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46 A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi mission and daily return with some excuse. The party naturally began to get restless and suspicious and were keen to know when they could start on the last lap of their pilgrimage. Things reached such a pitch that Spaulding was no longer able to control them. One day he returned and said that he had that day met Paul Brunton who had invited all of them in the meantime to pay a visit to Sri Ramana Maharshi's Ashram in the South. I never discovered if he really had met Brunton that day, I forgot to ask him. By this time some of the party had reached the point of exasperation and gone off on their own, while the remnant proceeded with their guide to the Ashram. To have such an auspicious end to the fiasco was extremely lucky, as none of them was ever likely to have come to the Maharshi otherwise. Here they settled for some time, gradually dispersing.
Just at this time one of the Darshans was held at the Pondicherry Ashram to which Spaulding took all those of his party who were left. They all stayed together in the same hotel where Paul Brunton happened to be at the time, as he, too, had gone there for the Darshan. He told me that one night after dinner there had been a showdown and one by one they had turned on Spaulding and accused him of having swindled them, that the story about the Masters was nothing but an invention and that he had never been in India before. However, he seemed quite equal to the occasion and held his own in spite of the odds. One of them he accused of having made a commission on the sale of the tickets and others of various
