Gita

“ Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach the equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil, but only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the most pernicious consequences. ”

“ He had frowned as if annoyed with himself, no doubt recalling his characteristic remark after he had handed her over to Topper. Probably those black eyes of Gita’s had been haunting him! She could conceive of no bond between those two and was determined they should not meet again if she could prevent it. No doubt Bylant would succeed in his suit before Gita went to New York for the winter. If she knew anything of men he was the sort whose enforced patience would come to an abrupt end when he had accomplished his purpose, and he would marry her at once. ”

“ Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. The Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man who unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in man who moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all our humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom all human life travels and progresses. ”

“ You hate Gita and you don’t like Geoffrey. You’ve let your imagination run away with you. That’s all.”
“Have I ever struck you as an imaginative woman? I doubt if there’s a more practical woman in New York. And I don’t hate Gita, although I disapprove of her, and was only too thankful when poor dear Eustace took her off my hands. A pleasant prospect for him!”
“You needn’t worry. Neither would do anything dishonorable even if there were anything in it, and there’s not. If you didn’t imagine it all you were mistaken.”
“Has he never talked to you about her?”
Polly raked her memory. ”

“ Mind, you are to dress every night for dinner, as your grandmother wished, and you are to look at yourself approvingly in the glass later when you’ve on one of those nightgowns.”
But Gita felt bewildered and at times almost unhappy. She opened the doors of the mahogany wardrobe, which had sheltered so many changes of fashion, and fingered the soft texture of her gowns, and felt a thrill of pleasure in their flowing lovely lines. She folded and refolded the dainty contents of the drawers of the oaken carved highboy, as old as the manor, which still smelled faintly of lavender. ”

“ We are told continually by many authoritative voices that the Gita, oppposing in this the ordinary ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indian thought and spirituality, proclaims with no uncertain sound the gospel of human action, the ideal of disinterested performance of social duties, nay, even, it would seem, the quite modern ideal of social service. ”

“ But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word of the Gita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are only means for entering with the mind and the heart and the understanding into the divine consciousness and living in it; and the Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as a means as long as the disciple is unable so to live or even to seek by practice the gradual development of this higher state. ”

“ I am merely trying to open your eyes.”
“Well, I’ll not believe it,” said Polly stubbornly. She was walking up and down the room, her eyes puzzled and angry. “But I’ll sound out Gita this very day. And warn her off the grass if I find she’s been flirting with him. She’s come out of her ‘fort’ to such an amazing extent this winter and has got so accustomed to men raving over her that no doubt she’s as keen as the next girl to stir a man up——”
“Do you believe that Gita is incapable of falling in love?” ”

“ The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness,—the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built, “Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,” has not the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation ”

“ An impetuous passionate man would repel her from the start. I’ve seen them together once or twice, and I got the impression of a subtle bond between them, quite aside from books, or master and pupil, although, so far, of course, Gita regards him merely as a walking intelligence.”
“Oh, let him do the job,” said Polly lightly. “You just stick round and play long-distance propriety. But if he says anything to you, tell him to go slow. I want to see first what Gita’s like when she’s racketing round with us. ”

“ But Gita had no intention of telling anything. She had once obeyed an egotistical impulse and the present mess was the result.
But something must happen to make the night memorable. No hope of anything fortuitous. Impossible to turn over, and be rescued, in these narrow channels. Not a soul on the meadows but themselves. . . . She wasn’t cold, after all—rarely was, for that matter. That fur coat was a wedding-present from Mrs. Pleyden . . . well, let her thoughts scatter.
Their eyes met with that quick spontaneous smile of youth to youth, which may mean all or nothing. ”

“ And the action in which this divine figure moves is the whole wide action of man in life, not merely the inner life, but all this obscure course of the world which we can judge only by the twilight of the human reason as it opens up dimly before our uncertain advance the little span in front. This is the distinguishing feature of the Gita that it is the culmination of such an action which gives rise to its teaching and assigns that prominence and bold relief to the gospel of works which it enunciates with an emphasis and force we do not find in other Indian Scriptures. ”

“ Gita raised one narrow sunburnt hand and stroked them tenderly. “If you want the truth I love my eyelashes.”
“Of course you do. And your lovely head and magnificent eyes and all the rest of your beauty, badly as you treat it. But, my dear, I am going to say it if you never speak to me again: you don’t look the least like a boy and you never can.”
She expected to witness a full and final exhibition of the Carteret temper, but to her surprise Gita answered gloomily: “I’ve begun to be afraid I don’t. Two of those horrid men on the Boardwalk this morning tried to flirt with me.” ”

“ The language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. ”

“ It lives in humanity only, and the Gita would have us live in God, though for the world in God ; in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in the spirit ; in the mutable Being who is “all creatures;” and the Gita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme ; in the changing march of Time, and the Gita would have us live in the Eternal. Or if these higher things are now beginning to be vaguely envisaged, it is only to make them subservient to man and society; but God and spirituality exist in their own right and not as adjuncts. ”

“ We are concerned only with the figure of the divine Teacher as it is presented to us in the Gita and with the Power for which it there stands in the spiritual illumination of the human being. The Gita accepts the human Avatarhood; for the Lord speaks of the repeated, the constant [5] manifestation of the Divine in humanity, when He the eternal Unborn assumes by his Maya, by the power of the infinite Consciousness to clothe itself apparently in finite forms, the conditions of becoming which we call birth. ”

“ His white wig was tied with a blue ribbon, and altogether he looked as little like a hard-working surgeon of the twentieth century as possible. She noticed swiftly that his eyebrows were darker than she had thought, and that the blue of his eyes was intensified by the costume.
It was evident that he had entered into the spirit of the masquerade, for his habitual expression of nervous concentration had been replaced by—mingled boyish wonder and delight in his unexpected good looks? Gita knew that even as a boy he had been serious and ambitious and known few of the common impulses of youth. ”

“ But the teaching of the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of the divine nature. The Teacher himself enumerating in a later chapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places among them compassion to creatures, gentleness, freedom from wrath and from-the desire to slay and do hurt, no less than fearlessness and high spirit and energy. Harshness and hardness and fierceness and a satisfaction in slaying enemies and amassing wealth and unjust enjoyments are Asuric qualities ”

“ Or if society outwardly condoned the friendship it would not cease from horrible inferences. As Gita’s lively imagination projected them the blood burned all over her body and crimsoned her face to her hair. That would be only less awful than if some man kidnapped her and subjected her to every indignity. ”

“ As the company moved toward the dining-room Gita found herself beside Geoffrey Pelham, who had surrendered Polly to Park Leonard, a new and increasingly determined admirer. Gita noted under her eyelashes that he more nearly filled Polly’s old ideal than any of her numerous court, certainly far more than Geoffrey Pelham. He was a partner in his father’s eminent law firm, and in spite of a personal fortune, was ambitious, active and diligent, going rarely into society and never to jazz parties. ”

“ They had entered Gita’s bedroom. Large as it was a four-poster seemed to take up fully a third of it, and highboys, chests, an immense wardrobe, heavy chairs and sofas, covered with horsehair, left little space for movement. The windows looked out into the wood. Gita had jerked off the bed-hangings on the night of her arrival.
“Well,” pursued the irreverent Miss Pleyden, “if you ever get hard up you can sell this old junk. There are imbeciles that will pay any price for mahogany and black old oak. ”

“ Gita nodded sullenly. She had behaved uncommonly well, she told herself, but if he were unable to take a hint nothing further could be expected of her. A man in her woods! Men, individually, were not worth hating as long as they behaved themselves, but her indifference when they did was entire. This creature did not look predatory and his cool impersonal gaze aroused in her no sense of wary disquiet. She walked straight and silent beside him and he talked of the dinner at the Pleydens’.
“Polly was rather huffed when I told her I had met you at the Pelhams’,” he said. ”

“ Eustace drew up his chair and bent over her. He had begun to turn off the lights before they fell into conversation and in the soft dimness he looked rather handsome to Gita’s critical eye. Distinguished he always looked. Perhaps she had been wrong—hadn’t known her personal predilections so well, after all . . . if it were in her to “love” any man it should be this one, who combined so much, and whom, her sharp eyes had long since informed her, other women found so attractive. ”

“ The long narrow dining-room was at the front of the house, rather somber, with its tapestries and Jacobean furniture, but lit with long red candles as slender as reeds. Topper had been left in charge of the manor and they were served by a trim maid. Gita, at the head of the table in a shining yellow gown with a jeweled sunflower (Bylant’s wedding-gift) at her breast, was a grateful and refreshing figure after his incarceration, and he felt as he would toward any beautiful woman who had never stirred his pulses ”

“ She moved over to the manor next day, and, as her novel was hanging fire, she determined to make an experiment. “I know at least one novelist,” she told Gita, “who writes every new book in a new place. Finds that surroundings dissociated from habit stimulate the imagination. So, if you will give me a quiet corner——”
Gita, delighted, gave her a room off the library that had been used as an office by her grandfather, and the experiment was a success. The social gods were placated, Elsie wrote from six until noon, while Gita either amused herself alone, or rode, walked, talked with Eustace Bylant ”

“ We know the divine Teacher, we see the human disciple ; it remains to form a clear conception of the doctrine. A clear conception fastening upon the essential idea, the central heart of the teaching is especially necessary here because the Gita with its rich and many-sided thought, its synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life and the fluent winding motion of its argument lends itself, even more than other scriptures, to one-sided misrepresentations born of a partisan intellectuality. ”

“ Wait until you have a wardrobe full of pretty things.”
Gita shrugged her thin shoulders. “Perhaps. But I don’t care for society either, grandmother. I—I—don’t know how to dance.”
“I never heard of such a thing! But you can learn, I suppose. You’re naturally graceful. You wouldn’t be a Carteret if you weren’t.”
Gita hastily changed the subject. “And I never know what to talk to men about. I’d really rather live quietly here and go over to New York occasionally—to the theater and concerts and lectures. And the opera! I haven’t been to an opera since I was fourteen.” ”