There was a silence, for the argument had evidently reached a dead-end. To Conway the history of Lo-Tsen seemed rather far from the point; the little Manchu lay so quietly in his mind that he hardly knew she was there. But at the mere mention of her Miss Brinklow had looked up suddenly from the Tibetan grammar which she was studying even over the breakfast table (just as if, thought Conway, with secret meaning, she hadn’t all her life for it). Chatter of girls and monks reminded her of those stories of Indian temples that men missionaries told their wives, and that the wives passed on to their unmarried female colleagues. “Of course,” she said between tightened lips, “the morals of this place are quite hideous – we might have expected that.” She turned to Barnard as if inviting support, but the American only grinned. “I don’t suppose you folks’d value my opinion on a matter of morals,” he remarked dryly. “But I should say myself that quarrels are just as bad. Since we’ve gotter be here for some time yet, let’s keep our tempers and make ourselves comfortable.”
Conway thought this good advice, but Mallinson was still unplacated. “I can quite believe you find it more comfortable than Dartmoor,” he said meaningly.
“Dartmoor? Oh, that’s your big penitentiary? – I get you. Well, yes, I certainly never did envy the folks in them places. And there’s another thing too – it don’t hurt when you chip me about it. Thick-skinned and tender-hearted, that’s my mixture.”
Conway glanced at him in appreciation, and at Mallinson with some hint of reproof; but then abruptly he had the feeling that they were all acting on a vast stage, of whose background only he himself was conscious; and such knowledge, so incommunicable, made him suddenly want to be alone. He nodded to them and went out into the courtyard. In sight of Karakal misgivings faded, and qualms about his three companions were lost in an uncanny acceptance of the new world that lay so far beyond their guesses. There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything; when one took things for granted merely because astonishment would have been as tedious for oneself as for others. Thus far had he progressed at Shangri-La, and he remembered that he had attained a similar though far less pleasant equanimity during his years at the War.
He needed equanimity, if only to accommodate himself to the double life he was compelled to lead. Thenceforward, with his fellow exiles, he lived in a world conditioned by the arrival of porters and a return to India; at all other times the horizon lifted like a curtain; time expanded and space contracted and the name Blue Moon took on a symbolic meaning, as if the future, so delicately plausible, were of a kind that might happen once in a blue moon only. Sometimes he wondered which of his two lives were the more real, but the problem was not pressing; and again he was reminded of the War, for during heavy bombardments he had had the same comforting sensation that he had many lives, only one of which could be claimed by death.
Chang, of course, now talked to him completely without reserve, and they had many conversations about the rule and routine of the lamasery. Conway learned that during his first five years he would live a normal life, without any special regimen; this was always done, as Chang said, “to enable the body to accustom itself to the altitude, and also to give time for the dispersal of mental and emotional regrets.”
Conway remarked with a smile: “I suppose you’re certain, then, that no human affection can outlast a five-year absence?”
“It can, undoubtedly,” replied the Chinese, “but only as a fragrance whose melancholy we may enjoy.”
After the probationary five years, Chang went on to explain, the process of retarding age would begin, and if successful, might give Conway half a century or so at the apparent age of forty – which was not a bad time of life at which to remain stationary.