e was in his
twenty-eighth year.

Another time, as he watched old _God-Mother_, he suddenly felt
_himself_ an instrument upon which played the awful yearning of the
younger peoples of Europe and America. Greatly startled, he saw them
hungering for this vastness, this beauty and peace; yet enchanted among
little things, condemned to chattering and pecking at each other, and
through interminable centuries to tread dim hot ways of spite and
weariness, cruelty and nervous pain. He, Bedient, had found peace here,
but it was not for him to take always. He seemed held by that awful
yearning across the world; as if he were an envoy commissioned to find
Content--to bring back the secret that would break their
enchantment.... No, he was not yet detached from his people; he could
only accept tentatively these mighty virtues of wonder and silence,
gird his loins with them and finally take back the rich tidings.... Was
he dwelling in silence to walk in power over there? This excited and
puzzled him at first. Bedient as a bearer of light was new....

Yet hunger was growing within for his own people; a passion to tell
them; rather to make them see that all their aims and possessions were
not worth one moment, such as he had spent, watching the breast of old
_God-Mother_ whiten, with the consciousness of God walking in the
mountain-winds, the scent of camphor, lotos, sandal and wild-honey in
His garments. A passion, indeed, grew within him to make his people see
that real life has no concern with wrestlings in fetid valleys, but up,
up the rising roads--poised with faith, and laughing with power--until
through a rift in the mountains, they are struck by the light of God's
face, and shine back--like the peaks of Kashmir to the moon.

And another night it came to him that he had something to say to the
women of his people. This thought emerged clean-cut from the deeps of
abstraction, and he trembled before it, for his recent life had kept
him far apart from women. And now, the thought occurred that he was
better prepared to inspire women--because of this separateness. He had
preserved the boyish ideal of their glowing mystery, their lovely
cosmic magnetism. India had stimulated it. All the lights of his mind
had fallen upon this ideal, all the colors of the spectrum and many
from heaven--certain swift flashes of glory, such as are brought, in
queer angles of light, from a butterfly's wing. He had been mercifully
spared from moving amo