The Lily Hand and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

one finger, her voice quiet.
    â€˜Well, of course!’ he said, astonished, and stared at her blankly.
    â€˜Why “of course”?’ She looked up. ‘They have the right to believe and worship as they please.’
    â€˜Certainly,’ agreed Andrew, stiffly. ‘As they please, and whichever they please. But not both !’
    Almost pleasurably, as in a half-dream, she heard her own voice saying: ‘Why not?’
    â€˜Why not?’
    He sat up rigidly in his chair, staring at her with dropped jaw and horrified eyes.
    â€˜Yes, why not?’
    She turned the picture and smoothed it out before him. ‘Did you look at the other one carefully? Colour the face blue, forget the beard, and make this fellow put down his flute, and you’d hardly know them apart. Two gentle, plaintive, pretty faces. People made them exactly alike because they needed exactly the same from them. True, we’re looking at the likeness on one of its lowest planes, but the same holds good higher up, you know. All that is different in them is the conventions. Why not both? They’re one and the same.’
    He was clinging to the arms of the chair as if the world had begun to rock under him. He stared under knotted black brows, trying to grasp the magnitude of her blasphemy. His jaw worked, and he couldn’t speak. He drew a convulsive breath and whispered creakingly: ‘You’re not serious! You don’t know what you’re saying!’
    â€˜I am serious. Do you mean you’ve never really caught a glimpse of it? In four years? Everybody who ever got as far as imagining the inevitability of God was looking at the same sun through his own particular little window. The view doesn’t even vary so very much, not until the creeds become business. When the priests move in, and start cornering, and organizing, and retailing what the saints left freely about the world for everybody to enjoy, then the distortions and perversions begin. But that doesn’t alter the first principle. Nothing can.’
    â€˜You’re just being deliberately perverse. I don’t see the slightest resemblance between this … this thing … and the church calendar they’ve got there on the wall beside it. That’s all very facile talk about the two pretty faces. I know our almanacs aren’t great art, just as well as you do. But supposing this had been Hanuman, or Ganesh, as it very well might have? What then?’
    The heat with which he had begun this outburst cooled quickly, she heard the note of security steady in his voice again, and was sure in her heart that he could not be shaken. In a moment he would be sounding indulgent, reminded to his comfort that she had been in India no more than four or five weeks, and was only running true to beginners’ form in knowing everything.
    â€˜It wouldn’t have mattered,’ she said simply. ‘I thought this might have made it easier to see, just the fact that it was Krishna. But it makes no difference. They’re all aspects and allegories.’
    â€˜And a beautiful monotheism embracing them all, I suppose, when one develops eyes to see!’ He laughed shortly and angrily. ‘Rachel, you’re not really such a fool as all that.’
    She looked back at him without any answering indignation, even smiled a little. ‘Did you ever wonder why Tagore and Gandhi so often wrote simply “God”? Because they meant it, that’s why. And long before their day Indians were leaving the evidence for us all over the place, if we cared to see it:
    â€œthe loving sage beholds that Mysterious Existence wherein the universe comes to have one home;
    Therein unites and therefrom issues the whole;
    The lord is warp and woof in created beings.”
    That isn’t one of the desert fathers, that’s the Yajur Veda.’
    â€˜Well, now come down out of the clouds for a moment, and look around you, and see what goes on at