in fact, a point in favor of his theories.”
“Oh dear, oh dear. Look, it’s because men like you lend a sympathetic ear to his ravings that he keeps on raving away. But just consider the man. His family name suggests that he’s descended from goats, and that straggly beard, a billy’s goatee even in college days, confirms his blood-stock. And his own name too, is singular beyond the point of simple idiosyncrasy. Now let me tell you a story. One day some years ago he came to visit me and, as usual, lectured me at length on the marvels of his mental training and his consequent passive discipline. He went on and on. All the same old tripe and he simply wouldn’t stop talking.
Eventually I suggested it was getting late, but he wouldn’t take the hint.
He said he didn’t feel at all sleepy and, to my intense annoyance, rattled ever on about his cranky notions. He became so much of a nuisance that I finally told him that, however wakeful he might feel, I was dead tired.
I begged and coaxed him to go to bed, and at long last he went. So far, so good. But in the middle of the night there was a major disturbance.
A rat, I’m almost sorry to say, came and bit him on the nose. Now, although he’d worn my ears off with his repetitive accounts of his spiritual enlightenment, of the way his training had lifted him above all concern with merely mundane matters, as soon as the rat had nipped his nose he displayed a tremendous interest in worldly realities. He was even worried lest his life should be in danger. What, he demanded, if the rat’s teeth were infected? The poison, he whimpered, would be spreading through his system while we wasted time in idle talk. Do something, he pestered me, do something and do it quickly. Well, I didn’t know what to do. But, after racking my brains, I staggered off into the kitchen and pressed some grains of boiled rice onto a piece of paper, and that did the trick.”
“How can boiled rice grains cure a rat bite?”
“I told him that the gooey mash was an imported ointment recently invented by a famous German doctor and that it had proved an immediate and sovereign cure when applied, in, I think, the State of Hyderabad, to persons fanged by venomous serpents. Provided you clap this on, your life, I told him from the bottom of my heart, will be entirely safe.”
“So even in those early days you had a knack for bamboozlement.”
“Well, it set Kidd’s precious mind at rest. The simpleton believed me and dropped off, smiling, into sleepy-byland. When I woke next morning, I was particularly delighted to notice that a trickle from my ointment had dried into a thread and solidified among the darker threads of his daft goatee.”
“I see your point. But he was younger then. It seems to me that he has matured into a man of serious worth.”
“Have you seen him lately?”
“He was here about a week ago, and spoke for some long time.”
“Ah, that explains why you’ve been so actively brandishing the childish negativities of the Kidd School.”
“It so happens that I was much impressed by his ideas, and I am currently considering whether I myself should make the effort demanded by his mental discipline.”
“Making an effort is always a good thing. But you’ll only make a fool of yourself if you persist in swallowing every tinseled tale that’s flashed in front of you. The trouble with you is that you believe anything and everything that anyone says. Though Kidd talks loftily about freeing himself from coarse realities by the disciplined power of his mind, the truth is that, in a real crisis, he’d be no different from the rest of us. You remember that big earthquake about nine years ago? The only person who jumped from an upstairs window and so broke his leg was your imperturbable Kidd.”
“But, as I recall it, he has his own explanation of that incident.”
“Of course he has. And a wonderful explanation naturally it is! Kidd’s version of that scaredy-cat reality is that the working of the Zen-trained mind is so sharp that, when faced with an emergency, it reacts with the terrifying speed of a bullet fired from a rifle. While all the others, he says, were fleeing helter-skelter during the earthquake, he simply leapt down from an upstairs window. This pleased him very much, for it was a proof that his training had resulted in a truly fantastic immediacy of reaction. Kidd was thus pleased but limping. He refuses to admit defeat.