Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/106

92 leaf to gild things with, and some Ceylon pilgrims leave a few dozen little bronze images with a ruby in each eye? They've "acquired merit," so they say. It goes to their credit on celestial records. Their next existence will be the better to that extent anyhow, now. Suppose the temple's gilded all over, and lumber-room's packed to the roof with bronze images already. Do they care what becomes of these things? Don't seem to. Why should they? They're credited on one ledger; you credit the same to the business on another. Economic, ain't it? That was the old man's perception, to begin with, but afterwards—well, maybe his joss-house got to be a hobby with him. I don't know, nor care. I'm going to look into it. Fu Shan says it's good property. What he says is generally about so.'

"That was the limit of Gainly Jones's knowledge of this thing.

"Maya Dala remembered the Shway Dagohn, but as to the other pagodas and monasteries—there were many—he didn't know—he thought they belonged to the monks and the Buddhas, or to the caretakers, or to no one at all, or maybe to the government. What became of the offerings? He thought they were kept in the pagodas. Sometimes they were sold? No doubt. He thought it made

no difference, for was it not taught in the monastery schools that 'the giver acquired merit only by his action and the spirit of his giving, wherefore the merits of the poor and the rich are equal'? Why should they care what became of their gifts?

"So many days and nights we talked it over, and got no further than this, but drew nearer to the old East by sailing west. So much appears backwards and crisscross there, that it seems no more than natural to reach the East by sailing west. It is a muddy sea with no bottom. It swallows a man as a fog-bank swallows a ship. Gainly Jones left the Annalee at Hongkong and disappeared.

"He dropped out of sight. His name went from the letter-heads of 'Jones and Shan.' I saw one a year or two after. It read, 'Shan Brothers, Saleratus: Fu Shan—Lum Shan.'

"Singular man was Jones. He held the opinion that this life was an idea that occurred to somebody, who had got dog-tired of the idea, but who couldn't seem to shake it off.

"It happened in the fall one year that I took in sailing orders from agents in Hongkong to go around to Rangoon for a cargo of teak-wood. It's a hard wood that's used in ship-building. That was a new port to me. You go some thirty miles up the Rangoon River, which is one of the mouths of the Irrawaddy, which is the main river of Burma. And the first you see of the town is the Shway Dagohn Pagoda, its gilded tapering cone above the trees. But Rangoon had already much that was European about it—hotels and shops, stone blocks of buildings, custom-houses, offices of the Indian Empire, and houses of English residents—but the gilded pagoda looks down on everything from its crowded hill, and the crowds in the streets are Eastern—Chinaman, Malay, and Ben-