Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/94

 from Ujjeni's flower-garden actually yielded me the fruit which the thorny hedge of the police—perhaps stunted just on account of that very same flourishing condition of the said blossom—failed to ripen.

These kind maidens, seeing me in despair because of the ruin threatening me and mine, discovered the culprits, and forced them, by threatening the complete withdrawal of their favour, to hand over the plunder, so that we got off leniently with the loss of the little that had already been spent, and with a fright which did not fail of its effect in my own case.

It woke me up from the dissipated life in which I was uselessly squandering the best of my years and strength. For, quite apart from this waking up and its occasion, my folly had now reached a point where it was certain either, in the garb of habit, to enslave and deprave me utterly, or, on the contrary, to fill me with gradually increasing disgust. This latter result was now very much hastened by the experience I had just had. I had seen poverty staring me in the face—the poverty to which the life I had been leading would have handed me over defenceless, after it had, with all its costly pleasures, treacherously left me in the lurch. At this juncture I bethought me of the words uttered by the merchant at the grave of Vajaçravas: "Did I stand so high in Vajaçravas' favour as thou dost, I should in a very few years be the richest man in Kosambi."

And I resolved to become the richest man in Ujjeni, and to this end, to devote myself with all my strength to the caravan traffic.

I carried out my resolutions; and whether my friend and master Vajaçravas, from his abode in the other world, did or did not stand by me in his own person in all my