“My dear chap, officially they call it Gokul Ashtami. All the State offices are closed, but how else should it concern you and me?”
“Gokul is the village where Krishna was born—well, more or less born, for there’s the same hovering between it and another village as between Bethlehem and Nazareth. What I want to discover is its spiritual side, if it has one.”
“It is useless discussing Hindus with me. Living with them teaches me no more. When I think I annoy them, I do not. When I think I don’t annoy them, I do. Perhaps they will sack me for tumbling on to their dolls’-house; on the other hand, perhaps they will double my salary. Time will prove. Why so curious about them?”
“It’s difficult to explain. I never really understood or liked them, except an occasional scrap of Godbole. Does the old fellow still say ‘Come, come?’”
Fielding sighed, opened his lips, shut them, then said with a little laugh, “I can’t explain, because it isn’t in words at all, but why do my wife and her brother like Hinduism, though they take no interest in its forms? They won’t talk to me about this. They know I think a certain side of their lives is a mistake, and are shy. That’s why I wish you would talk to them, for at all events you’re Oriental.”
Aziz refused to reply. He didn’t want to meet Stella and Ralph again, knew they didn’t want to meet him, was incurious about their secrets, and felt good old Cyril to be a bit clumsy. Something—not a sight, but a sound—flitted past him, and caused him to re-read his letter to Miss Quested. Hadn’t he wanted to say something else to her? Taking out his pen, he added: “For my own part, I shall henceforth connect you with the name that is very sacred in my mind, namely, Mrs. Moore.” When he had finished, the mirror of the scenery was shattered, the meadow disintegrated into butterflies. A poem about Mecca—the Caaba of Union—the thorn-bushes where pilgrims die before they have seen the Friend—they flitted next; he thought of his wife; and then the whole semi-mystic, semi-sensuous overturn, so characteristic of his spiritual life, came to end like a landslip and rested in its due place, and he found himself riding in the jungle with his dear Cyril.
“Oh, shut up,” he said. “Don’t spoil our last hour with foolish questions. Leave Krishna alone, and talk about something sensible.”