Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/110

 at—just like any old ass who, unyoked from his cart, runs to the rubbish-heap in the courtyard and peers and gazes and sniffs and snuffles.… Out upon him, the lazy, brazen-faced thief, the shameless beggar, the bald-pated monk!"

The object of these and similar expressions of maternal contempt, a pilgrim belonging to some ascetic school and a man of strikingly lofty stature, still stood leaning against the gate-post in an attitude of easy repose. His mantle, of the yellow colour of the kanikara flower, and not unlike thine own, fell in picturesque folds over his left shoulder to his feet, and gave the impression of covering a powerfully built body. The right arm, which hung limply down, was uncovered, and I could not help admiring the huge coil of muscles, which rather seemed to be the well-earned possession of a warrior than the idle inheritance of an ascetic; and even the clay alms-bowl appeared, in his nervous hand, to be as strange and incongruous as an iron bludgeon in that same hand would have seemed to be in its proper place. His head was bent, his gaze fixed on the ground, his mouth absolutely without expression, and he stood motionless there, as though some masterly artist had hewn the statue of a wandering ascetic in stone, had painted and clothed it, and as though I had thereupon caused it to be set up at my gate—it might be, as a symbol of my liberality.

This tranquillity of his, which I held to be meekness, but which my two wives regarded as contempt, naturally goaded the latter to ever greater efforts; and so they would probably have passed to actual violence, had I not come between, rebuked them for their evil tempers, and driven them into the house. Then I went up to the ascetic, bowed respectfully before him, and said—