In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid

impossibilities.

ARISTOTLE

Island

by Aldous Huxley

1

"Attention," a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had

suddenly become articulate. "Attention," it repeated in the same high, nasal

monotone. "Attention."

Lying there like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face

grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy, Will

Farnaby awoke with a start. Molly had called him. Time to get up. Time to

get dressed. Mustn't be late at the office.

"Thank you, darling," he said and sat up. A sharp pain stabbed at his

right knee and there were other kinds of pain in his back, his arms, his

forehead.

"Attention," the voice insisted without the slightest change of tone.

Leaning on one elbow, Will looked about him and saw with bewilderment,

not the gray wallpaper and yellow curtains of his London bedroom, but a

glade among trees and the long shadows and slanting lights of early

morning in a forest. "Attention"?

Why did she say, "Attention"?

"Attention. Attention," the voice insisted—how strangely, how

senselessly!

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Island

"Molly?" he questioned. "Molly?"

The name seemed to open a window inside his head. Suddenly, with

that horribly familiar sense of guilt at the pit of the stomach, he smelt

formaldehyde, he saw the small brisk nurse hurrying ahead of him along

the green corridor, heard the dry creaking of her starched clothes. "Number

fifty-five," she was saying, and then halted, opened a white door. He

entered and there, on a high white bed, was Molly. Molly with bandages

covering half her face and the mouth hanging cavernously open. "Molly,"

he had called, "Molly ..." His voice had broken, and he was crying, was

imploring now, "My darling!" There was no answer. Through the gaping

mouth the quick shallow breaths came noisily, again, again. "My darling,

my darling . . ." And then suddenly the hand he was holding came to life for

a moment. Then was still again.

"It's me," he said, "it's Will."

Once more the fingers stirred. Slowly, with what was evidently an

enormous effort, they closed themselves over his own, pressed them for a

moment and then relaxed again into lifelessness.

"Attention," called the inhuman voice. "Attention."

It had been an accident, he hastened to assure himself. The road was

wet, the car had skidded across the white line. It was one of those things

that happen all the time. The papers are full of them; he had reported them

by the dozen. "Mother and three children killed in head-on crash ..." But

that was beside the point. The point was that, when she asked him if it was

really the end, he had said yes; the point was that less than an hour after

she had walked out from that last shameful interview into the rain, Molly

was in the ambulance, dying.

3

He hadn't looked at her as she turned to go, hadn't dared to look at

her. Another glimpse of that pale suffering face might have been too much

for him. She had risen from her chair and was moving slowly across the

room, moving slowly out of his

life. Shouldn't he call her back, ask her forgiveness, tell her that he still

loved her? Had he ever loved her?

For the hundredth time the articulate oboe called him to attention.

Yes, had he ever really loved her?

"Good-bye, Will," came her remembered whisper as she turned back

on the threshold. And then it was she who had said it—in a whisper, from

the depths of her heart. "I still love you, Will—in spite of everything."

A moment later the door of the flat closed behind her almost without a

sound. The little dry click of the latch, and she was gone.

He had jumped up, had run to the front door and opened it, had

listened to the retreating footsteps on the stairs. Like a ghost at cockcrow, a

faint familiar perfume lingered vanishingly on the air. He closed the door

again, walked into his gray-and-yellow bedroom and looked out the widow.

A few seconds passed, then he saw her crossing the pavement and getting

into the car. He heard the shrill grinding of the starter, once, twice, and after

that the drumming of the motor. Should he open the window? "Wait, Molly,

wait," he heard himself shouting in imagination. The window remained

unopened; the car began to move, turned the corner and the street was

empty. It was too late. Too late, thank God! said a gross derisive voice.

Yes, thank God! And yet the guilt was there at the pit of his stomach. The

guilt, the gnawing of his remorse—but through the remorse he could feel a

horrible rejoicing. Somebody low and lewd and brutal, somebody alien and

odious who was yet himself was gleefully thinking that now there was

nothing to prevent him from having what he wanted. And what he wanted

was a different perfume, was the warmth and resilience of a younger body.

"Attention," said the oboe. Yes, attention. Attention to Babs's musky

bedroom, with its strawberry-pink alcove and the two windows that looked

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Island

onto the Charing Cross Road and were looked into, all night long, by the

winking glare of the big sky sign for Porter's Gin on the opposite side of the

street. Gin in royal crimson—and for ten seconds the alcove was the

Sacred Heart, for ten miraculous seconds the flushed face so close to his

own glowed like a seraph's, transfigured as though by an inner fire of love.

Then came the yet profounder transfiguration of darkness. One, two, three,

four . . . Ah God, make it go on forever! But punctually at the count of ten

the electric clock would turn on another revelation—but of death, of the

Essential Horror; for the lights, this time, were green, and for ten hideous

seconds Babs's rosy alcove became a womb of mud and, on the bed, Babs

herself was corpse-colored, a cadaver galvanized into posthumous

epilepsy. When Porter's Gin proclaimed itself in green, it was hard to forget

what had happened and who one was. The only thing to do was to shut

one's eyes and plunge, if one could, more deeply into the Other World of

sensuality, plunge violently, plunge deliberately into those alienating

frenzies to which poor Molly— Molly ("Attention") in her bandages, Molly in

her wet grave at Highgate, and Highgate, of course, was why one had to

shut one's eyes each time when the green light made a corpse of Babs's

nakedness—had always and so utterly been a stranger. And not only Molly.

Behind his closed eyelids, Will saw his mother, pale like a cameo, her face

spiritualized by accepted suffering, her hands made monstrous and

subhuman by arthritis. His mother and, standing behind her wheelchair,

already running to fat and quivering like calf's-foot jelly with all the feelings

that had never found their proper expression in consummated love, was his

sister Maud.

"How can you, Will?"

"Yes, how can you?" Maud echoed tearfully in her vibrating contralto.

There was no answer. No answer, that was to say, in any words that

could be uttered in their presence, that, uttered,

those two martyrs—the mother to her unhappy marriage, the daughter to

filial piety—could possibly understand. No answer except in words of the

most obscenely scientific objectivity, the most inadmissible frankness. How

could he do it? He could do it, for all practical purposes was compelled to

do it, because . . . well, because Babs had certain physical peculiarities

which Molly did not possess and behaved at certain moments in ways

which Molly would have found unthinkable.

There had been a long silence; but now, abruptly, the strange voice

took up its old refrain.

"Attention. Attention."

Attention to Molly, attention to Maud and his mother, attention to Babs.

And suddenly another memory emerged from the fog of vagueness and

confusion. Babs's strawberry-pink alcove sheltered another guest, and its

owner's body was shuddering ecstatically under somebody else's caresses.

To the guilt in the stomach was added an anguish about the heart, a

constriction of the throat.

"Attention."

The voice had come nearer, was calling from somewhere over there to

the right. He turned his head, he tried to raise himself for a better view; but

the arm that supported his weight began to tremble, then gave way, and he

fell back into the leaves. Too tired to go on remembering, he lay there for a

long time staring up through half-closed lids at the incomprehensible world

around him. Where was he and how on earth had he got here? Not that this

was of any importance. At the moment nothing was of any importance

except this pain, this annihilating weakness. All the same, just as a matter

of scientific interest. . .

This tree, for example, under which (for no known reason) he found

himself lying, this column of gray bark with the groining, high up, of sun-

speckled branches, this ought by rights to be a beech tree. But in that

case—and Will admired himself for being so lucidly logical—in that case

the leaves had no right to

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Island

be so obviously evergreen. And why would a beech tree send its roots

elbowing up like this above the surface of the ground? And those

preposterous wooden buttresses, on which the pseudo-beech supported

itself—where did those fit into the picture? Will remembered suddenly his

favorite worst line of poetry. "Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days my

mind?" Answer: congealed ectoplasm, Early Dali. Which definitely ruled out

the Chilterns. So did the butterflies swooping out there in the thick buttery

sunshine. Why were they so large, so improbably cerulean or velvet black,

so extravagantly eyed and freckled? Purple staring out of chestnut, silver

powdered over emerald, over topaz, over sapphire.

"Attention."

"Who's there?" Will Farnaby called in what he intended to be a loud

and formidable tone; but all that came out of his mouth was a thin,

quavering croak.

There was a long and, it seemed, profoundly menacing silence. From

the hollow between two of the tree's wooden buttresses an enormous black

centipede emerged for a moment into view, then hurried away on its

regiment of crimson legs and vanished into another cleft in the lichen-

covered ectoplasm.

"Who's there?" he croaked again.

There was a rustling in the bushes on his left and suddenly, like a

cuckoo from a nursery clock, out popped a large black bird, the size of a

jackdaw—only, needless to say, it wasn't a jackdaw. It clapped a pair of

white-tipped wings and, darting across the intervening space, settled on the

lowest branch of a small dead tree, not twenty feet from where Will was

lying. Its beak, he noticed, was orange, and it had a bald yellow patch

under each eye, with canary-colored wattles that covered the sides and

back of its head with a thick wig of naked flesh. The bird cocked its head

and looked at him first with the right eye, then with the left. After which it

opened its orange bill, whistled ten or twelve

7

notes of a little air in the pentatonic scale, made a noise like somebody

having hiccups, and then, in a chanting phrase, do do sol do, said, "Here

and now, boys; here and now, boys."

The words pressed a trigger, and all of a sudden he remembered

everything. Here was Pala, the forbidden island, the place no journalist had

ever visited. And now must be the morning after the afternoon when he'd

been fool enough to go sailing, alone, outside the harbor of Rendang-Lobo.

He remembered it all—the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of

a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of

diamonds on every wave crest, the troughs of wrinkled jade. And

eastwards, across the Strait, what clouds, what prodigies of sculptured

whiteness above the volcanoes of Pala! Sitting there at the tiller, he had

caught himself singing—caught himself, incredibly, in the act of feeling

unequivocally happy.

" 'Three, three for the rivals,' " he had declaimed into the wind.

" 'Two, two for the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-oh; One is one

and all alone . . . ' "

Yes, all alone. All alone on the enormous jewel of the sea. " 'And ever

more shall be so.' "

After which, needless to say, the thing that all the cautious and

experienced yachtsmen had warned him against happened. The black

squall out of nowhere, the sudden, senseless frenzy of wind and rain and

waves . . .

"Here and now, boys," chanted the bird. "Here and now, boys."

The really extraordinary thing was that he should be here, he reflected,

under the trees and not out there, at the bottom of the Pala Strait or, worse,

smashed to pieces at the foot of the cliffs. For even after he had managed,

by sheer miracle, to take his sinking boat through the breakers and run her

aground on the only sandy beach in all those miles of Pala's rockbound

coast—

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Island

even then it wasn't over. The cliffs towered above him; but at the head of

the cove there was a kind of headlong ravine where a little stream came

down in a succession of filmy waterfalls, and there were trees and bushes

growing between the walls of gray limestone. Six or seven hundred feet of

rock climbing—in tennis shoes, and all the footholes slippery with water.

And then, dear God! those snakes. The black one looped over the branch

by which he was pulling himself up. And five minutes later, the huge green

one coiled there on the ledge, just where he was preparing to step. Terror

had been succeeded by a terror infinitely worse. The sight of the snake had

made him start, made him violently withdraw his foot, and that sudden

unconsidered movement had made him lose his balance. For a long

sickening second, in the dreadful knowledge that this was the end, he had

swayed on the brink, then fallen. Death, death, death. And then, with the

noise of splintering wood in his ears he had found himself clinging to the

branches of a small tree, his face scratched, his right knee bruised and

bleeding, but alive. Painfully he had resumed his climbing. His knee hurt

him excruciatingly; but he climbed on. There was no alternative. And then

the light had begun to fail. In the end he was climbing almost in darkness,

climbing by faith, climbing by sheer despair.

"Here and now, boys," shouted the bird.

But Will Farnaby was neither here nor now. He was there on the rock

face, he was then at the dreadful moment of falling. The dry leaves rustled

beneath him; he was trembling. Violently, uncontrollably, he was trembling

from head to foot.

9

Suddenly the bird ceased to be articulate and started to scream. A

small shrill human voice said, "Mynah!" and then added something in a

language that Will did not understand. There was a sound of footsteps on

dry leaves. Then a little cry of alarm. Then silence. Will opened his eyes

and saw two exquisite children looking down at him, their eyes wide with

astonishment and a fascinated horror. The smaller of them was a tiny boy

of five, perhaps, or six, dressed only in a green loincloth. Beside him,

carrying a basket of fruit on her head, stood a little girl some four or five

years older. She wore a full crimson skirt that reached almost to her ankles;

but above the waist she was naked. In the sunlight her skin glowed like

pale copper flushed with rose. Will looked from one child to the other. How

beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant! Like two

little thoroughbreds. A round and sturdy thoroughbred, with a face like a

cherub's—that was the boy. And the girl was another kind of thoroughbred,

fine-drawn, with a rather long, grave little face framed between braids of

dark hair.

There was another burst of screaming. On its perch in the dead tree

the bird was turning nervously this way and that; then,

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Island

with a final screech, it dived into the air. Without taking her eyes from Will's

face, the girl held out her hand invitingly. The bird fluttered, settled, flapped

wildly, found its balance, then folded its wings and immediately started to

hiccup. Will looked on without surprise. Anything was possible now—

anything. Even talking birds that would perch on a child's finger. Will tried to

smile at them; but his lips were still trembling, and what was meant to be a

sign of friendliness must have seemed like a frightening grimace. The little

boy took cover behind his sister.

The bird stopped hiccuping and began to repeat a word that Will did

not understand. "Runa"—was that it? No, "karuna," Definitely "karuna."

He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the fruit in the round basket.

Mangoes, bananas . . . His dry mouth was watering.

"Hungry," he said. Then, feeling that in these exotic circumstances the

child might understand him better if he put on an imitation of a musical-

comedy Chinaman, "Me velly hungry," he elaborated.

"Do you want to eat?" the child asked in perfect English.

"Yes—eat," he repeated, "eat."

"Fly away, mynah!" She shook her hand. The bird uttered a protesting

squawk and returned to its perch on the dead tree. Lifting her thin little

arms in a gesture that was like a dancer's, the child raised the basket from

her head, then lowered it to the ground. She selected a banana, peeled it

and, torn between fear and compassion, advanced towards the stranger. In

his incomprehensible language the little boy uttered a cry of warning and

clutched at her skirt. With a reassuring word, the girl halted, well out of

danger, and held up the fruit.

"Do you want it?" she asked.

Still trembling, Will Farnaby stretched out his hand. Very cautiously,

she edged forward, then halted again and, crouching down, peered at him

intently.

11

"Quick," he said in an agony of impatience.

But the little girl was taking no chances. Eyeing his hand for the least

sign of a suspicious movement, she leaned forward, she cautiously

extended her arm.

"For God's sake," he implored.

"God?" the child repeated with sudden interest. "Which god?" she

asked. "There are such a lot of them."

"Any damned god you like," he answered impatiently.

"I don't really like any of them," she answered. "I like the

Compassionate One."

"Then be compassionate to me," he begged. "Give me that banana."

Her expression changed. "I'm sorry," she said apologetically. Rising to

her full height, she took a quick step forward and dropped the fruit into his

shaking hand.

"There," she said and, like a little animal avoiding a trap, she jumped

back, out of reach.

The small boy clapped his hands and laughed aloud. She turned and

said something to him. He nodded his round head, and saying "Okay,

boss," trotted away, through a barrage of blue and sulphur butterflies, into

the forest shadows on the further side of the glade.

"I told Tom Krishna to go and fetch someone," she explained.

Will finished his banana and asked for another, and then for a third. As

the urgency of his hunger diminished, he felt a need to satisfy his curiosity.

"How is it that you speak such good English?" he asked.

"Because everybody speaks English," the child answered.

"Everybody?"

"I mean, when they're not speaking Palanese." Finding the subject

uninteresting, she turned, waved a small brown hand and whistled.

"Here and now, boys," the bird repeated yet once more, then

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Island

fluttered down from its perch on the dead tree and settled on her shoulder.

The child peeled another banana, gave two-thirds of it to Will and offered

what remained to the mynah.

"Is that your bird?" Will asked.

She shook her head.

"Mynahs are like the electric light," she said. "They don't belong to

anybody."

"Why does he say those things?"

"Because somebody taught him," she answered patiently. What an

ass! her tone seemed to imply.

"But why did they teach him those things? Why 'Attention'? Why 'Here

and now'?"

"Well ..." She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-

evident to this strange imbecile. "That's what you always forget, isn't it? I

mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same

as not being here and now."

"And the mynahs fly about reminding you—is that it?"

She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.

"What's your name?" she inquired.

Will introduced himself.

"My name's Mary Sarojini MacPhail."

"MacPhail?" It was too implausible.

"MacPhail," she assured him.

"And your little brother is called Tom Krishna?" She nodded. "Well, I'm

damned!"

"Did you come to Pala by the airplane?"

"I came out of the sea."

"Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?"

"I did have one." With his mind's eye Will saw the waves breaking over

the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under

her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of

the boat, the long

13

nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling . . . He began to

tremble again, more violently than ever.

Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his

voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still

perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.

"Listen, Will," she said, laying a hand on his forehead. "We've got to

get rid of this." Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.

"I wish I knew how," he said between chattering teeth.

"How?" she repeated. "But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again

about those snakes and how you fell down."

He shook his head. "I don't want to."

"Of course you don't want to," she said. "But you've got to. Listen to

what the mynah's saying."

"Here and now, boys," the bird was still exhorting. "Here and now,

boys."

"You can't be here and now," she went on, "until you've got rid of those

snakes. Tell me."

"I don't want to, I don't want to." He was almost in tears.

"Then you'll never get rid of them. They'll be crawling about inside your

head forever. And serve you right," Mary Sarojini added severely.

He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to

him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to

humiliate him, to make him suffer.

"Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini

was saying. "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?"

She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little

baby."

"She did that?" The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. "But

that's awful! That's the way to rub it in. 'My poor

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15

baby,' " she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours.

And you'd never forget it."

Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by

irrepressible shudderings.

"Well, if you won't do it yourself, I'll have to do it for you. Listen, Will:

there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You

almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your

balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!"

"I almost stepped on him," he whispered obediently. "And then I ..." He

couldn't say it. "Then I fell," he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.

All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic

start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the

ghastly certainty that it was the end.

"Say it again."

"I almost stepped on him. And then ..."

He heard himself whimpering.

"That's right, Will. Cry—cry!"

The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth,

and the moaning stopped.

"No, don't do that," she cried. "Let it come out if it wants to. Remember

that snake, Will. Remember how you fell."

The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently

than ever.

"Now tell me what happened."

"I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out."

"Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?"

"I lost my balance, I fell."

"Say it again, Will." He was sobbing now. "Say it again," she insisted.

"I fell."

"Again."

It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. "I fell."

"Again, Will." She was implacable. "Again."

"I fell, I fell. I fell . . ."

Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and

the memories they aroused were less painful.

"I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.

"But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.

"No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.

"So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.

There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication

of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called

for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what was all the fuss about? The

snake hadn't bitten him; he hadn't broken his neck. And anyhow it had all

happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that

called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch

uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five

degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby

laughed aloud.

The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the

bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter

that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole

universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of

existence.

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"Well, I'm glad it's all so amusing," a deep voice suddenly commented.

Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man

dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag. A man, he judged,

in his late fifties. Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and

what a strange beaky nose! And the eyes—how incongruously blue in the

dark face!

"Grandfather!" he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.

The stranger turned from Will to the child.

"What was so funny?" he asked.

"Well," Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her

thoughts. "Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm

yesterday and he got wrecked—somewhere down there. So he had to

climb up the cliff. And there were some snakes, and he fell down. But

luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright. Which was why he was

shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through

it a million times. And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn't anything to

worry about. I mean, it's all over and done with. And that made him

17

laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. And then the mynah bird laughed."

"Very good," said her grandfather approvingly. "And now," he added,

turning back to Will Farnaby, "after the psychological first aid, let's see what

can be done for poor old Brother Ass. I'm Dr. Robert MacPhail, by the way.

Who are you?"

"His name's Will," said Mary Sarojini before the young man could

answer. "And his other name is Far-something."

"Farnaby, to be precise. William Asquith Farnaby. My father, as you

might guess, was an ardent Liberal. Even when he was drunk. Especially

when he was drunk." He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely

unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that

there was really nothing to make a fuss about.

"Didn't you like your father?" Mary Sarojini asked with concern.

"Not as much as I might have," Will answered.

"What he means," Dr. MacPhail explained to the child, "is that he

hated his father. A lot of them do," he added parenthetically.

Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his

black bag.

"One of our ex-imperialists, I assume," he said over his shoulder to the

young man.

"Born in Bloomsbury," Will confirmed.

"Upper class," the doctor diagnosed, "but not a member of the military

or county subspecies."

"Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is,

when he wasn't too busy being an alcoholic. My mother, incredible as it

may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon. An archdeacon,'" he

repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father's taste for

brandy.

Dr. MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention

once more to the straps.

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Island

"When you laugh like that," he remarked in a tone of scientific

detachment, "your face becomes curiously ugly."

Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of

facetiousness. "It's always ugly," he said.

"On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it's rather beautiful.

Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make

those noises?"

"I'm a journalist," Will explained. "Our Special Correspondent, paid to

travel about the world and report on the current horrors. What other kind of

noise do you expect me to make? Coo-coo? Blah-blah? Marx-Marx?" He

laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. "I'm the

man who won't take yes for an answer."

"Pretty," said Dr. MacPhail. "Very pretty. But now let's get down to

business." Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away

the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will's injured knee.

Will Farnaby looked up at him and wondered, as he looked, how much

of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese.

About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there could be no doubt. But the

brown skin, the delicate hands, the grace of movement—these surely came

from somewhere considerably south of the Tweed.

"Were you born here?" he asked.

The doctor nodded affirmatively. "At Shivapuram, on the day of Queen

Victoria's funeral."

There was a final click of the scissors, and the trouser leg fell away,

exposing the knee. "Messy," was Dr. MacPhail's verdict after a first intent

scrutiny. "But I don't think there's anything too serious." He turned to his

granddaughter. "I'd like you to run back to the station and ask Vijaya to

come here with one of the other men. Tell them to pick up a stretcher at the

infirmary."

Mary Sarojini nodded and, without a word, rose to her feet and hurried

away across the glade.

19

Will looked after the small figure as it receded—the red skirt swinging

from side to side, the smooth skin of the torso glowing rosily golden in the

sunlight.

"You have a very remarkable granddaughter," he said to Dr. MacPhail.

"Mary Sarojini's father," said the doctor after a little silence, "was my

eldest son. He died four months ago—a mountain-climbing accident."

Will mumbled his sympathy, and there was another silence.

Dr. MacPhail uncorked a bottle of alcohol and swabbed his hands.

"This is going to hurt a bit," he warned. "I'd suggest that you listen to

that bird." He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after

Mary Sarojini's departure, the mynah had returned.

"Listen to him closely, listen discriminatingly. It'll keep your mind off the

discomfort."

Will Farnaby listened. The mynah had gone back to its first theme.

"Attention," the articulate oboe was calling. "Attention."

"Attention to what?" he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more

enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.

"To attention," said Dr. MacPhail.

"Attention to attention?"

"Of course."

"Attention," the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.

"Do you have many of these talking birds?"

"There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It

was the Old Raja's idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it

does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately,

however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just

imagine," he went on, "preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and

goldfinches and

20

Island

chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut

and let the birds preach to him? And now," he added in another tone,

"you'd better start listening to our friend in the tree. I'm going to clean this

thing up."

"Attention."

"Here goes."

The young man winced and bit his lip.

"Attention. Attention. Attention."

Yes, it was quite true. If you listened intently enough, the pain wasn't

so bad.

"Attention. Attention ..."

"How you ever contrived to get up that cliff," said Dr. MacPhail, as he

reached for the bandage, "I cannot conceive."

Will managed to laugh. "Remember the beginning of Erewhon" he

said. " 'As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.' "

From the further side of the glade came the sound of voices. Will

turned his head and saw Mary Sarojini emerging from between the trees,

her red skirt swinging as she skipped along. Behind her, naked to the waist

and carrying over his shoulder the bamboo poles and rolled-up canvas of a

light stretcher, walked a huge bronze statue of a man, and behind the giant

came a slender, dark-skinned adolescent in white shorts.

"This is Vijaya Bhattacharya," said Dr. MacPhail as the bronze statue

approached. "Vijaya is my assistant."

"In the hospital?"

Dr. MacPhail shook his head. "Except in emergencies," he said, "I

don't practice any more. Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural

Experimental Station. And Murugan Mailen-dra" (he waved his hand in the

direction of the dark-skinned boy) "is with us temporarily, studying soil

science and plant breeding."

Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion's

shoulder, pushed him forward. Looking up into that beau-

21

tiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise,

the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo,

had driven with in Colonel Dipa's white Mercedes all over the island. He

smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself. Almost

imperceptibly but quite unmistakenly, the boy had shaken his head. In his

eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading. His lips moved

soundlessly. "Please," he seemed to be saying, "please ..." Will readjusted

his face.

"How do you do, Mr. Mailendra," he said in a tone of casual formality.

Murugan looked enormously relieved. "How do you do," he said, and

made a little bow.

Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened.

Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with tli£ stretcher and the

doctor was repacking his black bag. The little comedy had been played

without an audience. Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not

wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang. Boys will be boys.

Boys will even be girls. Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards

his young protege, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good

deal more than filial—he had been positively adoring. Was it merely hero

worship, merely a schoolboy's admiration for the strong man who had

carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition, and installed

himself as dictator? Or were other feelings involved? Was Murugan playing

Antinous to this black-mustached Hadrian? Well, if that was how he felt

about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege. And if the

gangster liked pretty boys, that was his. And perhaps, Will went on to

reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal

introduction. "This is Muru" was all he had said when the boy was ushered

into the presidential office. "My young friend Muru," and he had risen, had

put his arm around the boy's shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat

down beside

22

Island

him. "May I drive the Mercedes?" Murugan had asked. The dictator had

smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head. And that was another

reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that

curious relationship. At the wheel of the Colonel's sports car Murugan was

a maniac. Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to

mention his guest, to such a chauffeur. On the flat between Rendang-Lobo

and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten;

and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil

fields to the copper mines. Chasms yawned, tires screeched round corners,

water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car,

ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road. "Aren't

you a little nervous?" Will had ventured to ask. But the gangster was pious

as well as infatuated. "If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah—and I

do know it, Mr. Farnaby—there is no excuse for nervousness. In those

circumstances, nervousness would be blasphemy." And as Murugan

swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case

and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.

"Ready," Vijaya called.

Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside

him.

"Good!" said Dr. MacPhail. "Let's lift him onto it. Carefully. Carefully ..."

A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow

path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather

brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either

end of the stretcher.

From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green

darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the

surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And

now it was a dozen hornbills hopping,

23

like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.

"Are you comfortable?" Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into

his face.

Will smiled back at him.

"Luxuriously comfortable," he said.

"It isn't far," the other went on reassuringly. "We'll be there in a few

minutes."

"Where's 'there'?"

"The Experimental Station. It's like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to

Rothamsted when you were in England?"

Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.

"It's been going for more than a hundred years," Vijaya went on.

"A hundred and eighteen, to be precise," said Dr. MacPhail. "Lawes

and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils

came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our station

going. Rothamsted in the tropics— that was the idea. In the tropics and for

the tropics."

There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter

emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised

his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an

immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain,

checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In

the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards

a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the

plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour

lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what

seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely

natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its

geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have

24

Island

been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks

of pure bright color.

"What were you doing in Rendang?" Dr. Robert asked, breaking a long

silence.

"Collecting materials for a piece on the new regime." "I wouldn't have

thought the Colonel was newsworthy." "You're mistaken. He's a military

dictator. That means there's death in the offing. And death is always news.

Even the remote smell of death is news." He laughed. "That's why I was

told to drop in on my way back from China."

And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention.

Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde's interests. In another

manifestation he was the Southeast Asia Petroleum Company, he was

Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited. Officially, Will had come to Rendang

to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned

to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he

was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization. And how

much of the profits would be exportable? How many native technicians and

administrators would have to be employed? A whole battery of questions.

But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative. Hence that hair-

raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines. "Primitive,

my dear Farnaby, primitive. Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself,

of modern equipment." Another meeting had been arranged— arranged,

Will now remembered, for this very morning. He visualized the Colonel at

his desk. A report from the chief of police. "Mr. Farnaby was last seen

sailing a small boat singlehanded into the Pala Strait. Two hours later a

storm of great violence . . . Presumed dead ..." Instead of which, here he

was, alive and kicking, on the forbidden island.

"They'll never give you a visa," Joe Aldehyde had said at their last

interview. "But perhaps you could sneak ashore in disguise. Wear a

burnous or something, like Lawrence of Arabia."

25

With a straight face, "I'll try," Will had promised.

"Anyhow, if you ever do manage to land in Pala, make a bee-line for

the palace. The Rani—that's their Queen Mother—is an old friend of mine.

Met her for the first time six years ago at Lugano. She was staying there

with old Voegeli, the investment banker. His girl friend is interested in

spiritualism and they staged a seance for me. A trumpet medium, genuine

Direct Voice—only unfortunately it was all in German. Well, after the lights

were turned on, I had a long talk with her."

"With the trumpet?"

"No, no. With the Rani. She's a remarkable woman. You know, the

Crusade of the Spirit."

"Was that her invention?"

"Absolutely. And personally I prefer it to Moral Rearmament. It goes

down better in Asia. We had a long talk about it that evening. And after that

we talked about oil. Pala's full of oil. Southeast Asia Petroleum has been

trying to get in on it for years. So have all the other companies. Nothing

doing. No oil concessions to anyone. It's their fixed policy. But the Rani

doesn't agree with it. She wants to see the oil doing some good in the

world. Financing the Crusade of the Spirit, for example. So, as I say, if ever

you get to Pala, make a beeline for the palace. Talk to her. Get the inside

story about the men who make the decisions. Find out if there's a pro-oil

minority and ask how we could help them to carry on the good work." And

he had ended by promising Will a handsome bonus if his efforts should be

crowned with success. Enough to give him a full year of freedom. "No more

reporting. Nothing but High Art, Art, A-ART." And he had uttered a

scatalogical laugh as though the word had an s at the end of it and not a t.

Unspeakable creature! But all the same he wrote for the unspeakable

creature's vile papers and was ready, for a bribe, to do the vile creature's

dirty work. And now, incredibly, here he was on Palanese soil. As luck

would have it, Providence had been on his side—for the express

26

Island

purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes

which are Providence's specialty.

He was called back to present reality by the sound of Mary Sarojini's

shrill voice. "Here we are!"

Will raised his head again. The little procession had turned off the

highway and was passing through an opening in a white stuccoed wall. To

the left, on a rising succession of terraces, stood lines of low buildings

shaped by peepul trees. Straight ahead an avenue of tall palms sloped

down to a lotus pool, on the further side of which sat a huge stone Buddha.

Turning to the left, they climbed between flowering trees and through

blending perfumes to the first terrace. Behind a fence, motionless except

for his ruminating jaws, stood a snow-white humped bull, godlike in his

serene and mindless beauty. Europa's lover receded into the past, and

here were a brace of Juno's birds trailing their feathers over the grass.

Mary Sarojini unlatched the gate of a small garden.

"My bungalow," said Dr. MacPhail, and turning to Muru-gan, "Let me

help you to negotiate the steps."

27

Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini had gone to take their siesta with the

gardener's children next door. In her darkened living room Susila MacPhail

sat alone with her memories of past happiness and the present pain of her

bereavement. The clock in the kitchen struck the half hour. It was time for

her to go. With a sigh she rose, put on her sandals and walked out into the

tremendous glare of the tropical afternoon. She looked up at the sky. Over

the volcanoes enormous clouds were climbing towards the zenith. In an

hour it would be raining. Moving from one pool of shadow to the next, she

made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills a

flock of pigeons broke out of one of the towering peepul trees. Green-

winged and coral-billed, their breasts changing color in the light like mother-

of-pearl, they flew off towards the forest. How beautiful they were, how

unutterably lovely! Susila was on the point of turning to catch the

expression of delight on Dugald's upturned face; then, checking herself,

she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was

only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the

imagination,

28

Island

haunting even the perceptions of those who have undergone an

amputation. "Amputation," she whispered to herself, "amputation ..."

Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse

for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as

ever and her children, all the other children-, had as much need to be loved

and helped and taught. If his absence was so constantly present, that was

to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take

thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own

eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before

the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

But here was the doctor's bungalow. She mounted the steps, crossed

the veranda and walked into the living room. Her father-in-law was seated

near the window, sipping cold tea from an earthenware mug and reading

the Revue tie Mycologie. He looked up as she approached, and gave her a

welcoming

smile.

"Susila, my dear! I'm so glad you were able to come."

She bent down and kissed his stubbly cheek.

"What's all this I hear from Mary Sarojini?" she asked. "Is it true she

found a castaway?"

"From England—but via China, Rendang, and a shipwreck. A

journalist."

"What's he like?"

"The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be

convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were

convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings

would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won't allow

it."

"So I suppose he's very unhappy."

"So unhappy that he has to laugh like a hyena."

"Does he know he laughs like a hyena?"

29

"Knows and is rather proud of it. Even makes epigrams about it. 'I'm

the man who won't take yes for an answer.' "

"Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

"Not badly. But he's running a temperature. I've started him on

antibiotics. Now it's up to you to raise his resistance and give the vis

medicatrix naturae a chance."

"I'll do my best." Then, after a silence, "I went to see Lak-shmi," she

said, "on my way back from school."

"How did you find her?"

"About the same. No, perhaps a little weaker than yesterday/'

"That's what I felt when I saw her this morning."

"Luckily the pain doesn't seem to get any worse. We can still handle it

psychologically. And today we worked on the nausea. She was able to

drink something. I don't think there'll be any more need for intravenous

fluids."

"Thank goodness!" he said. "Those IV's were a torture. Such

enormous courage in the face of every real danger; but whenever it was a

question of a hypodermic or a needle in a vein, the most abject and

irrational terror."

He thought of the time, in the early days of their marriage, when he

had lost his temper and called her a coward for making such a fuss.

Lakshmi had cried and, having submitted to her martyrdom, had heaped

coals of fire upon his head by begging to be forgiven. "Lakshmi, Lakshmi . .

." And now in a few days she would be dead. After thirty-seven years.

"What did you talk about?" he asked aloud.

"Nothing in particular," Susila answered. But the truth was that they

had talked about Dugald and that she couldn't bring herself to repeat what

had passed between them. "My first baby," the dying woman had

whispered. "I didn't know that babies could be so beautiful." In their skull-

deep, skull-dark sockets the eyes had brightened, the bloodless lips had

smiled. "Such tiny, tiny hands," the faint hoarse voice went on, "such a

30

Island

greedy little mouth!" And an almost fleshless hand tremblingly touched the

place where, before last year's operation, her breast had been. "I never

knew," she repeated. And, before the event, how could she have known? It

had been a revelation, an apocalypse of touch and love. "Do you know

what I mean?" And Susila had nodded. Of course she knew—had known it

in relation to her own two children, known it, in those other apocalypses of

touch and love, with the man that little Dugald of the tiny hands and greedy

mouth had grown into. "I used to be afraid for him," the dying woman had

whispered. "He was so strong, such a tyrant, he could have hurt and bullied

and destroyed. If he'd married another woman . . . I'm so thankful it was

you!" From the place where the breast had been the fleshless hand moved

out and came to rest on Susila's arm. She had bent her head and kissed it.

They were both crying.

Dr. MacPhail sighed, looked up and, like a man who has climbed out of

the water, gave himself a little shake. "The castaway's name is Farnaby,"

he said. "Will Farnaby."

"Will Farnaby," Susila repeated. "Well, I'd better go and see what I can

do for him." She turned and walked away.

Dr. MacPhail looked after her, then leaned back in his chair and closed

his eyes. He thought of his son, he thought of his wife—of Lakshmi slowly

wasting to extinction, of Dugald like a bright fiery flame suddenly snuffed

out. Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances

that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose

conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern

of human destiny. "Poor girl," he said to himself, remembering the look on

Susila's face when he had told her of what had happened to Dugald, "poor

girl!" Meanwhile there was this article on Hallucinogenic mushrooms in the

Revue de Mycologie. That was another of the irrelevancies that somehow

took its place in the pattern. The words of one of the old Raja's queer little

poems came to his mind.

31

All things, to all things perfectly indifferent, perfectly work together in

discord for a Good beyond good, for a Being more timeless in transience,

more eternal in its dwindling than God there in heaven.

The door creaked, and an instant later Will heard light footsteps and

the rustle of skirts. Then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a woman's

voice, low-pitched and musical, asked him how he was feeling.

"I'm feeling miserable," he answered without opening his eyes.

There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy— only the

angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long

farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

"I'm feeling miserable."

The hand touched him again. "I'm Susila MacPhail," said the voice

"Mary Sarojini's mother."

Reluctantly Will turned his head and opened his eyes. An adult, darker

version of Mary Sarojini was sitting there beside the bed, smiling at him

with friendly solicitude. To smile back at her would have cost him too great

an effort; he contented himself with saying "How do you do," then pulled

the sheet a little higher and closed his eyes again.

Susila looked down at him in silence—at the bony shoulders, at the cage

of ribs under a skin whose Nordic pallor made him seem, to her Palanese

eyes, so strangely frail and vulnerable, at the sunburnt face, emphatically

featured like a carving intended to be seen at a distance—emphatic and yet

sensitive, the quivering, more than naked face, she found herself thinking,

of a man who has been flayed and left to suffer.

32

Island

"I hear you're from England," she said at last.

"I don't care where I'm from," Will muttered irritably. "Nor where I'm

going. From hell to hell."

"I was in England just after the war," she went on. "As a student."

He tried not to listen; but ears have no lids; there was no escape from

that intruding voice.

"There was a girl in my psychology class," it was saying: "her people

lived at Wells. She asked me to stay with them for the first month of the

summer vacation. Do you know Wells?"

Of course he knew Wells. Why did she pester him with her silly

reminiscences?

"I used to love walking there by the water," Susila went on, "looking

across the moat at the cathedral"—and thinking, while she looked at the

cathedral, of Dugald under the palm trees on the beach, of Dugald giving

her her first lesson in rock climbing. "You're on the rope. You're perfectly

safe. You can't possibly fall ..." Can't possibly fall, she repeated bitterly—

and then remembered here and now, remembered that she had a job to do,

remembered, as she looked again at the flayed emphatic face, that here

was a human being in pain. "How lovely it was," she went on, "and how

marvelously peaceful!"

The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and

in some strange way more remote. Perhaps that was why he no longer

resented its intrusion.

"Such an extraordinary sense of peace. Shanti, shanti, shanti. The

peace that passes understanding."

The voice was almost chanting now—chanting, it seemed, out of some

other world.

"I can shut my eyes," it chanted on, "can shut my eyes and see it all so

clearly. Can see the church—and it's enormous, much taller than the huge

trees round the bishop's palace. Can see the green grass and the water

and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between

the buttresses. And lis-

33

ten! I can hear the bells. The bells and the jackdaws. The jackdaws in the

tower—can you hear the jackdaws?"

Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as

he now heard those parrots in the trees outside his window. He was here

and at the same time he was there—here in this dark, sweltering room near

the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the edge of the

Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound

of the bells dying away into the green silence.

"And there are white clouds," the voice was saying, "and the blue sky

between them is so pale, so delicate, so exquisitely tender."

Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April weekend he had

spent there, before the disaster of their marriage, with Molly. There were

daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the

huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its

austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time

complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation. That was

how it should have been with himself and Molly—how it had been then.

"And the swans," he now heard the voice dreamily chanting, "the

swans ..."

Yes, the swans. White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet—

a breathing mirror that heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images

were forever breaking and coming together again, disintegrating and being

made whole.

"Like the inventions of heraldry. Romantic, impossibly beautiful. And

yet there they are—real birds in a real place. So near to me now that I can

almost touch them—and yet so far away, thousands of miles away. Far

away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly, majestically ..."

Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting

as the curved white breasts advanced—lifting, parting, sliding back in

ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead

34

Island

behind them. He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could

hear the jackdaws in the tower, could catch, through this nearer mingling of

disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat, weedy smell of that Gothic moat

in the faraway green valley.

"Effortlessly floating."

"Effortlessly floating." The words gave him a deep satisfaction.

"I'd sit there," she was saying, "I'd sit there looking and looking, and in

a little while I'd be floating too. I'd be floating with the swans on that smooth

surface between the darkness below and the pale tender sky above.

Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and far away,

between then and now." And between remembered happiness, she was

thinking, and this insistent, excruciating presence of an absence. "Floating,"

she said aloud, "on the surface between the real and the imagined,

between what comes to us from the outside and what comes to us from

within, from deep, deep down in

here."

She laid her hand on his forehead, and suddenly the words

transformed themselves into the things and events for which they stood;

the images turned into facts. He actually was floating.

"Floating," the voice softly insisted. "Floating like a white bird on the

water. Floating on a great river of life—a great smooth silent river that flows

so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it

flows irresistibly.

"Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living

peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete

because it knows all your pain and unhappi-ness, knows them and takes

them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And it's into

that peace that you're floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that

sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it's

sleeping. And I'm floating with it." She was speaking for the stranger. She

was speaking on another level for herself. "Effortlessly floating. Not having

to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself

35

to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take

me where it's going—and knowing all the time that where it's going is

where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace.

Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation."

Involuntarily, unconsciously, Will Farnaby gave a deep sigh. How silent

the world had become! Silent with a deep crystalline silence, even though

the parrots were still busy out there beyond the shutters, even though the

voice still chanted here beside him! Silence and emptiness and through the

silence and the emptiness flowed the river, sleeping and irresistible.

Susila looked down at the face on the pillow. It seemed suddenly very

young, childlike in its perfect serenity. The frowning lines across the

forehead had disappeared. The lips that had been so tightly closed in pain

were parted now, and the breath came slowly, softly, almost imperceptibly.

She remembered suddenly the words that had come into her mind as she

looked down, one moonlit night, at the transfigured innocence of Dugald's

face: "She giveth her beloved sleep." "Sleep," she said aloud. "Sleep."

The silence seemed to become more absolute, the emptiness more

enormous.

"Asleep on the sleeping river," the voice was saying. "And above the

river, in the pale sky, there are huge white clouds. And as you look at them,

you begin to float up towards them. Yes, you begin to float up towards

them, and the river now is a river in the air, an invisible river that carries

you on, carries you up, higher and higher."

Upwards, upwards through the silent emptiness. The image was the

thing, the words became the experience.

"Out of the hot plain," the voice went on, "effortlessly, into the

freshness of the mountains."

Yes, there was the Jungfrau, dazzlingly white against the blue. There

was Monte Rosa . . .

36

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"How fresh the air feels as you breathe it. Fresh, pure, charged with

life!"

He breathed deeply and the new life flowed into him. And now a little

wind came blowing across the snowfields, cool against his skin, deliciously

cool. And, as though echoing his thoughts, as though describing his

experience, the voice said, "Coolness. Coolness and sleep. Through

coolness into more life. Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness,

into living peace."

Half an hour later Susila re-entered the sitting room.

"Well?" her father-in-law questioned. "Any success?"

She nodded.

"I talked to him about a place in England," she said. "He went off more

quickly than I'd expected. After that I gave him some suggestions about his

temperature ..."

"And the knee, I hope."

"Of course."

"Direct suggestions?"

"No, indirect. They're always better. I got him to be conscious of his

body image. Then I made him imagine it much bigger than in everyday

reality—and the knee much smaller. A miserable little thing in revolt against

a huge and splendid thing. There can't be any doubt as to who's going to

win." She looked at the clock on the wall. "Goodness, I must hurry.

Otherwise I'll be late for my class at school."

37

The sun was just rising as Dr. Robert entered his wife's room at the

hospital. An orange glow, and against it the jagged silhouette of the

mountains. Then suddenly a dazzling sickle of incandescence between two

peaks. The sickle became a half circle and the first long shadows, the first

shafts of golden light crossed the garden outside the window. And when

one looked up again at the mountains there was the whole unbearable

glory of the risen sun.

Dr. Robert sat down by the bed, took his wife's hand and kissed it. She

smiled at him, then turned again towards the window.

"How quickly the earth turns!" she whispered, and then after a silence,

"One of these mornings," she added, "it'll be my last sunrise."

Through the confused chorus of bird cries and insect noises, a mynah

was chanting, "Karuna. Karuna . . ."

"Karuna," Lakshmi repeated. "Compassion . . ."

"Karuna. Karuna," the oboe voice of Buddha insisted from the garden.

38

Island

"I shan't be needing it much longer," she went on. "But what about

you? Poor Robert, what about you?"

"Somehow or other one finds the necessary strength," he said.

"But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of

armor, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your

work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else? Remember

how I used to come and pull your hair and make you pay attention? Who's

going to do that when I'm gone?"

A nurse came in with a glass of sugared water. Dr. Robert slid a hand

under his wife's shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. The nurse held

the glass to her lips. Lakshmi drank a little water, swallowed with difficulty,

then drank again and yet once more. Turning from the proffered glass, she

looked up at Dr. Robert. The wasted face was illumined by a strangely

incongruous twinkle of pure mischief.

" 'I the Trinity illustrate,' " the faint voice hoarsely quoted, " 'sipping

watered orange pulp; in three sips the Arian frustrate' . . ." She broke off.

"What a ridiculous thing to be remembering. But then I always was pretty

ridiculous, wasn't I?"

Dr. Robert did his best to smile back at her. "Pretty ridiculous," he

agreed.

"You used to say I was like a flea. Here one moment and then, hop!

somewhere else, miles away. No wonder you could never educate me!"

"But you educated me all right," he assured her. "If it hadn't been for

you coming in and pulling my hair and making me look at the world and

helping me to understand it, what would I be today? A pedant in blinkers—

in spite of all my training. But luckily I had the sense to ask you to marry

me, and luckily you had the folly to say yes and then the wisdom and

intelligence to make a good job of me. After thirty-seven years of adult

education I'm almost human."

39

"But I'm still a flea." She shook her head. "And yet I did try. I tried very

hard. I don't know if you ever realized it, Robert: I was always on tiptoes,

always straining up towards the place where you were doing your work and

your thinking and your reading. On tiptoes, trying to reach it, trying to get up

there beside you. Goodness, how tiring it was! What an endless series of

efforts! And all of them quite useless. Because I was just a dumb flea

hopping about down here among the people and the flowers and the cats

and dogs. Your kind of highbrow world was a place I could never climb up

to, much less find my way in. When this thing happened" (she raised her

hand again to her absent breast) "I didn't have to try any more. No more

school, no more homework. I had a permanent excuse."

There was a long silence.

"What about taking another sip?" said the nurse at last.

"Yes, you ought to drink some more," Dr. Robert agreed.

"And ruin the Trinity?" Lakshmi gave him another of her smiles.

Through the mask of age and mortal sickness Dr. Robert suddenly saw the

laughing girl with whom, half a lifetime ago, and yet only yesterday, he had

fallen in love.

An hour later Dr. Robert was back in his bungalow.

"You're going to be all alone this morning," he announced, after

changing the dressing on Will Farnaby's knee. "I have to drive down to

Shivapuram for a meeting of the Privy Council. One of our student nurses

will come in around twelve to give you your injection and get you something

to eat. And in the afternoon, as soon as she's finished her work at the

school, Susila will be dropping in again. And now I must be going." Dr.

Robert rose and laid his hand for a moment on Will's arm. "Till this

evening." Halfway to the door he halted and turned back. "I almost forgot to

give you this." From one of the side pockets of his sagging jacket he pulled

out a small green booklet. "It's the

40

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Old Raja's Notes on What's What, and on What It Might be

Reasonable to Do about What's What."

"What an admirable title!" said Will as he took the proffered book.

"And you'll like the contents, too," Dr. Robert assured him. "Just a few

pages, that's all. But if you want to know what Pala is all about, there's no

better introduction."

"Incidentally," Will asked, "who is the Old Raja?"

"Who was he, I'm afraid. The Old Raja died in 'thirty-eight—after a

reign three years longer than Queen Victoria's. His eldest son died before

he did, and he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass—but

made up for it by being shortlived. The present Raja is his great-grandson."

'

"And, if I may ask a personal question, how does anybody called

MacPhail come into the picture?"

"The first MacPhail of Pala came into it under the Old Raja's

grandfather—the Raja of the Reform, we call him. Between them, he and

my great-grandfather invented modern Pala. The Old Raja consolidated

their work and carried it further. And today we're doing our best to follow in

his footsteps."

Will held up the Notes on What's What.

"Does this give the history of the reforms?"

Dr. Robert shook his head. "It merely states the underlying principles.

Read about those first. When I get back from Shiva-puram this evening, I'll

give you a taste of the history. You'll have a better understanding of what

was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done—what

always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea

about what's what. So read it, read it. And don't forget to drink your fruit

juice at eleven."

Will watched him go, then opened the little green book and started to

read.

41

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it,

already there.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I

think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know

who I am.

What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to

know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and

the blessed experience of Not-Two.

In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about

Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with

carbolic soap.

Because his aspiration to perpetuate only the "yes" in every pair of

opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realized, the insulated

Manichee I think I am condemns himself to endlessly repeated frustration,

endlessly repeated conflicts with other aspiring and frustrated Manichees.

Conflicts and frustrations—the theme of all history and almost all

biography. "I show you sorrow," said the Buddha realistically. But he also

showed the ending of sorrow—self-knowledge, total acceptance, the

blessed experience of Not-Two.

Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being

results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not

of itself result in Good Being. We can be virtuous without knowing who in

fact we are. The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they

are just pillars of society.

Most pillars are their own Samsons. They hold up, but sooner or later

they pull down. There has never been a society in which most good doing

was the product of Good Being and therefore constantly appropriate. This

does not mean that there will never be such a society or that we in Pala are

fools for trying to call it into existence.

42

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The Yogin and the Stoic—two righteous egos who achieve their very

considerable results by pretending, systematically, to be somebody else.

But it is not by pretending to be somebody else, even somebody supremely

good and wise, that we can pass from insulated Manichee-hood to Good

Being.

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in

fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are

and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of

clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not,

puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until

they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are

not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.

Concentration, abstract thinking, spiritual exercises-systematic

exclusions in the realm of thought. Asceticism and hedonism—systematic

exclusions in the realms of sensation, feeling and action. But Good Being is

in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences. So be

aware—aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or

discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This

is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing.

The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he

43

knows about God. Translating Spinoza's language into ours, we can say:

The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of

experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing

who in fact he is—or rather Who (capital W) in Fact (capital F) "he"

(between quotation marks) Is (capital I).

St. John was right. In a blessedly speechless universe, the Word was

not only with God; it was God. As a something to be believed in. God is a

projected symbol, a reified name. God = "God."

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic

taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words,

Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words—people take them too

seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence

of history—sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty;

devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity

selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and

crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For

Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in

fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give

us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

There was a tap at the door. Will looked up from his book.

"Who's there?"

"It's me," said a voice that brought back unpleasant memories of

Colonel Dipa and that nightmarish drive in the white Mercedes. Dressed

only in white sandals, white shorts, and a platinum wrist watch, Murugan

was advancing towards the bed.

"How nice of you to come and see me!"

Another visitor would have asked him how he was feeling; but

Murugan was too wholeheartedly concerned with himself to be able even to

simulate the slightest interest in anyone else. "I

44

Island

came to the door three-quarters of an hour ago," he said in tones of

aggrieved complaint. "But the old man hadn't left, so I had to go home

again. And then I had to sit with my mother and the man who's staying with

us while they were having their breakfast..."

"Why couldn't you come in while Dr. Robert was here?" Will asked. "Is

it against the rules for you to talk to me?"

The boy shook his head impatiently. "Of course not. I just didn't want

him to know the reason for my coming to see you."

"The reason?" Will smiled. "Visiting the sick is an act of charity—highly

commendable."

His irony was lost upon Murugan, who went on steadily thinking about

his own affairs. "Thank you for not telling them you'd seen me before," he

said abruptly, almost angrily. It was as though he resented having to

acknowledge his obligation and were furious with Will for having done him

the good turn which demanded this acknowledgment.

"I could see you didn't want me to say anything about it," said Will. "So

of course I didn't."

"I wanted to thank you," Murugan muttered between his teeth and in a

tone that would have been appropriate to "You dirty swine!"

"Don't mention it," said Will with mock politeness.

What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amused

curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a

statue's but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—-a Hellenistic face,

mobile and all too human. A vessel of incomparable beauty—but what did it

contain? It was a pity, he reflected, that he hadn't asked that question a

little more seriously before getting involved with his unspeakable Babs. But

then Babs was a female. By the sort of heterosexual he was, the sort of

rational question he was now posing was unaskable. As no doubt it would

be, by anyone susceptible to boys, in regard to this bad-blooded little

demigod sitting at the end of his bed.

45

"Didn't Dr. Robert know you'd gone to Rendang?" he asked.

"Of course he knew. Everybody knew it. I'd gone there to fetch my

mother. She was staying there with some of her relations. I went over to

bring her back to Pala. It was absolutely official."

"Then why didn't you want me to say that I'd met you over there?"

Murugan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at Will defiantly.

"Because I didn't want them to know I'd been seeing Colonel Dipa."

Oh, so that was it! "Colonel Dipa's a remarkable man," he said aloud,

fishing with sugared bait for confidences.

Surprisingly unsuspicious, the fish rose at once. Murugan's sulky face

lit up with enthusiasm and there, suddenly, was Anti-nous in all the

fascinating beauty of his ambiguous adolescence. "I think he's wonderful,"

he said, and for the first time since he had entered the room he seemed to

recognize Will's existence and give him the friendliest of smiles. The

Colonel's wonderful-ness had made him forget his resentment, had made it

possible for him, momentarily, to love everybody—even this man to whom

he owed a rankling debt of gratitude. "Look at what he's doing for

Rendang!"

"He's certainly doing a great deal for Rendang," said Will

noncommittally.

A cloud passed across Murugan's radiant face. "They don't think so

here," he said, frowning. "They think he's awful."

"Who thinks so?"

"Practically everybody!" ;! "So they didn't want you to see him?"

With the expression of an urchin who has cocked a snook while the

teacher's back is turned, Murugan grinned triumphantly. "They thought I

was with my mother all the time."

Will picked up the cue at once. "Did your mother know you were

seeing the Colonel?" he asked.

46

Island

"Of course." "And had no objection?" "She was all for it."

And yet, Will felt quite sure, he hadn't been mistaken when he thought

of Hadrian and Antinous. Was the woman blind? Or didn't she wish to see

what was happening?

"But if she doesn't mind," he said aloud, "why should Dr. Robert and

the rest of them object?" Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizing

that he had ventured too far into forbidden territory, Will hastily drew a red

herring across the trail. "Do they think," he asked with a laugh, "that he

might convert you to a belief in military dictatorship?"

The red herring was duly followed, and the boy's face relaxed into a

smile. "Not that, exactly," he answered, "but something like it. It's all so

stupid," he added with a shrug of the shoulders. "Just idiotic protocol."

"Protocol?" Will was genuinely puzzled.

"Weren't you told anything about me?"

"Only what Dr. Robert said yesterday."

"You mean, about my being a student?" Murugan threw back his head

and laughed.

"What's so funny about being a student?"

"Nothing—nothing at all." The boy looked away again. There was a

silence. Still averted, "The reason," he said at last, "why I'm not supposed

to see Colonel Dipa is that he's the head of a state and I'm the head of a

state. When we meet, it's international politics."

"What do you mean?"

"I happen to be the Raja of Pala."

"TheRajaofPala?"

"Since 'fifty-four. That was when my father died."

"And your mother, I take it, is the Rani?"

"My mother is the Rani."

Make a beelinefor the palace. But here was the palace making

47

a beeline for him. Providence, evidently, was on the side of Joe Aldehyde

and working overtime.

"Were you the eldest son?" he asked.

"The only son," Murugan replied. And then, stressing his uniqueness

still more emphatically, "The only child,'1'' he added.

"So there's no possible doubt," said Will. "My goodness! I ought to be

calling you Your Majesty. Or at least Sir." The words were spoken

laughingly; but it was with the most perfect seriousness and a sudden

assumption of regal dignity that Murugan responded to them.

"You'll have to call me that at the end of next week," he said. "After my

birthday. I shall be eighteen. That's when a Raja of Pala comes of age. Till

then I'm just Murugan Mailendra. Just a student learning a little bit about

everything—including plant breeding," he added contemptuously—"so that,

when the time comes, I shall know what I'm doing."

"And when the time comes, what will you be doing?" Between this

pretty Antinous and his portentous office there was a contrast which Will

found richly comic. "How do you propose to act?" he continued on a

bantering note. "Off with their heads? L'etat c'est moi?"

Seriousness and regal dignity hardened into rebuke. "Don't be stupid."

Amused, Will went through the motions of apology. "I just wanted to

find out how absolute you were going to be."

"Pala is a constitutional monarchy," Murugan answered gravely.

"In other words, you're just going to be a symbolic figurehead—to

reign, like the Queen of England, but not rule."

Forgetting his regal dignity, "No, no" Murugan almost screamed. "Not

like the Queen of England. The Raja of Pala doesn't just reign; he rules."

Too much agitated to sit still, Murugan jumped up and began to walk about

the room. "He rules constitutionally; but, by God, he rules, he rules!"

Murugan

48

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49

walked to the window and looked out. Turning back after a moment of

silence, he confronted Will with a face transfigured by its new expression

into an emblem, exquisitely molded and colored, of an all too familiar kind

of psychological ugliness. "I'll show them who's the boss around here," he

said in a phrase and tone which had obviously been borrowed from the

hero of some American gangster movie. "These people think they can push

me around," he went on, reciting from the dismally commonplace script,

"the way they pushed my father around. But they're making a big mistake."

He uttered a sinister snigger and wagged his beautiful, odious head. "A big

mistake," he repeated.

The words had been spoken between clenched teeth and with scarcely

moving lips; the lower jaw had been thrust out so as to look like the jaw of a

comic strip criminal; the eyes glared coldly between narrowed lids. At once

absurd and horrible. Antinous had become the caricature of all the tough

guys in all the B-pictures from time immemorial.

"Who's been running the country during your minority?" he now asked.

"Three sets of old fogeys," Murugan answered contemptuously. "The

Cabinet, the House of Representatives and then, representing me, the

Raja, the Privy Council."

"Poor old fogeys!" said Will. "They'll soon be getting the shock of their

lives." Entering gaily into the spirit of delinquency, he laughed aloud. "I only

hope I'll still be around to see it happening."

Murugan joined in the laughter—joined in it, not as the sin-isterly

mirthful Tough Guy, but with one of those sudden changes of mood and

expression that would make it, Will foresaw, so hard for him to play the

Tough Guy part, as the triumphant urchin of a few minutes earlier. "The

shock of their lives," he repeated happily.

"Have you made any specific plans?"

"I most certainly have," said Murugan. On his mobile face the

triumphant urchin made way for the statesman, grave but condescendingly

affable, at a press conference. "Top priority: get this place modernized.

Look at what Rendang has been able to do because of its oil royalties."

"But doesn't Pala get any oil royalties?" Will questioned with that

innocent air of total ignorance which he had found by long experience to be

the best way of eliciting information from the simpleminded and the self-

important.

"Not a penny," said Murugan. "And yet the southern end of the island

is fairly oozing with the stuff. But except for a few measly little wells for

home consumption, the old fogeys won't do anything about it. And what's

more, they won't allow anyone else to do anything about it." The statesman

was growing angry; there were hints now in his voice and expression of the

Tough Guy. "All sorts of people have made offers—Southeast Asia

Petroleum, Shell, Royal Dutch, Standard of California. But the bloody old

fools won't listen."

"Can't you persuade them to listen?"

"I'll damn well make them listen," said the Tough Guy.

"That's the spirit!" Then, casually, "Which of the offers do you think of

accepting?" he asked.

"Colonel Dipa's working with Standard of California, and he thinks it

might be best if we did the same."

"I wouldn't do that without at least getting a few competing bids."

"That's what I think too. So does my mother."

"Very wise."

"My mother's all for Southeast Asia Petroleum. She knows the

Chairman of the Board, Lord Aldehyde."

"She knows Lord Aldehyde? But how extraordinary!" The tone of

delighted astonishment was thoroughly convincing. "Joe Aldehyde is a

friend of mine. I write for his papers. I even serve

50

Island

as his private ambassador. Confidentially," he added, "that's why we took

that trip to the copper mines. Copper is one of Joe's sidelines. But of

course his real love is oil."

Murugan tried to look shrewd. "What would he be prepared to offer?"

Will picked up the cue and answered, in the best movie -tycoon style,

"Whatever Standard offers plus a little more."

"Fair enough," said Murugan out of the same script, and nodded

sagely. There was a long silence. When he spoke again, it was as the

statesman granting an interview to representatives of the press.

"The oil royalties," he said, "will be used in the following manner:

twenty-five percent of all moneys received will go to World Reconstruction."

"May I ask," Will enquired deferentially, "precisely how you propose to

reconstruct the world?"

"Through the Crusade of the Spirit. Do you know about the Crusade of

the Spirit?"

"Of course. Who doesn't?"

"It's a great world movement," said the statesman gravely. "Like Early

Christianity. Founded by my mother."

Will registered awe and astonishment.

"Yes, founded by my mother," Murugan repeated, and he added

impressively, "I believe it's man's only hope."

"Quite," said Will Farnaby, "quite."

"Well, that's how the first twenty-five percent of the royalties will be

used," the statesman continued. "The remainder will go into an intensive

program of industrialization." The tone changed again. "These old idiots

here only want to industrialize in spots and leave all the rest as it was a

thousand years ago."

"Whereas you'd like to go the whole hog. Industrialization for

industrialization's sake."

"No, industrialization for the country's sake. Industrialization to make

Pala strong. To make other people respect us. Look

51

at Rendang. Within five years they'll be manufacturing all the rifles and

mortars and ammunition they need. It'll be quite a long time before they can

make tanks. But meanwhile they can buy them from Skoda with their oil

money."

"How soon will they graduate to H-bombs?" Will asked ironically.

"They won't even try," Murugan answered. "But after all," he added,

"H-bombs aren't the only absolute weapons." He pronounced the phrase

with relish. It was evident that he found the taste of "absolute weapons"

positively delicious. "Chemical and biological weapons—Colonel Dipa calls

them the poor man's H-bombs. One of the first things I'll do is to build a big

insecticide plant." Murugan laughed and winked an eye. "If you can make

insecticides," he said, "you can make nerve gas."

Will remembered that still unfinished factory in the suburbs of

Rendang-Lobo.

"What's that?" he had asked Colonel Dipa as they flashed past it in the

white Mercedes.

"Insecticides," the Colonel had answered. And showing his gleaming

white teeth in a genial smile, "We shall soon be exporting the stuff all over

Southeast Asia."

At the time, of course, he had thought that the Colonel merely meant

what he said. But now . . . Will shrugged his mental shoulders. Colonels will

be colonels and boys, even boys like Murugan, will be gun-loving boys.

There would always be plenty of jobs for special correspondents on the trail

of death.

"So you'll strengthen Pala's army?" Will said aloud.

"Strengthen it? No—I'll create it. Pala doesn't have an army."

"None at all?"

"Absolutely nothing. They're all pacifists." The p was an explosion of

disgust, the s's hissed contemptuously. "I shall have to start from scratch."

"And you'll militarize as you industrialize, is that it?"

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Island

"Exactly."

Will laughed. "Back to the Assyrians! You'll go down in history as a

true revolutionary."

"That's what I hope," said Murugan. "Because that's what my policy is

going to be—Continuing Revolution."

"Very good!" Will applauded.

"I'll just be continuing the revolution that was started more than a

hundred years ago by Dr. Robert's great-grandfather when he came to

Pala and helped my great-great-grandfather to put through the first reforms.

Some of the things they did were really wonderful. Not all of them, mind

you," he qualified; and with the absurd solemnity of a schoolboy playing

Polonius in an end-of-term performance of Hamlet he shook his curly head

in grave, judicial disapproval. "But at least they did something. Whereas

nowadays we're governed by a set of do-nothing conservatives.

Conservatively primitive—they won't lift a finger to bring in modern

improvements. And conservatively radical— they refuse to change any of

the old bad revolutionary ideas that ought to be changed. They won't

reform the reforms. And I tell you, some of those so-called reforms are

absolutely disgusting."

"Meaning, I take it, that they have something to do with sex?"

Murugan nodded and turned away his face. To his astonishment, Will

saw that he was blushing.

"Give me an example," he demanded.

But Murugan could not bring himself to be explicit.

"Ask Dr. Robert," he said, "ask Vijaya. They think that sort of thing is

simply wonderful. In fact they all do. That's one of the reasons why nobody

wants to change. They'd like everything to go on as it is, in the same old

disgusting way, forever and ever."

"Forever and ever," a rich contralto voice teasingly repeated.

"Mother!" Murugan sprang to his feet.

Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed

(rather incongruously, he thought; for that kind of face and build usually

went with mauve and magenta and electric

53

blue) in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious

mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jeweled hand

pressed against the doorjamb, in the pose of the great actress, the

acknowledged diva, pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of

her adorers on the other side of the footlights. In the background, waiting

patiently for his cue, stood a tall man in a dove-gray Dacron suit whom

Murugan, peering past the massive embodiment of maternity that almost

filled the doorway, now greeted as Mr. Bahu.

Still in the wings, Mr. Bahu bowed without speaking.

Murugan turned again to his mother. "Did you walk here?" he asked.

His tone expressed incredulity and an admiring solicitude. Walking here—

how unthinkable! But if she had walked, what heroism! "All the way?"

"All the way, my baby," she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm

came down, slid round the boy's slender body, pressed it, engulfed in

floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. "I

had one of my Impulses." She had a way, Will noticed, of making you

actually hear the capital letters at the beginning of the words she meant to

emphasize. "My Little Voice said, 'Go and see this Stranger at Dr. Robert's

house. Go!' 'Now?' I said. ''Malgre la chaleur? Which makes my Little Voice

lose patience. 'Woman,' it says, 'hold your silly tongue and do as you're

told.' So here I am, Mr. Farnaby." With hand outstretched and surrounded

by a powerful aura of sandal-wood oil, she advanced towards him.

Will bowed over the thick bejeweled ringers and mumbled something

that ended in "Your Highness."

"Bahu!" she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned

surname.

Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his

entrance and was introduced as His Excellency, Abdul Bahu, the

Ambassador of Rendang: "Abdul Pierre Bahu—car sa mere est parisienne.

But he learned his English in New York."

54

Island

He looked, Will thought as he shook the Ambassador's hand, like

Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.

"Bahu," said the Rani, "is Colonel Dipa's Brains Trust."

"Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me

and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel."

His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a

parody of deference and self-abasement.

"The brains," he went on, "are where brains ought to be—in the head.

As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang's sympathetic nervous system."

"Et combien sympathique!" said the Rani. "Among other things, Mr.

Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country

place! Like The Arabian Nights! One claps one's hands—and instantly

there are six servants ready to do one's bidding. One has a birthday—and

there is a fete nocturne in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls;

two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Harun al-Rashid, but

with modern plumbing."

"It sounds quite delightful," said Will, remembering the villages through

which he had passed in Colonel Dipa's white Mercedes—the wattled huts,

the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women

bent double under enormous loads.

"And such taste," the Rani went on, "such a well-stored mind and,

through it all" (she lowered her voice) "such a deep and unfailing Sense of

the Divine."

Mr. Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.

Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a

backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very

nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—

the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.

"I hope you don't feel that my visit is an intrusion," she said

55

to Will. He assured her that he didn't; but she continued to apologize. "I

would have given warning," she said, "I would have asked your permission.

But my Little Voice says, 'No—you must go now.' Why? I cannot say. But

no doubt we shall find out in due course." She fixed him with her large,

bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. "And now, first of all, how

are you, dear Mr. Farnaby?"

"As you see, ma'am, in very good shape."

"Truly?" The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intent-ness that

he found embarrassing. "I can see that you're the kind of heroically

considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his

deathbed."

"You're very flattering," he said. "But as it happens, I am in good

shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so."

"Miraculous," said the Rani, "was the very word I used when I heard

about your escape. It was a miracle."

" 'As luck would have it,' " Will quoted again from Erewhon, "

'Providence was on my side.' "

Mr. Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently

failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of

merriment into a loud cough.

"How true!" the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly

vibrated. "Providence is always on our side." And when Will raised a

questioning eyebrow, "I mean," she elaborated, "in the eyes of those who

Truly Understand" (capital T, capital U). "And this is true even when all

things seem to conspire against us—meme dans le desastre. You

understand French, of course, Mr. Farnaby?" Will nodded. "It often comes

to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese. After

so many years in Switzerland," she explained, "first at school. And again,

later on, when my poor baby's health was so precarious" (she patted

Murugan's bare arm) "and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which

illustrates what I was saying

56

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about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my

little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I'd ever

learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for

having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got

well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our

lives— weren't they, darling?"

"The happiest of our lives," the boy agreed, with what almost sounded

like complete sincerity.

The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips, and with a faint

smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. "So you see, my dear

Farnaby," she went on, "you see. It's really self-evident. Nothing happens

by Accident. There's a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable

little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us."

"Quite," said Will politely. "Quite."

"There was a time," the Rani continued, "when I knew it only with my

intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really ..." she paused for an instant

to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, "Understand."

"Psychic as hell." Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her.

And surely that lifelong frequenter of seances should know.

"I take it, ma'am," he said, "that you're naturally psychic."

"From birth," she admitted. "But also and above all by training.

Training, needless to say, in Something Else."

"Something else?"

"In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the sidhis,

all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously."

"Is that so?"

"My mother," Murugan proudly assured him, "can do the most fantastic

things."

"N'exagerons pas, cheri."

57

"But it's the truth," Murugan insisted.

"A truth," the Ambassador put in, "which I can confirm. And I confirm

it," he added, smiling at his own expense, "with a certain reluctance. As a

lifelong skeptic about these things, I don't like to see the impossible

happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the

impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I'm compelled malgre

moi to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the most fantastic

things."

"Well, if you like to put it that way," said the Rani, beaming with

pleasure. "But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely

no importance. What's important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes

to at the end of the Path."

"After the Fourth Initiation," Murugan specified. "My mother ..."

"Darling!" The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. "These are things

one doesn't talk about."

"I'm sorry," said the boy. There was a long and pregnant silence.

The Rani closed her eyes, and Mr. Bahu, letting fall his monocle,

reverentially followed suit and became the image of Savonarola in silent

prayer. What was going on behind that austere, that almost fleshless mask

of recollectedness? Will looked and wondered.

"May I ask," he said at last, "how you first came, ma'am, to find the

Path?"

For a second or two the Rani said nothing, merely sat there with her

eyes shut, smiling her Buddha smile of mysterious bliss. "Providence found

it for me," she answered at last.

"Quite, quite. But there must have been an occasion, a place, a human

instrument."

"I'll tell you." The lids fluttered apart and once again he found himself

under the bright unswerving glare of those protu-! berant eyes of hers.

58

Island

The place had been Lausanne; the time, the first year of her Swiss

education; the chosen instrument, darling little Mme Buloz. Darling little

Mme Buloz was the wife of darling old Professor Buloz, and old Professor

Buloz was the man to whose charge, after careful enquiry and much

anxious thought, she had been committed by her father, the late Sultan of

Rendang. The Professor was sixty-seven, taught geology and was a

Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret

with his dinner, saying his prayers only twice a day, and being strictly

monogamous, he might almost have been a Muslim. Under such

guardianship a princess of Rendang would be intellectually stimulated,

while remaining morally and doctrinally intact. But the Sultan had reckoned

without the Professor's wife. Mme Buloz was only forty, plump, sentimental,

bubblingly enthusiastic and, though officially of her husband's Protestant

persuasion, a newly converted and intensely ardent Theosophist. In a room

at the top of the tall house near the Place de la Riponne she had her

Oratory, to which, whenever she could find time, she would secretly retire

to do breathing exercises, practice concentration, and raise Kundalini.

Strenuous disciplines! But the reward was transcendentally great. In the

small hours of a hot summer night, while the darling old Professor lay

rhythmically snoring two floors down, she had become aware of a

Presence: the Master Koot Hoomi was with her.

The Rani made an impressive pause. "Extraordinary," said Mr. Bahu.

"Extraordinary," Will dutifully echoed. The Rani resumed her narrative.

Irrepressibly happy, Mme Buloz had been unable to keep her secret. She

had dropped mysterious hints, had passed from hints to confidences, from

confidences to an invitation to the Oratory and a course of

instruction. In a very short time Koot Hoomi was bestowing greater favors

upon the novice than upon her teacher.

59

"And from that day to this," she concluded, "the Master has helped me

to Go Forward."

To go forward, Will asked himself, into what? Koot Hoomi only knew.

But whatever it was that she had gone forward into, he didn't like it. There

was an expression on that large florid face which he found peculiarly

distasteful—an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakable

self-esteem. She reminded him in a curious way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was

one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without

inhibition in their money and in all that their money will buy in the way of

influence and power. And here—albeit clothed in white muslin, mystic,

wonderful—was another of Joe Aldehyde's breed: a female tycoon who

had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure

Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily rubbing her

hands over the exploit.

"Here's one example of what He's done for me," the Rani went on.

"Eight years ago—to be exact, on the twenty-third of November, 1952—the

Master came to me in my morning Meditation. Came in Person, came in

Glory. 'A great Crusade is to be launched,' He said, 'a World Movement to

save Humanity from self-destruction. And you, my child, are the Appointed

Instrument.' 'Me? A World Movement? But that's absurd,' I said. 'I've never

made a speech in my whole life. I've never written a word for publication.

I've never been a leader or an organizer.' 'Nevertheless,' He said (and He

gave one of these indescribably beautiful smiles of His), 'nevertheless it is

you who will launch this Crusade—the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit.

You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The

dogs bark; the Caravan passes. From tiny, laughable beginnings the

Crusade of the Spirit is destined to become a Mighty Force. A force for

Good, a force that will ultimately Save the World.' And with that He left me.

Left me stunned, bewildered, scared out of

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my wits. But there was nothing for it; I had to obey. I did obey. And what

happened? I made speeches, and He gave me eloquence. I accepted the

burden of leadership and, because He was walking invisibly at my side,

people followed me. I asked for help, and the money came pouring in. So

here I am." She threw out her thick hands in a gesture of self-depreciation,

she smiled a mystic smile. A poor thing, she seemed to be saying, but not

my own—my Master's, Koot Hoomi's. "Here I am," she repeated. "Here,

praise God," said Mr. Bahu devoutly, "you are." After a decent interval Will

asked the Rani if she had always kept up the practices so providentially

learned in Mme Buloz's Oratory.

"Always," she answered. "I could no more do without Meditation than I

could do without Food."

"Wasn't it rather difficult after you were married? I mean, before you

went back to Switzerland. There must have been so many tiresome official

duties."

"Not to mention all the unofficial ones," said the Rani in a tone that

implied whole volumes of unfavorable comment upon her late husband's

character, Weltanschauung and sexual habits. She opened her mouth to

elaborate on the theme, then closed it again and looked at Murugan.

"Darling," she called.

Murugan, who was absorbedly polishing the nails of his left hand upon

the open palm of his right, looked up with a guilty start. "Yes, Mother?"

Ignoring the nails and his evident inattention to what she had been

saying, the Rani gave him a seducing smile. "Be an angel," she said, "and

go and fetch the car. My Little Voice doesn't say anything about walking

back to the bungalow. It's only a few hundred yards," she explained to Will.

"But in this heat, and at my age . . ."

Her words called for some kind of flattering rebuttal. But if it was too

hot to walk, it was also too hot, Will felt, to put forth the very considerable

amount of energy required for a convincing

61

show of bogus sincerity. Fortunately a professional diplomat, a practiced

courtier was on hand to make up for the uncouth journalist's deficiencies.

Mr. Bahu uttered a peal of lighthearted laughter, then apologized for his

merriment.

"But it was really too funny! 'At my age,' " he repeated, and laughed

again. "Murugan is not quite eighteen, and I happen to know how old—how

very young—the Princess of Rendang was when she married the Raja of

Pala."

Murugan, meanwhile, had obediently risen and was kissing his

mother's hand.

"Now we can talk more freely," said the Rani when he had left the

room. And freely—her face, her tone, her bulging eyes, her whole quivering

frame registering the most intense disapproval— she now let fly. De

mortuis. . . She wouldn't say anything about her husband except that he

was a typical Palanese, a true representative of his country. For the sad

truth was that Pala's smooth bright skin concealed the most horrible

rottenness.

"When I think what they tried to do to my Baby, two years ago, when I

was on my world tour for the Crusade of the Spirit." With a jingling of

bracelets she lifted her hands in horror. "It was an agony for me to be

parted from him for so long; but the Master had sent me on a Mission, and

my Little Voice told me that it wouldn't be right for me to take my Baby with

me. He'd lived abroad for so long. It was high time for him to get to know

the country he was to rule. So I decided to leave him here. The Privy

Council appointed a committee of guardianship. Two women with growing

boys of their own and two men—one of whom, I regret to say" (more in

sorrow than in anger), "was Dr. Robert MacPhail. Well, to cut a long story

short, no sooner was I safely out of the country than those precious

guardians, to whom I'd entrusted my Baby, my Only Son, set to work

systematically— systematically, Mr. Farnaby—to undermine my influence.

They tried to destroy the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values which I

had so laboriously built up over the years."

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Somewhat maliciously (for of course he knew what the woman was

talking about), Will expressed his astonishment. The whole edifice of moral

and spiritual values? And yet nobody could have been kinder than Dr.

Robert and the others, no Good Samaritans were ever more simply and

effectively charitable.

"I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness

isn't the only virtue."

"Of course not," Will agreed, and he listed all the qualities that the Rani

seemed most conspicuously to lack. "There's also sincerity. Not to mention

truthfulness, humility, selflessness . . ."

"You're forgetting Purity," said the Rani severely. "Purity is

fundamental, Purity is the sine qua, non."

"But here in Pala, I gather, they don't think so."

"They most certainly do not," said the Rani. And she went on to tell him

how her poor Baby had been deliberately exposed to impurity, even

actively encouraged to indulge in it with one of those precocious,

promiscuous girls of whom, in Pala, there were only too many. And when

they found that he wasn't the sort of boy who would seduce a girl (for she

had brought him up to think of Woman as essentially Holy), they had

encouraged the girl to do her best to seduce him.

Had she, Will wondered, succeeded? Or had Antinoiis already been

girlproofed by little friends of his own age or, still more effectively, by some

older, more experienced and authoritative pederast, some Swiss precursor

of Colonel Dipa?

"But that wasn't the worst." The Rani lowered her voice to a horrified

stage whisper. "One of the mothers on the committee of guardianship—one

of the mothers, mind you—advised him to take a course of lessons."

"What sort of lessons?"

"In what they euphemistically call Love." She wrinkled up her nose as

though she had smelt raw sewage. "Lessons, if you please," and disgust

turned into indignation, "from some Older Woman."

63

"Heavens!" cried the Ambassador.

"Heavens!" Will dutifully echoed. Those older women, he could see,

were competitors much more dangerous, in the Rani's eyes, than even the

most precociously promiscuous of girls. A mature instructress in love would

be a rival mother, enjoying the monstrously unfair advantage of being free

to go the limits of incest.

"They teach ..." The Rani hesitated. "They teach Special Techniques."

"What sort of techniques?" Will enquired. But she couldn't bring herself

to go into the repulsive particulars. And anyhow it wasn't necessary, for

Murugan (bless his heart!) had refused to listen to them. Lessons in

immorality from someone old enough to be his mother—the very idea of it

had made him sick. No wonder. He had been brought up to reverence the

Ideal of Purity. "Brahmacharya, if you know what that means."

"Quite," said Will.

"And this is another reason why his illness was such a blessing in

disguise, such a real godsend. I don't think I could have brought him up

that way in Pala. There are too many bad influences here. Forces working

against Purity, against the Family, even against Mother Love."

Will pricked up his ears. "Did they even reform mothers?" She nodded.

"You just can't imagine how far things have gone here. But Koot Hoomi

knew what kind of dangers we would have to run in Pala. So what

happens? My Baby falls ill, and the doctors order us to Switzerland. Out of

harm's way."

"How was it," Will asked, "that Koot Hoomi let you go off on your

Crusade? Didn't he foresee what would happen to Murugan as soon as

your back was turned?"

"He foresaw everything," said the Rani. "The temptations, the

resistance, the massed assault by all the Powers of Evil and then, at the

very last moment, the rescue. For a long time," she

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Island

explained, "Murugan didn't tell me what was happening. But after three

months the assaults of the Powers of Evil were too much for him. He

dropped hints; but I was too completely absorbed in my Master's business

to be able to take them. Finally he wrote me a letter in which it was all

spelled out—in detail. I canceled my last four lectures in Brazil and flew

home as fast as the jets would carry me. A week later we were back in

Switzerland. Just my Baby and I—alone with the Master."

She closed her eyes, and an expression of gloating ecstasy appeared

upon her face. Will looked away in distaste. This self-canonized world-

savior, this clutching and devouring mother— had she ever, for a single

moment, seen herself as others saw her? Did she have any idea of what

she had done, what she was still doing, to her poor silly little son? To the

first question the answer was certainly no. About the second one could only

speculate. Perhaps she honestly didn't know what she had made of the

boy. But perhaps, on the other hand, she did know. Knew and preferred

what was happening with the Colonel to what might happen if the boy's

education were taken in hand by a woman. The woman might supplant her;

the Colonel, she knew, would not.

"Murugan told me that he intended to reform these so-called reforms."

"I can only pray," said the Rani in a tone that reminded Will of his

grandfather, the Archdeacon, "that he'll be given the Strength and Wisdom

to do it."

"And what do you think of his other projects?" Will asked. "Oil?

Industries? An army?"

"Economics and politics aren't exactly my strong point," she answered

with a little laugh which was meant to remind him that he was talking to

someone who had taken the Fourth Initiation. "Ask Bahu what he thinks."

"I have no right to offer an opinion," said the Ambassador. "I'm an

outsider, the representative of a foreign power."

65

"Not so very foreign," said the Rani.

"Not in your eyes, ma'am. And not, as you know very well, in mine. But

in the eyes of the Palanese government—yes. Completely foreign."

"But that," said Will, "doesn't prevent you from having opinions. It only

prevents you from having the locally orthodox opinions. And incidentally,"

he added, "I'm not here in my professional capacity. You're not being

interviewed, Mr. Ambassador. All this is strictly off the record."

"Strictly off the record, then, and strictly as myself and not as an official

personage, I believe that our young friend is perfectly right."

"Which implies, of course, that you believe the policy of the Palanese

government to be perfectly wrong."

"Perfectly wrong," said Mr. Bahu—and the bony, emphatic mask of

Savonarola positively twinkled with his Voltairean smile—"perfectly wrong

because all too perfectly right."

"Right?" the Rani protested. "Right?"

"Perfectly right," he explained, "because so perfectly designed to make

every man, woman, and child on this enchanting island as perfectly free

and happy as it's possible to be."

"But with a False Happiness," the Rani cried, "a freedom that's only for

the Lower Self."

"I bow," said the Ambassador, duly bowing, "to Your High-ness's

superior insight. But still, high or low, true or false, happiness is happiness

and freedom is most enjoyable. And there can be no doubt that the politics

inaugurated by the original Reformers and developed over the years have

been admirably well adapted to achieving these two goals."

"But you feel," said Will, "that these are undesirable goals?"

"On the contrary, everybody desires them. But unfortunately they're

out of context, they've become completely irrelevant to the present situation

of the world in general and Pala in particular."

66

Island

"Are they more irrelevant now than they were when the Reformers first

started to work for happiness and freedom?"

The Ambassador nodded. "In those days Pala was still completely off

the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness

made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world,

an ideal society can be a viable society. Pala was completely viable, I'd

say, until about 1905. Then, in less than a single generation, the world

completely changed. Movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Mass production, mass

slaughter, mass communication and, above all, plain mass— more and

more people in bigger and bigger slums or suburbs. By 1930 any clear-

sighted observer could have seen that, for three quarters of the human

race, freedom and happiness were almost out of the question. Today, thirty

years later, they're completely out of the question. And meanwhile the

outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and

happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer.

What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable."

"So Pala will have to be changed—is that your conclusion?"

Mr. Bahu nodded. "Radically."

"Root and branch," said the Rani with a prophet's sadistic

gusto.

"And for two cogent reasons," Mr. Bahu went on. "First, because it

simply isn't possible for Pala to go on being different from the rest of the

world. And, second, because it isn't right that it should be different."

"Not right for people to be free and happy?"

Once again the Rani said something inspirational about false

happiness and the wrong kind of freedom.

Mr. Bahu deferentially acknowledged her interruption, then turned back

to Will.

.,,

"Not right," he insisted. "Flaunting your blessedness in the face of so

much misery—it's sheer hubris, it's a deliberate affront to the rest of

humanity. It's even a kind of affront to God."

67

"God," the Rani murmured voluptuously, "God . . ." Then, reopening

her eyes, "These people in Pala," she added, "they don't believe in God.

They only believe in Hypnotism and Pantheism and Free Love." She

emphasized the words with indignant disgust.

"So now," said Will, "you're proposing to make them miserable in the

hope that this will restore their faith in God. Well, that's one way of

producing a conversion. Maybe it'll work. And maybe the end will justify the

means." He shrugged his shoulders. "But I do see," he added, "that, good

or bad, and regardless of what the Palanese may feel about it, this thing is

going to happen. One doesn't have to be much of a prophet to foretell that

Murugan is going to succeed. He's riding the wave of the future. And the

wave of the future is undoubtedly a wave of crude petroleum. Talking of

crudity and petroleum," he added, turning to the Rani, "I understand that

you're acquainted with my old friend, Joe Aldehyde." "You know Lord

Aldehyde?" "Well."

"So that's why my Little Voice was so insistent!" Closing her eyes

again, she smiled to herself and slowly nodded her head. "Now I

Understand." Then, in another tone, "How is that dear man?" she asked.

"Still characteristically himself," Will assured her. "And what a rare self!

L'homme au cerf-volant—that's what I call him."

"The man with the kite?" Will was puzzled. "He does his work down

here," she explained; "but he holds a string in his hand, and at the other

end of the string is a kite, and the kite is forever trying to go higher, higher,

Higher. Even while he's at work, he feels the constant Pull from Above,

feels the Spirit tugging insistently at the flesh. Think of it! A man of affairs, a

great Captain of Industry—and yet, for him, the only thing that Really

Matters is the Immortality of the Soul."

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Light dawned. The woman had been talking about Joe Alde-hyde's

addiction to spiritualism. He thought of those weekly seances with Mrs.

Harbottle, the automatist; with Mrs. Pym, whose control was a Kiowa Indian

called Bawbo; with Miss Tuke and her floating trumpet out of which a

squeaky whisper uttered oracular words that were taken down in shorthand

by Joe's private secretary: "Buy Australian cement; don't be alarmed by the

fall in Breakfast Foods; unload forty percent of your rubber shares and

invest the money in IBM and Westinghouse ..."

"Did he ever tell you," Will asked, "about that departed stockbroker

who always knew what the market was going to do next week?"

"Sidhis," said the Rani indulgently. "Just sidhis. What else can you

expect? After all, he's only a Beginner. And in this present life business is

his karma. He was predestined to do what he's done, what he's doing, what

he's going to do. And what he's going to do," she added impressively and

paused in a listening pose, her finger lifted, her head cocked, "what he's

going to do—that's what my Little Voice is saying—includes some great

and wonderful things here in Pala."

What a spiritual way of saying, This is what I want to happen! Not as I

will but as God wills—and by a happy coincidence God's will and mine are

always identical. Will chuckled inwardly, but kept the straightest of faces.

"Does your Little Voice say anything about Southeast Asia

Petroleum?" he asked.

The Rani listened again, then nodded. "Distinctly."

"But Colonel Dipa, I gather, doesn't say anything but 'Standard of

California.' Incidentally," Will went on, "why does Pala have to worry about

the Colonel's taste in oil companies?"

"My government," said Mr. Bahu sonorously, "is thinking in terms of a

Five-Year Plan for Interisland Economic Co-ordina tion and Co-operation."

69

"Does Interisland Co-ordination and Co-operation mean that Standard

has to be granted a monopoly?"

"Only if Standard's terms were more advantageous than those of its

competitors."

"In other words," said the Rani, "only if there's nobody who will pay us

more."

"Before you came," Will told her, "I was discussing this subject with

Murugan. Southeast Asia Petroleum, I said, will give Pala whatever

Standard gives Rendang plus a little more."

"Fifteen percent more?"

"Let's say ten."

"Make it twelve and a half."

Will looked at her admiringly. For someone who had taken the Fourth

Initiation she was doing pretty well.

"Joe Aldehyde will scream with agony," he said. "But in the end, I feel

certain, you'll get your twelve and a half."

"It would certainly be a most attractive proposition," said Mr. Bahu.

"The only trouble is that the Palanese government won't accept it."

"The Palanese government," said the Rani, "will soon be changing its

policy."

"You think so?"

"I KNOW it," the Rani answered in a tone that made it quite clear that

the information had come straight from the Master's mouth.

"When the change of policy comes, would it help," Will asked, "if

Colonel Dipa were to put in a good word for Southeast Asia Petroleum?"

"Undoubtedly."

Will turned to Mr. Bahu. "And would you be prepared, Mr.

Ambassador, to put in a good word with Colonel Dipa?"

In polysyllables, as though he were addressing a plenary ses-

70

Island

sion of some international organization, Mr. Bahu hedged diplomatically.

On the one hand, yes; but on the other hand, no. From one point of view,

white; but from a different angle, distinctly black.

Will listened in polite silence. Behind the mask of Savonarola, behind

the aristocratic monocle, behind the ambassadorial verbiage he could see

and hear the Levantine broker in quest of his commission, the petty official

cadging for a gratuity. And for her enthusiastic sponsorship of Southeast

Asia Petroleum, how much had the royal initiate been promised?

Something, he was prepared to bet, pretty substantial. Not for herself, of

course, no no! For the Crusade of the Spirit, needless to say, for the

greater glory of Koot Hoomi.

Mr. Bahu had reached the peroration of his speech to the international

organization. "It must therefore be understood," he was saying, "that any

positive action on my part must remain contingent upon circumstances as,

when, and if these circumstances arise. Do I make myself clear?"

"Perfectly," Will assured him. "And now," he went on with deliberately

indecent frankness, "let me explain my position in this matter. All I'm

interested in is money. Two thousand pounds without having to do a hand's

turn of work. A year of freedom just for helping Joe Aldehyde to get his

hands on Pala."

"Lord Aldehyde," said the Rani, "is remarkably generous."

"Remarkably," Will agreed, "considering how little I can do in this

matter. Needless to say, he'd be still more generous to anyone who could

be of greater help."

There was a long silence. In the distance a mynah bird was calling

monotonously for attention. Attention to avarice, attention to hypocrisy,

attention to vulgar cynicism . . . There was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Will called out and, turning to Mr. Bahu, "Let's continue this

conversation some other time," he said.

Mr. Bahu nodded.

71

"Come in," Will repeated.

Dressed in a blue skirt and a short buttonless jacket that left her midriff

bare and only sometimes covered a pair of apple-round breasts, a girl in

her late teens walked briskly into the room. On her smooth brown face a

smile of friendliest greeting was punctuated at either end by dimples. "I'm

Nurse Appu," she began. "Radhu Appu." Then, catching sight of Will's

visitors, she broke off. "Oh, excuse me, I didn't know ..."

She made a perfunctory knicks to the Rani.

Mr. Bahu, meanwhile, had courteously risen to his feet. "Nurse Appu,"

he cried enthusiastically. "My little ministering angel from the Shivapuram

hospital. What a delightful surprise!"

For the girl, it was evident to Will, the surprise was far from delightful.

"How do you do, Mr. Bahu," she said without a smile and, quickly

turning away, started to busy herself with the straps of the canvas bag she

was carrying.

"Your Highness has probably forgotten," said Mr. Bahu; "but I had to

have an operation last summer. For hernia," he specified. "Well, this young

lady used to come and wash me every morning. Punctually at eight-forty-

five. And now, after having vanished for all these months, here she is

again!"

"Synchronicity," said the Rani oracularly. "It's all part of the Plan."

"I'm supposed to give Mr. Farnaby an injection," said the little nurse,

looking up, still unsmiling, from her professional bag.

"Doctor's orders are doctor's orders," cried the Rani, overacting the

role of royal personage deigning to be playfully gracious. "To hear is to

obey. But where's my chauffeur?"

"Your chauffeur's here," called a familiar voice.

Beautiful as a vision of Ganymede, Murugan was standing in the

doorway. A look of amusement appeared on the little nurse's face.

"Hullo, Murugan—I mean, Your Highness." She bobbed

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another curtsy, which he was free to take as a mark of respect or of ironic

mockery.

"Oh, hullo, Radha," said the boy in a tone that was meant to be

distantly casual. He walked past her to where his mother was sitting. "The

car," he said, "is at the door. Or rather the so-called car." With a sarcastic

laugh, "It's a Baby Austin, 1954 vintage," he explained to Will. "The best

that this highly civilized country can provide for its royal family. Rendang

gives its ambassador a Bentley," he added bitterly.

"Which will be calling for me at this address in about ten minutes," said

Mr. Bahu, looking at his watch. "So may I be permitted to take leave of you

here, Your Highness?"

The Rani extended her hand. With all the piety of a good Catholic

kissing a cardinal's ring, he bent over it; then, straightening himself up, he

turned to Will.

"I'm assuming—perhaps unjustifiably—that Mr. Farnaby can put up

with me for a little longer. May I stay?"

Will assured the Ambassador that he would be delighted.

"And I hope," said Mr. Bahu to the little nurse, "that there will be no

objections on medical grounds?"

"Not on medical grounds," said the girl in a tone that implied the

existence of the most cogent nonmedical objections.

Assisted by Murugan, the Rani hoisted herself out of her chair. uAu

revoir, mon cher Farnaby," she said as she gave him her jeweled hand. Her

smile was charged with a sweetness that Will found positively menacing.

"Good-bye, ma'am."

She turned, patted the little nurse's cheek, and sailed out of the room.

Like a pinnace in the wake of a full-rigged ship of the line, Murugan trailed

after her.

73

"Golly!" the little nurse exploded, when the door was safely closed

behind them.

"I entirely agree with you," said Will.

The Voltairean light twinkled for a moment on Mr. Bahu's evangelical

face. "Golly," he repeated. "It was what I heard an English schoolboy

saying when he first saw the Great Pyramid. The Rani makes the same

kind of impression. Monumental. She's what the Germans call eine grosse

Seek." The twinkle had faded, the face was unequivocally Savonarola's,

the words, it was obvious, were for publication.

The little nurse suddenly started to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Will asked.

"I suddenly saw the Great Pyramid all dressed up in white muslin," she

gasped. "Dr. Robert calls it the mystic's uniform."

"Witty, very witty!" said Mr. Bahu. "And yet," he added diplomatically, "I

don't know why mystics shouldn't wear uniforms, if they feel like it."

The little nurse drew a deep breath, wiped the tears of merriment from

her eyes, and began to make her preparations for giving the patient his

injection.

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"I know exactly what you're thinking," she said to Will. "You're thinking

I'm much too young to do a good job."

"I certainly think you're very young."

"You people go to a university at eighteen and stay there for four

years. We start at sixteen and go on with our education till we're twenty-

four—half-time study and half-time work. I've been doing biology and at the

same time doing this job for two years. So I'm not quite such a fool as I

look. Actually I'm a pretty good nurse."

"A statement," said Mr. Bahu, "which I can unequivocally confirm. Miss

Radha is not merely a good nurse; she's an absolutely first-rate one."

But what he really meant, Will felt sure as he studied the expression on

that face of a much-tempted monk, was that Miss Radha had a first-rate

midriff, first-rate navel, and first-rate breasts. But the owner of the navel,

midriff and breasts had clearly resented Savonarola's admiration, or at any

rate the way it had been expressed. Hopefully, overhopefully, the rebuffed

Ambassador was returning the attack.

The spirit lamp was lighted and, while the needle was being boiled,

little Nurse Appu took her patient's temperature.

"Ninety-nine point two."

"Does that mean I have to be banished?" Mr. Bahu enquired.

"Not so far as he's concerned," the girl answered.

"So please stay," said Will.

The little nurse gave him his injection of antibiotic, then, from one of

the bottles in her bag, stirred a tablespoonful of some greenish liquid into

half a glass of water.

"Drink this."

It tasted like one of those herbal concoctions that health-food

enthusiasts substitute for tea.

"What is it?" Will asked, and was told that it was an extract from a

mountain plant related to valerian.

"It helps people to stop worrying," the little nurse explained,

75

"without making them sleepy. We give it to convalescents. It's useful,

too, in mental cases."

"Which am I? Mental or convalescent?"

"Both," she answered without hesitation.

Will laughed aloud. "That's what comes of fishing for compliments."

"I didn't mean to be rude," she assured him. "All I meant was that I've

never met anybody from the outside who wasn't a mental case."

"Including the Ambassador?"

She turned the question back upon the questioner. "What do you

think?"

Will passed it on to Mr. Bahu. "You're the expert in this field," he said.

"Settle it between yourselves," said the little nurse. "I've got to go and

see about my patient's lunch."

Mr. Bahu watched her go; then, raising his left eyebrow, he let fall his

monocle and started methodically to polish the lens with his handkerchief.

"You're aberrated in one way," he said to Will. "I'm aberrated in another. A

schizoid (isn't that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a

paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the

Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. Were you ever interested in power?"

he asked after a moment of silence.

"Never." Will shook his head emphatically. "One can't have power

without committing oneself."

"And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of

pushing other people around?"

"By a factor of several thousand times."

"So it was never a temptation?"

"Never." Then after a pause, "Let's get down to business," Will added

in another tone.

"To business," Mr. Bahu repeated. "Tell me something about Lord

Aldehyde."

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"Well, as the Rani said, he's remarkably generous."

"I'm not interested in his virtues, only his intelligence. How bright is

he?"

"Bright enough to know that nobody does anything for nothing."

"Good," said Mr. Bahu. "Then tell him from me that for effective work

by experts in strategic positions he must be prepared to lay out at least ten

times what he's going to pay you."

"I'll write him a letter to that effect."

"And do it today," Mr. Bahu advised. "The plane leaves Shiv-apuram

tomorrow evening, and there won't be another outgo- ing mail for a whole

week."

"Thank you for telling me," said Will. "And now—Her Highness and

the shockable stripling being gone—let's move on to the next temptation.

What about sex?"

With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of

importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved a brown and bony hand back and

forth in front of his face. "Just a distraction, that's all. Just a nagging,

humiliating vexation. But an intelligent man can always cope with it."

"How difficult it is," said Will, "to understand another man's vices!"

"You're right. Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen

fit to curse him with. Pecca fortiter—that was Luther's advice. But make a

point of sinning your own sins, not someone else's. And above all don't do

what the people of this island do. Don't try to behave as though you were

essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the

same cosmic boat—and the boat is perpetually sinking."

"In spite of which, no rat is justified in leaving it. Is that what you're

saying?"

"A few of them may sometimes try to leave. But they never get very

far. History and the other rats will always see to it that

77

they drown with the rest of us. That's why Pala doesn't have the ghost of a

chance."

Carrying a tray, the little nurse re-entered the room.

"Buddhist food," she said, as she tied a napkin round Will's neck. "All

except the fish. But we've decided that fishes are vegetables within the

meaning of the act."

Will started to eat.

"Apart from the Rani and Murugan and us two here," he asked after

swallowing the first mouthful, "how many people from the outside have you

ever met?"

"Well, there was that group of American doctors," she answered.

"They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central

Hospital."

"What were they doing here?"

"They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and

cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!" She shook her head. "I tell you, Mr.

Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end—made everybody's hair

stand on end in the whole hospital."

"So you think our medicine's pretty primitive?"

"That's the wrong word. It isn't primitive. It's fifty percent terrific and fifty

percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics—but absolutely no methods for

increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won't be necessary. Fantastic

operations—but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through

life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it's the same

all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you've started to fall

apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage

systems and synthetic vitamins, you don't seem to do anything at all about

prevention. And yet you've got a proverb: prevention is better than cure."

"But cure," said Will, "is so much more dramatic than prevention. And

for the doctors it's also a lot more profitable."

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"Maybe for your doctors," said the little nurse. "Not for ours. Ours get

paid for keeping people well."

"How is it to be done?"

"We've been asking that question for a hundred years, and we've

found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers

in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how

you feel about being who you are in this kind of world."

"And which are the best answers?"

"None of them is best without the others."

"So there's no panacea."

"How can there be?" And she quoted the little rhyme that every student

nurse had to learn by heart on the first day of her training.

" 'I' am a crowd, obeying as many laws As it has members. Chemically

impure Are all 'my' beings. There's no single cure For what can never have

a single cause."

"So whether it's prevention or whether it's cure, we attack on all the

fronts at once. All the fronts," she insisted, "from diet to autosuggestion,

from negative ions to meditation."

"Very sensible," was Will's comment.

"Perhaps a little too sensible," said Mr. Bahu. "Did you ever try to talk

sense to a maniac?" Will shook his head. "I did once." He lifted the graying

lock that slanted obliquely across his forehead. Just below the hairline a

jagged scar stood out, strangely pale against the brown skin. "Luckily for

me, the bottle he hit me with was pretty flimsy." Smoothing his ruffled hair,

he turned to the little nurse. "Don't ever forget, Miss Radha; to the

senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island

completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So

beware of being too rational. In the country of the

79

insane, the integrated man doesn't become king." Mr. Bahu's face was

positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. "He gets lynched."

Will laughed perfunctorily, then turned again to the little nurse.

"Don't you have any candidates for the asylum?" he asked.

"Just as many as you have—I mean in proportion to the population. At

least that's what the textbook says."

"So living in a sensible world doesn't seem to make any difference."

"Not to the people with the kind of body chemistry that'll turn them into

psychotics. They're born vulnerable. Little troubles that other people hardly

notice can bring them down. We're just beginning to find out what it is that

makes them so vulnerable. We're beginning to be able to spot them in

advance of a breakdown. And once they've been spotted, we can do

something to raise their resistance. Prevention again-—and, of course, on

all the fronts at once."

"So being born into a sensible world will make a difference even for the

predestined psychotic."

"And for the neurotics it has already made a difference. Your neurosis

rate is about one in five or even four. Ours is about one in twenty. The one

that breaks down gets treatment, on all fronts, and the nineteen who don't

break down have had prevention on all the fronts. Which brings me back to

those American doctors. Three of them were psychiatrists, and one of the

psychiatrists smoked cigars without stopping and had a German accent. He

was the one that was chosen to give us a lecture. What a lecture!" The little

nurse held her head between her hands. "I never heard anything like it."

"What was it about?"

"About the way they treat people with neurotic symptoms. We just

couldn't believe our ears. They never attack on all the fronts; they only

attack on about half of one front. So far as

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they're concerned, the physical fronts don't exist. Except for a mouth and

an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't

born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a

digestive tube, a family and a psyche. But what sort of psyche? Obviously

not the whole mind, not the mind as it really is. How could it be that when

they take no account of a person's anatomy, or biochemistry or physiology?

Mind abstracted from body—that's the only front they attack on. And not

even on the whole of that front. The man with the cigar kept talking about

the unconscious. But the only unconscious they ever pay attention to is the

negative unconscious, the garbage that people have tried to get rid of by

burying it in the basement. Not a single word about the positive

unconscious. No attempt to help the patient to open himself up to the life

force or the Buddha Nature. And no attempt even to teach him to be a little

more conscious in his everyday life. You know: 'Here and now, boys.'

'Attention.' " She gave an imitation of the mynah birds. "These people just

leave the unfortunate neurotic to wallow in his old bad habits of never being

all there in present time. The whole thing is just pure idiocy! No, the man

with the cigar didn't even have that excuse; he was as clever as clever can

be. So it's not idiocy. It must be something voluntary, something self-

induced—like getting drunk or talking yourself into believing some piece of

foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at

their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one

who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society." Once again the

little nurse held her head between her hands. "It's unimaginable! No

question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the

quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about

the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane

one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be

completely adjusted to it?"

With another of his twinkling smiles, "Those whom God

81

would destroy," said the Ambassador, "He first makes mad. Or

alternatively, and perhaps even more effectively, He first makes them

sane." Mr. Bahu rose and walked to the window. "My car has come for me.

I must be getting back to Shivapuram and my desk." He turned to Will and

treated him to a long and flowery farewell. Then, switching off the

Ambassador, "Don't forget to write that letter," he said. "It's very important."

He smiled con-spiratorially and, passing his thumb back and forth across

the first two fingers of his right hand, he counted out invisible money.

"Thank goodness," said the little nurse when he had gone.

"What was his offense?" Will enquired. "The usual thing?"

"Offering money to someone you want to go to bed with— but she

doesn't like you. So you offer more. Is that usual where he comes from?"

"Profoundly usual," Will assured her.

"Well, I didn't like it."

"So I could see. And here's another question. What about Murugan?"

"What makes you ask?"

"Curiosity. I noticed that you'd met before. Was that when he was here

two years ago without his mother?"

"How did you know about that?"

"A little bird told me—or rather an extremely massive bird."

"The Rani! She must have made it sound like Sodom and Gomorrah."

"But unfortunately I was spared the lurid details. Dark hints—that was

all she gave me. Hints, for example, about veteran Messalinas giving

lessons in love to innocent young boys."

"And did he need those lessons!"

"Hints, too, about a precocious and promiscuous girl of his own age."

Nurse Appu burst out laughing.

"Did you know her?"

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"The precocious and promiscuous girl was me."

"You? Does the Rani know it?"

"Murugan only gave her the facts, not the names. For which I'm very

grateful. You see, I'd behaved pretty badly. Losing my head about

someone I didn't really love and hurting someone I did. Why is one so

stupid?"

"The heart has its reasons," said Will, "and the endocrines have

theirs."

There was a long silence. He finished the last of his cold boiled fish

and vegetables. Nurse Appu handed him a plate of fruit salad.

"You've never seen Murugan in white satin pajamas," she said.

"Have I missed something?"

"You've no idea how beautiful he looks in white satin pajamas. Nobody

has any right to be so beautiful. It's indecent. It's taking an unfair

advantage."

It was the sight of him in those white satin pajamas from Sulka that

had finally made her lose her head. Lose it so completely that for two

months she had been someone else—an idiot who had gone chasing after

a person who couldn't bear her and had turned her back on the person who

had always loved her, the person she herself had always loved.

"Did you get anywhere with the pajama boy?" Will asked.

"As far as a bed," she answered. "But when I started to kiss him, he

jumped out from between the sheets and locked himself in the bathroom.

He wouldn't come out until I'd passed his pajamas through the transom and

given him my word of honor that he wouldn't be molested. I can laugh

about it now; but at the time, I tell you, at the time . . ." She shook her head.

"Pure tragedy. They must have guessed, from the way I carried on, what

had happened. Precocious and promiscuous girls, it was obvious, were no

good. What he needed was regular lessons."

"And the rest of the story I know," said Will. "Boy writes to Mother,

Mother flies home and whisks him off to Switzerland."

83

"And they didn't come back until about six months ago. And for at least

half of that time they were in Rendang, staying with Murugan's aunt."

Will was on the point of mentioning Colonel Dipa, then remembered

that he had promised Murugan to be discreet and said nothing.

From the garden came the sound of a whistle.

"Excuse me," said the little nurse and went to the window. Smiling

happily at what she saw, she waved her hand. "It's Ranga."

"Who's Ranga?"

"That friend of mine I was talking about. He wants to ask you some

questions. May he come in for a minute?"

"Ofcourse."

She turned back to the window and made a beckoning gesture.

"This means, I take it, that the white satin pajamas are completely out

of the picture."

She nodded. "It was only a one-act tragedy. I found my head almost as

quickly as I'd lost it. And when I'd found it, there was Ranga, the same as

ever, waiting for me." The door swung open and a lanky young man in gym

shoes and khaki shorts came into the room.

"Ranga Karakuran," he announced as he shook Will's hand.

"If you'd come five minutes earlier," said Radha, "you'd have had the

pleasure of meeting Mr. Bahu."

"Was he here?" Ranga made a grimace of disgust.

"Is he as bad as all that?" Will asked.

Ranga listed the indictments. "A: He hates us. B: He's Colonel Dipa's

tame jackal. C: He's the unofficial ambassador of all the oil companies. D:

The old pig made passes at Radha. And E: He goes about giving lectures

about the need for a religious revival. He's even published a book about it.

Complete with preface by someone at the Harvard Divinity School. It's all

part

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of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is Dipa's alibi. Why

can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting

idealistic hogwash—it makes one vomit."

Radha stretched out her hand and gave his ear three sharp

tweaks.

"You little ..." he began angrily; then broke off and laughed. "You're

quite right," he said. "All the same, you didn't have to pull quite so hard."

"Is that what you always do when he gets worked up?" Will enquired of

Radha.

"Whenever he gets worked up at the wrong moment, or over things he

can't do anything about."

Will turned to the boy. "And do you ever have to tweak her

ear?"

Ranga laughed. "I find it more satisfactory," he said, "to smack her

bottom. Unfortunately, she rarely needs it."

"Does that mean she's better balanced than you are?"

"Better balanced? I tell you, she's abnormally sane."

"Whereas you're merely normal?"

"Maybe a little left of center." He shook his head. "I get horribly

depressed sometimes—feel I'm no good for anything."

"Whereas in fact," said Radha, "he's so good that they've given him a

scholarship to study biochemistry at the University

of Manchester."

"What do you do with him when he plays these despairing, miserable-

sinner tricks on you? Pull his ears?"

"That," she said, "and . . . well, other things." She looked at Ranga and

Ranga looked at her. Then they both burst out laughing.

"Quite," said Will. "Quite. And these other things being what they are,"

he went on, "is Ranga looking forward to the prospect of leaving Pala for a

couple of years?"

"Not much," Ranga admitted.

"But he has to go," said Radha firmly.

85

"And when he gets there," Will wondered, "is he going to be happy?"

"That's what I wanted to ask you," said Ranga. "Well, you won't like the

climate, you won't like the food, you won't like the noises or the smells or

the architecture. But you'll almost certainly like the work and you'll probably

find that you can like quite a lot of the people." "What about the girls?"

Radha enquired. "How do you want me to answer that question?" he

asked. "Consolingly or truthfully?" "Truthfully."

"Well, my dear, the truth is that Ranga will be a wild success. Dozens

of girls are going to find him irresistible. And some of those girls will be

charming. How will you feel if he can't resist?" "I'll be glad for his sake."

Will turned to Ranga. "And will you be glad if she consoles herself,

while you're away, with another boy?"

"I'd like to be," he said. "But whether I actually shall be glad—that's

another question."

"Will you make her promise to be faithful?" "I won't make her promise

anything." "Even though she's your girl?" "She's her own girl."

"And Ranga's his own boy," said the little nurse. "He's free to do what

he likes."

Will thought of Babs's strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously.

"And free above all," he said, "to do what he doesn't like." He looked from

one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain

astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, "But I'd

forgotten," he added. "One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only

a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this

mental case from the outside is talking about?" And without leaving them

time to answer his question, "Tell me," he

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asked, "how long is it—" He broke off. "But perhaps I'm being indiscreet. If

so, just tell me to mind my own business. But 1 would like to know, just as

a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends."

"Do you mean 'friends'?" asked the little nurse. "Or do you mean

'lovers'?"

"Why not both, while we're about it?"

"Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And

we've been lovers—except for that miserable white pajama episode—since

I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen— just about two and a half

years."

"And nobody objected?"

"Why should they?"

"Why, indeed," Will echoed. "But the fact remains that, in my part of

the world, practically everybody would have objected."

"What about other boys?" Ranga asked.

"In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice . . .

Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male

adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of

thing ever go on here?"

"Of course."

"I'm surprised."

"Surprised? Why?"

"Seeing that girls aren't out of bounds."

"But one kind of love doesn't exclude the other."

"And both are legitimate?"

"Naturally."

"So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in

another pajama boy?"

"Not if it was a good sort of relationship."

"But unfortunately," said Radha, "the Rani had done such a thorough

job that he couldn't be interested in anyone but her— and, of course,

himself."

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"No boys?"

"Maybe now. I don't know. All I know is that in my day there was

nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only

Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records

and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning

Pala into what he calls a Modern State."

"Three weeks ago," said Ranga, "he and the Rani were at the palace,

in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and

listen to Murugan's ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on

armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit."

"Did he make any converts?"

Ranga shook his head. "Why would anyone want to exchange

something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and

thin and boring? We don't feel any need for your speedboats or your

television, your wars and revolutions, vour revivals, your political slogans,

your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of

maithuna?" he asked.

"Maithuna? What's that?"

"Let's start with the historical background," Ranga answered; and with

the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about

matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth.

"Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not

from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and

through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we're Mahayanists, and our

Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what

Tantra is?"

Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.

"And to tell you the truth," said Ranga, with a laugh that broke

irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, "I don't really know much

more than you do. Tantra's an enormous sub-

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ject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition—not worth

bothering about. But there's a hard core of sense. If you're a Tantrik, you

don't renounce the world or deny its value; you don't try to escape into a

Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you

accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you

do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear

and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison

of yourself."

"Good talk," said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.

"And something more besides," Ranga insisted. "That's the difference,"

he added—and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful

proselytism—"that's the difference between your philosophy and ours.

Western philosophers, even the best of them—they're nothing more than

good talkers. Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that

doesn't matter. Talk isn't the point. Their philosophy is pragmatic and

operational. Like the philosophy of modern physics-except that the

operations in question are psychological and the results transcendental.

Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the

universe; but they don't offer the reader any way of testing the truth of

those statements. When we make statements, we follow them up with a list

of operations that can be used for testing the validity of what we've been

saying. For example, tat tvam asi, 'thou are That'—the heart of all our

philosophy. Tat tvam asi," he repeated. "It looks like a proposition in

metaphysics; but what it actually refers to is a psychological experience,

and the operations by means of which the experience can be lived through

are described by our philosophers, so that anyone who's willing to perform

the necessary operations can test the validity of tat tvam asi for himself.

The operations arc-called yoga, or dhyana, or Zen—or, in certain special

circumstances, maithuna."

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"Which brings us back to my original question. What is ntaithuna!"

"Maybe you'd better ask Radha."

Will turned to the little nurse. "What is it?"

u Maithuna," she answered gravely, "is the yoga of love."

"Sacred or profane?"

"There's no difference."

"That's the whole point," Ranga put in. "When you do maithuna,

profane love is sacred love."

"Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansritan," the girl quoted.

"None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?"

"How would you translate Buddhatvan, Ranga?"

"Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened."

Radha nodded and turned back to Will. "It means that Buddhaness is

in the yoni."

"In the yoni?" Will remembered those little stone emblems of the

Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office,

from a hunchbacked vendor of bondieuseries at Benares. Eight annas for a

black yoni; twelve for the still more sacred image of the yoni-lingam.

"Literally in the yoniV he asked. "Or metaphorically?"

"What a ridiculous question!" said the little nurse, and she laughed her

clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. "Do you think we make love

metaphorically? Buddhatvan yoshidyonisan-sritan" she repeated. "It

couldn't be more completely and absolutely literal."

"Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?" Ranga now asked.

Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in

nineteenth-century communities. "But why do you know about it?" he

asked.

"Because it's mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy.

Basically, maithuna is the same as what the Oneida peo-

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pie called Male Continence. And that was the same as what Roman

Catholics mean by coitus reservatus."

"Reservatus," the little nurse repeated. "It always makes me want to

laugh. 'Such a reserved young man'!" The dimples reappeared and there

was a flash of white teeth.

"Don't be silly," said Ranga severely. "This is serious."

She expressed her contrition. "But reservatus was really too

funny."

"In a word," Will concluded, "it's just birth control without

contraceptives."

"But that's only the beginning of the story," said Ranga. "Maithuna is

also something else. Something even more important." The undergraduate

pedant had reasserted himself. "Remember," he went on earnestly,

"remember the point that Freud was always harping on."

"Which point? There were so many."

"The point about the sexuality of children. What we're born with, what

we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't

concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole

organism. That's the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the

child grows up. Maithuna is the organized attempt to regain that paradise."

He turned to Radha. "You've got a good memory," he said. "What's that

phrase of Spinoza's that they quote in the applied philosophy book?"

" 'Make the body capable of doing many things,' " she recited. " 'This

will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of

God.' "

"Hence all the yogas," said Ranga. "Including maithuna."

"And it's a real yoga," the girl insisted. "As good as raja yoga, or karma

yoga, or bhakti yoga. In fact, a great deal better, so far as most people are

concerned. Maithuna really gets them there."

"What's 'there'?" Will asked.

" 'There' is where you know."

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"Know what?"

"Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not," she added, "tat tvam

asi—thou art That, and so am I: That is me." The dimples came to life, the

teeth flashed. "And That's also him." She pointed at Ranga. "Incredible,

isn't it?" She stuck out her tongue at him. "And yet it's a fact."

Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched

the tip of her nose. "And not merely a fact," he said. "A revealed truth." He

gave the nose a little tap. "A revealed truth," he repeated. "So mind your

P's and Q's, young woman."

"What I'm wondering," said Will, "is why we aren't all enlightened—I

mean, if it's just a question of making love with a rather special kind of

technique. What's the answer to that?"

"I'll tell you," Ranga began.

But the girl cut him short. "Listen," she said, "listen!"

Will listened. Faint and far off, but still distinct, he heard the strange

inhuman voice that had first welcomed him to Pala. "Attention," it was

saying. "Attention, Attention ..."

"That bloody bird again!"

"But that's the secret."

"Attention? But a moment ago you were saying it was something else.

What about that young man who's so reserved?"

"That's just to make it easier to pay attention."

"And it does make it easier," Ranga confirmed. "And that's the whole

point of maithuna. It's not the special technique that turns love-making into

yoga; it's the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible.

Awareness of one's sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in

every sensation."

"What's a not-sensation?"

"It's the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with."

"And you can pay attention to your not-self?"

"Ofcourse."

Will turned to the little nurse. "You too?"

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"To myself," she answered, "and at the same time to my not-self. And

to Ranga's not-self, and to Ranga's self, and to Ranga's body, and to my

body and everything it's feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And

to the mystery of the other person— the perfect stranger, who's the other

half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one's

paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if

one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and

gross and sordid even. But they aren't sordid, because one's also paying

attention to the fact that, when one's fully aware of them, those things are

just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful."

"Maithuna is dhyana," Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt,

would explain everything.

"But what is dhyana?" Will asked.

"Dhyana is contemplation."

"Contemplation."

Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross

Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet

even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of

deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter's Gin were

alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately,

alienations from all the rest of his being—alienations from love, from

intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an

excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest,

vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha's shining face. What

happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr. Bahu was so

determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful

opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me

tangere—it was a categor ical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he

managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we

do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.

93

Smiling at his own little joke, "Were you taught maithuna at school?"

he asked ironically.

"At school," Radha answered with a simple matter-of-fact-ness that

took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.

"Everybody's taught it," Ranga added.

"And when does the teaching begin?"

"About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That's

between fifteen and fifteen and a half."

"And after they've learned maithuna, after they've gone out into the

world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?"

"Oh, we do, we do," Radha assured him.

"Do they still practice it?"

"Not all of them, of course. But a good many do."

"All the time?"

"Except when they want to have a baby."

"And those who don't want to have babies, but who might like to have

a little change from maithuna—what do they do?"

"Contraceptives," said Ranga laconically.

"And are the contraceptives available?"

"Available! They're distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for

nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes."

"The postman," Radha added, "delivers a thirty-night supply at the

beginning of each month."

"And the babies don't arrive?"

"Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people

stop at two."

"With the result," said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his

pedantic manner, "that our population is increasing at less than a third of

one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang's increase is as big as

Ceylon's—almost three percent. And China's is two percent, and India's

about one point seven."

"I was in China only a month ago," said Will. "Terrifying!

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And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central

America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of

you been in Rendang-Lobo?"

Ranga nodded affirmatively.

"Three days in Rendang," he explained. "If you get into the Upper

Sixth, it's part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for

yourself what the Outside is like."

"And what did you think of the Outside?" Will enquired.

Ranga answered with another question. "When you were in Rendang-

Lobo, did they show you the slums?"

"On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the

slums. But I gave them the slip."

Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to

the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office.

Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their

wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important

foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of

the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two

Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of

Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important

financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen

Czech technicians who had come with last month's shipment of tanks and

cannon and machine guns from Skoda. "And these are the people," he had

said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office

into Liberty Square, "these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine

hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few

thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide

of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor."

After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious

smells of canapes and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the

brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly

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dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees

of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than

even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses

in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny

potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall

from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was

carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried hack,

carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had

counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.

"Keeping babies alive," he said, "healing the sick, preventing the

sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things

that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends

by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It's the

kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy."

He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins. "God has

nothing to do with it," Ranga retorted, "and the joke isn't cosmic, it's strictly

man-made. These things aren't like gravity or the second law of

thermodynamics; they don't have to happen. They happen only if people

are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven't

allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn't been played on us. We've had

good sanitation for the best part of a century—and still we're not

overcrowded, we're not miserable, we're not under a dictatorship. And the

reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way."

"How on earth were you able to choose?" Will asked. "The right people

were intelligent at the right moment," said Ranga. "But it must be

admitted—they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been

extraordinarily lucky. It's had the luck, first of all, never to have been

anyone's colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an

Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us

alone

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and we're still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we're not Tantrik

agnostics."

"Is that what you are?" Will enquired. "A Tantrik agnostic?"

"With Mahayana trimmings," Ranga qualified. "Well, to return to

Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn't. No harbor, no

Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense

about its being God's will that people should breed themselves into

subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn't

our only blessing: After a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese,

Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English.

We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore

no planters, no coolie labor, no cash crops for export, no systematic

exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign

administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for

our own affairs."

"You certainly were lucky."

"And on top of that amazing good luck," Ranga went on, "there was

the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew

MacPhail. Has Dr. Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?"

"Just a few words, that's all."

"Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?"

Will shook his head.

"The Experimental Station," said Ranga, "had a lot to do with our

population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr.

Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the

monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells

went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People

died like flies. There's a famous passage in Dr. Andrew's memoirs about

the famine. A description and then a comment. He'd had to listen to

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a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept

remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. 'Man cannot

live by bread alone'—that was the text, and the preacher had been so

eloquent that several people were converted. 'Man cannot live by bread

alone.' But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner

light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and

then apathy and finally death."

"Another of the cosmic jokes," said Will. "And this one was formulated

by Jesus himself. 'To those who have shall be given, and from those who

have not shall be taken away even that which they have'—the bare

possibility of being human. It's the crudest of all God's jokes, and also the

commonest. I've seen it being played on millions of men and women,

millions of small children—all over the world."

"So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible

impression on Dr. Andrew's mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend

the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their

decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was

a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and

millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better

ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties we built the first

superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people

were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children. Ten years after the

founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The

population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started

to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr. Andrew foresaw, Pala would be

transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What

was to be clone? Dr. Andrew had read his Malthus. 'Food production

increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only

two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the

population problem in the old familiar way, by

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famine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can

keep down his numbers by moral restraint.' "

"Mor-ral r-restr-raint," the little nurse repeated, rolling her r's in the

Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. "Mor-ral r-restr-raint! Incidentally,"

she added, "Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja's sixteen-year-old niece."

"And that," said Ranga, "was yet another reason for revising Malthus.

Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better,

happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there

was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides.

There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every

known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The

whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control."

"And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control?

With horror?"

"Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Bud dhist

knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to

get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about

putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth

control makes metaphys ical sense. And for a village community of rice

growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough

young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones.

But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their

children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six

children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the

Experimental Station. Out of six chil dren five now survived. The old

patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to

Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more

aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the

yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about maithunn and, being a true man of

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science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary

instruction."

"With what results?"

"Enthusiastic approval."

"That's the way everybody feels about it," said Radha.

"Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some feel that

way, others don't. Dr. Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole

matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives

should be like education—free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory,

as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something

more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love."

"Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?"

"It wasn't really so difficult. Maithuna was orthodox. People weren't

being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they

were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning

something esoteric."

"And don't forget the most important point of all," the little nurse

chimed in. "For women—all women, and I don't care what you say about

sweeping generalizations—the yoga of love means perfection, means

being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed." There was

a brief silence. "And now," she resumed in another, brisker tone, "it's high

time we left you to your siesta."

"Before you go," said Will, "I'd like to write a letter. Just a brief note to

my boss to say that I'm alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by

the natives."

Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert's study and came back with paper,

pencil and an envelope.

" Veni, vidi," Will scrawled. "I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her

collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in

return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand

pounds. Shall I negotiate on this

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basis? If you cable Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for

article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon

be writing."

"There," he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to

Ranga. "May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch

tomorrow's plane?"

"Without fail," the boy promised.

Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming

young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of

history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if

he didn't do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his

concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they

were accustomed. Or couldn't they?

From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. "No reading

now," she wagged her finger at him. "Go to sleep."

"I never sleep during the day," Will assured her, with a certain perverse

satisfaction.

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He could never go to sleep during the day; but when he looked next at

his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling

wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What's What, and resumed

his interrupted reading:

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new

section, the fifth:

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and

the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the

person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in

the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-

conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of

nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time,

through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and

the certainty of

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death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as

the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He

picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the

bottom of the page the initials S. M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and

therefore public property. He read:

Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday's

Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;

Somewhere between

Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;

Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere

Between our soiled and greasy currency of words

And the first star, the great moths fluttering

About the ghosts of flowers,

Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,

Nevertheless remember

Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore;

And, listening to the wind, remember too

That other night, that first of widowhood,

Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.

Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!

But I, no longer I,

In this clear place between my thought and silence

See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,

Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,

Blue, unpossessed and open.

"Like gentians," Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer

holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high

above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English

butterflies; thought of the dark-blue sky and the sunshine and the huge

shining moun-

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tains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was

that it looked like an advertisement for Nestle's milk chocolate. "Not even

real chocolate," he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. "Milk chocolate."

After which there had been an ironic comment on the water color his

mother was painting— so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and

conscientious care. "The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestle

rejected." And now it was his turn. "Instead of just mooning about with your

mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a

change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example." And

diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hard-boiled

eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a

detestable mail! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see

him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian—Will glanced again at

the last line of the poem—"blue, unpossessed and open."

"Well ..." said a familiar voice.

He turned toward the door. "Talk of the devil," he said. "Or rather read

what the devil has written." He held up the sheet of notepaper for her

inspection.

Susila glanced at it. "Oh that,'' she said. "If only good intentions were

enough to make good poetry!" She sighed and shook her head.

"I was trying to think of my father as a gentian," he went on. "But all I

get is the persistent image of the most enormous turd."

"Even turds," she assured him, "can be seen as gentians."

"But only, I take it, in the place you were writing about—the clear place

between thought and silence?"

Susila nodded.

"How do you get there?"

"You don't get there. There comes to you. Or rather there is really

here."

"You're just like little Radha," he complained. "Parroting what the Old

Raja says at the beginning of this book."

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"If we repeat it," she said, "it's because it happens to be true. If we

didn't repeat it, we'd be ignoring the facts."

"Whose facts?" he asked. "Certainly not mine."

"Not at the moment," she agreed. "But if you were to do the kind of

things that the Old Raja recommends, they might be yours."

"Did you have parent trouble?" he asked after a little silence. "Or could

you aways see turds as gentians?"

"Not at that age," she answered. "Children have to be Manichean

dualists. It's the price we must all pay for learning the rudiments of being

human. Seeing turds as gentians, or rather seeing both gentians and turds

as Gentians with a capital G— that's a postgraduate accomplishment."

"So what did you do about your parents? Just grin and bear the

unbearable? Or did your father and mother happen to be bearable?"

"Bearable separately," she answered. "Especially my father. But quite

unbearable together—unbearable because they couldn't bear one another.

A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously

introverted that she got on his nerves all the time—even, I suspect, in bed.

She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result

that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was

heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings."

"I'd have expected that you people would know better than to walk into

that kind of trap."

"We do know better," she assured him. "Boys and girls are specifically

taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very

different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the

lessons don't seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in

some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is

really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and

mother never managed to make a go of it. They'd fallen in love with one

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another—goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she

found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while her

uninhibited good-fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and

distaste. My sympathies were always with my father. Physically and

temperamentally I'm very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I

remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her

exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one's privacy. She still

is."

"Do you have to see a lot of her?"

"Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the

world 'Mother' is strictly the name of a function. When the function has

been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to

be called 'Mother' establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well

together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don't, they drift

apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn't equated with

loving—isn't regarded as anything particularly creditable."

"So all's well now. But what about then? What happened when you

were a child, growing up between two people who couldn't bridge the gulf

that separated them? I know what that means—the fairy-story ending in

reverse, 'And so they lived unhappily ever after.' "

"And I've no doubt," said Susila, "that if we hadn't been born in Pala,

we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things

considered, remarkably well."

"How did you manage to do that?"

"We didn't; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja

says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that's homemade and

gratuitous?"

Will nodded. "I was just reading it when you came in."

"Well, in the bad old days," she went on, "Palanese families could be

just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today.

In fact they were so awful that Dr. Andrew and the Raja of the Reform

decided that something had to be

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done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were

skillfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation

the whole family system was radically changed." She hesitated for a

moment. "Let me explain," she went on, "in terms of my own particular

case—the case of an only child of two people who couldn't understand one

another and were always at cross-purposes or actually quarreling. In the

old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged

as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the

new dispensation I didn't have to undergo unnecessary suffer ing, I wasn't

wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the

moment I could toddle, I was free to escape."

"To escape?" he repeated. "To escape?" It seemed too good to be

true.

"Escape," she explained, "is built into the new system. Whenever the

parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed,

is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind

the encouragement— to migrate to one of its other homes."

"How many homes does a Palanese child have?"

"About twenty on the average."

"Twenty? My God!"

"We all belong," Susila explained, "to an MAC—a Mutual Adoption

Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted

couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing

children, grandparents and great-grandparents—everybody in the club

adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our

quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy

brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers."

Will shook his head. "Making twenty families grow where only one

grew before."

"But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty

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are all our kind." As though reading instructions from a cookery book, "Take

one sexually inept wage slave," she went on, "one dissatisfied female, two

or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of

Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat

and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different:

Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science,

intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and

simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of

affection."

"And what comes out of your open pan?" he asked. "An entirely

different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not

predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary

family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and

ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages."

"Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?" "Of course

not. Grown-up children don't adopt their own parents or their own brothers

and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group

of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in

due course, their children. Hybridization of microcultures—that's what our

sociologists call the process. It's as beneficial, on its own level, as the

hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier

relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper

understandings. And the sympathies and understandings arc for everyone

in the MAC from babies to centenarians." "Centenarians? What's your

expectation of life?" "A year or two more than yours," she answered. "Ten

percent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can't earn.

But obviously pensions aren't enough. They need some-thing useful and

challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in

return. The MAC's fulfill those needs."

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"It all sounds," said Will, "suspiciously like the propaganda for one of

the new Chinese communes."

"Nothing," she assured him, "could be less like a commune than an

MAC. An MAC isn't run by the government, it's run by its members. And

we're not militaristic. We're not interested in turning out good party

members; we're only interested in turn ing out good human beings. We

don't inculcate dogmas. And finally we don't take the children away from

their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and

the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we

enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow

older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater

responsibilities. Whereas in China there's no freedom at all. The children

are handed over to official baby tamers, whose business it is to turn them

into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your

part of the world—better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state

appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your

childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and

parents. They're foisted on you by hereditary pre destination. You can't get

rid of them, can't take a holiday from them, can't go to anyone else for a

change of moral or psycho logical air. It's freedom, if you like—but freedom

in a telephone booth."

"Locked in," Will elaborated, "(and I'm thinking now ol myself) with a

sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who'd been frightened by

the bully and blackmailed by the mar tyr's appeal to her better feelings into

a state of quivering imbe cility. That was the home from which, until I was

fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped."

"And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you.'"

"That's not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my

mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my

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sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family

servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!"

"Not so lyrical! Free, let's say, as a developing human being, lice as a

future woman—but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against

injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn't

guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept

responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their

responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your

predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long

prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers

may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little

prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of

your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They're

apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or

else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So

God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to

their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive,

voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the

children grow up in a world that's a working model of society at large, a

small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they're going

to have to live when they're grown up. 'Holy,' 'healthy,' 'whole'—they all

come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same

meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and

voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family."

"Amen," said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too

of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. "What happens," he

asked after a pause, "when the children migrate to one of their other

homes? How long do they stay there?"

"It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they

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seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That's because,

fundamentally, they're very happy at home. I wasn't, and so when I walked

out, I'd sometimes stay away for a whole month."

"And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother

and father?"

"It's not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that's being

backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that's being opposed is

unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first

home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes.

Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other

members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit

to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their

parents. But you mustn't think," she added, "that it's only when they're in

trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They

do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of

new experience. And it isn't just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy

children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights—brushing

the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while

the mother's doing something else. Duties as well as privileges—but not in

one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big,

open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and

a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children

have experience of all the important and significant things that human

beings do and suffer—working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick,

dying ..." She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald's mother; then,

deliberately changing her tone, "But what about you)" she went on. "I've

been so busy talking about families that I haven't even asked you how

you're feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last."

"Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who,

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I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on

earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?"

Susila smiled. "You did it to yourself," she assured him. "I merely

pressed the buttons."

"Which buttons?"

"Memory buttons, imagination buttons."

"And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?"

"If you like to call it that."

"What else can one call it?"

"Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be

content with just knowing that it happened?"

"But what did happen?"

"Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn't we?"

"We certainly did," he agreed. "And yet I don't believe I even so much

as looked at you."

He was looking at her now, though—looking and wondering, as he

looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the

smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they

returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.

"How could you look at me?" she said. "You'd gone off on your

vacation."

"Or was I pushed off?"

"Pushed? No." She shook her head. "Let's say seen off, helped off."

There was a moment of silence. "Did you ever," she resumed, "try to do a

job of work with a child hanging around?"

Will thought of the small neighbor who had offered to help him paint

the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.

"Poor little darling!" Susila went on. "He means so well, he's do

anxious to help."

"But the paint's on the carpet, the fingerprints are all over the walls . . ."

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"So that in the end you have to get rid of him. 'Run along, little boy! Go

and play in the garden!' "

There was a silence.

"Well?" he questioned at last.

"Don't you see?"

Will shook his head.

"What happens when you're ill, when you've been hurt? Who does the

repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you?"

"Who else?"

"You?" she insisted. "You? The person that feels the pain and does

the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you

capable of doing what has to be done?"

"Oh, I see what you're driving at."

"At last!" she mocked.

"Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their

work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?"

"Don't ask me," she answered. "That's a question for a neuro-

theologian."

"Meaning what?" he asked.

"Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in

terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative

nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology."

"And the children?"

"The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the

grown-ups."

"And so must be told to run along and play."

"Exactly."

"Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?" he asked.

"Standard procedure," she assured him. "In your part of the world

doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with

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barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws."

Her voice had modulated into a chant. "About white clouds floating in the

sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life . . ."

"Now, now," he protested. "None of that!"

A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked

at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another

Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.

"I know your tricks," he added, joining in the laughter.

"Tricks?" Still laughing, she shook her head. "I was just explaining how

I did it."

"I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What's

more, I give you leave to do it again—whenever it's necessary."

"If you like," she said more seriously, "I'll show you how to press your

own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary schools. The three R's plus

rudimentary SD."

"What's that?"

"Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control."

"Destiny Control?" He raised his eyebrows.

"No, no," she assured him, "we're not quite such fools as you seem to

think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable."

"And you control it by pressing your own buttons?"

"Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we'd like to

happen."

"But does it happen?"

"In many cases it does."

"Simple!" There was a note of irony in his voice.

"Wonderfully simple," she agreed. "And yet, so far as I know, we're the

only people who systematically teach DC to their children. You just tell

them what they're supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you

say. But how? You never tell

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them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy."

"Pure unadulterated idiocy," he agreed, remembering Mr. Crabbe, his

housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings

and the weekly sermons and the Com mination Service on Ash

Wednesday. "Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbor's wife. Amen."

"If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable

sinners. And if they don't take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable

cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they're apt to go Papist

or Marxist. No wonder you have to have-all those thousands of jails and

churches and Communist cells."

"Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few."

Susila shook her head.

"No Alcatrazes here," she said. "No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs

or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky,

no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and

their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living

somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other

home made imaginary universe. And it really isn't your fault. You're almost

compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it's

frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap

between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and

your actual behavior."

" 'For the good that I would,' " he quoted, " 'I do not; and the evil that I

would not, that I do.' "

"Who said that?"

"The man who invented Christianity—St. Paul."

"You see," she said, "the highest possible ideals, and no methods for

realizing them."

"Except the supernatural method of having them realized by

Somebody Else."

Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.

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"There is a fountain fill'd with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel's veins, And sinners plunged beneath that

flood Are cleansed of all their stains."

Susila had covered her ears. "It's really obscene," she said.

"My housemaster's favorite hymn," Will explained. "We used to sing it

about once a week, all the time I was at school."

"Thank goodness," she said, "there was never any blood in Buddhism!

Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad

food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. 'If you

won't believe that you're redeemed by my redeemer's blood, I'll drown you

in your own.' Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of

Christianity." Susila shuddered at the memory. "What a horror! And all

because that poor ignorant man didn't know how to implement his good

intentions."

"And most of us," said Will, "are still in the same old boat. The evil that

we would not, that we do. And how!"

Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed

derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then,

with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly's

unhappiness, Molly's death, his own gnawing sense of guilt, and then the

pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the

agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool

must have known she inevitably would do—turned him out of her infernal

gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.

"What's the matter?" Susila asked.

"Nothing. Why do you ask?"

"Because you're not very good at hiding your feelings. You were

thinking of something that made you unhappy."

"You've got sharp eyes," he said, and looked away.

There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about

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Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and

senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his

oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the

other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated

game which (as an English gentleman who was also a bohemian, also a

would-be poet, also—in mere despair, because he knew he could never be

a good poet—a hard-boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid,

of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing.

No, old friends would never do. But from this dark little outsider, this

stranger to whom he already owed so much and with whom, though he

knew nothing about her, he was already so intimate, there would come no

foregone conclusions, no ex parte judgments—would come perhaps, he

found himself hoping (he who had trained himself never to hope!), some

unexpected enlightenment, some positive and practical help. (And, God

knew, he needed help—though God also knew only too well that he would

never say so, never sink so low as to ask for it.)

Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout

from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, "Here and now, boys. Here and

now, boys."

Will decided to take the plunge—but to take it indirectly, by talking first,

not about his problems, but about hers. Without looking at Susila (for that,

he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.

"Dr. MacPhail told me something about. . . about what happened to

your husband."

The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected,

that was right and inevitable. "It'll be four months next Wednesday," she

said. And then, meditatively, "Two people," she went on after a little

silence, "two separate individuals—but they add up to something like a new

creation. And then suddenly half

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of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn't die—can't die,

mustn't die."

"Mustn't die?"

"For so many reasons—the children, oneself, the whole nature of

things. But needless to say," she added, with a little smile that only

accentuated the sadness in her eyes, "needless to say the reasons don't

lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more

bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just

now—Destiny Control. And even that..." She shook her head. "DC can give

you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless

bereavement—no. And of course that's as it should be. It wouldn't be right

if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you'd be less than

human."

"Less than human," he repeated. "Less than human ..." Three short

words; but how completely they summed him up! "The really terrible thing,"

he said aloud, "is when you know it's your fault that the other person died."

"Were you married?" she asked.

"For twelve years. Until last spring ..."

"And now she's dead?"

"She died in an accident."

"In an accident? Then how was it your fault?"

"The accident happened because . . . well, because the evil t hat I

didn't want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it

confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car—let her

drive away into a head-on collision."

"Did you love her?"

He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

"Was there somebody else—somebody you cared for more?"

"Somebody I couldn't have cared for less." He made a grimace of

sardonic self-mockery.

"And that was the evil you didn't want to do, but did?"

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"Did and went on doing until I'd killed the woman I ought to have loved,

but didn't. Went on doing it even after I'd killed her, even though I hated

myself for doing it—yes, and really hated the person who made me do it."

"Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?"

Will nodded, and there was a silence.

"Do you know what it's like," he asked at length, "to feel that nothing is

quite real-—including yourself?"

Susila nodded. "It sometimes happens when one's just on the point of

discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one

ever imagined. It's like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before

you change into high."

"Or low," said Will. "In my case, the shift wasn't up, it was down. No,

not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting

for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of

people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center

of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything

was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible

click, they were all maggots."

"Maggots?"

"You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on

rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people's faces were the

same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not

even real maggots—just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of

maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that

maggot world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and

dinner in it—all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the

least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I

tried to make love to a young woman I'd had occasional fun with in the

past, completely impotent."

"What did you expect?"

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"Precisely that."

"Then why on earth . . . ?"

Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. "As

a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex

life of the phantom maggot."

"After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal."

"Even more," he agreed, "if that was possible."

"But what brought on the maggots in the first place?"

"Well, to begin with," he answered, "I was my parents' son. By Bully

Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents' son," he

went on after a little pause, "I was my aunt Mary's nephew."

"What did your aunt Mary have to do with it?"

"She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got

cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And

after that nine months of X rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the

liver, and that was the end. I was rhere from start to finish. For a boy in his

teens it was a liberal education—but liberal."

"In what?" Susila asked.

"In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after i he close

of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public

course. World War II. Followed by the nonstop refresher course of Cold

War I. And all this time I'd been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I

simply don't have what it takes. And then, after the war, I had to go into

journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary,

but try to write something decent—good prose at least, seeing that it

couldn't be good poetry. But I'd reckoned without those darling parents of

mine. By the time he died, in lanuary of 'forty-six, my father had got rid of all

the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly

a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be sup-

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ported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a

success that were completely humiliating."

"Why humiliating?"

"Wouldn't you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by

turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success

because I was so irremediably second-rate."

"And the net result of it all was maggots?"

He nodded. "Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here's

where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot party in

Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane

conversation about nonobjective painting. Not wanting to see any more

maggots, I didn't look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly

had very pale gray-blue eyes," he added parenthetically, "eyes that saw

everything—she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or

censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it,

just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to

think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she

must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me

why I was so sad. I'd had a couple of drinks and there was nothing

impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her

about the maggots. 'And you're one of them,' I finished up, and for the first

time I looked at her. 'A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy

women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion.' "

"Was she flattered?"

"I think so. She'd stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain

weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she

called me at breakfast time. Would I like to drive down into the country with

her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in

a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers.

One doesn't pick the windflowers," he explained, "because in an hour

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they're withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse— looking at

flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the

magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don't know why, but it

was extraordinarily therapeutic— just looking into the hearts of primroses

and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street

was still there, waiting for me, and by lunchtime on Monday the whole place

was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I

knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly's studio."

"Was she a painter?"

"Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn't resent it, just

made the best of having no talent. She didn't paint for art's sake; she

painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying

meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a

canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise." "And did it work?"

"It worked so well that when a couple of months later I cut open a

rotten apple, the worm at its center wasn't a maggot— not subjectively, I

mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that's how I

portrayed it, how we both portrayed it—for we always painted the same

things at the same time."

"What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the

apple?"

"Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail

parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And

meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in

love—falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in

love with me—why, God only knows."

"I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you

because . . ." Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled. "Well, because

you're quite an attractive kind of queer fish."

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He laughed. "Thank you for a handsome compliment."

"On the other hand," Susila went on, "(and this isn't quite so

complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so

damned sorry for you."

"That's the truth, I'm afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy."

"And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn't the same as a Wife of

Love."

"Which I duly discovered," he said.

"After your marriage, I suppose."

Will hesitated for a moment. "Actually," he said, "it was before. Not

because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only

because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on

principle, she didn't believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and

more surprisingly" (he remembered the outrageous things she would so

casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother's presence) "all

for freely talking about that freedom."

"You knew it beforehand," Susila summed up, "and yet you still

married her."

Will nodded his head without speaking.

"Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his

word."

"Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in

love with her."

" Were you in love with her?"

"Yes. No, I don't know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I

knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I

still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised

those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was

admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But

unfortunately, you're right: a Sister of Mercy isn't the same as a Wife of

Love.

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But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was

ready to believe that her terms were better than mine."

"How soon," Susila asked, after a long silence, "did you start having

affairs on the side?"

Will smiled his flayed smile. "Three months to the day after our

wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office.

Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a

curlyheaded little Jewish girl whom Molly had helped with money while she

was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her studio twice a week, from five

to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it."

"And, I gather, she was upset?"

"Much more than I'd ever thought she'd be."

"So what did you do about it?"

Will shook his head. "This is where it begins to get complicated," he

said. "I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I

hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for

being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her

suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up

my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so

miserable about what I was doing—what she really forced me to do—she

was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But

meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for

blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity," he

repeated, "not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I

wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me,

and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering.

Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I

mean—sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in

excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time

her unhappiness

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came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never

quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did

because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her

unhappiness and to the pain her unhappi-ness was inflicting on me), that

tenderness was always frustrated 'i; before it could come to its natural

consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a

Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she

loved me with a total commitment—a commitment that called for an

answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn't commit myself, maybe I

genuinely couldn't. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I

resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So

there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old

drama—the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a

sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt

and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but

always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contra-

puntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curly-headed

painter."

"I hope at least they were enjoyable," said Susila.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Only moderately. Rachel could never

forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one

thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real

enjoyment and of course the real agony—I never experienced them until

Babs appeared on the scene."

"When was that?"

"Just over a year ago. In Africa."

"Africa?"

"I'd been sent there by Joe Aldehyde."

"That man who owns newspapers?"

""And, all the rest. He was married to Molly's aunt Eileen. An

exemplary family man, I may add. That's why he's so serenely

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convinced of his own righteousness, even when he's engaged in the most

nefarious financial operations."

"And you're working for him?"

Will nodded. "That was his wedding present to Molly—a job for me on

the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I'd been getting from my

previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly."

"How did he react to Babs?"

"He never knew about her—never knew that there was any reason for

Molly's accident."

"So he goes on employing you for your dead wife's sake?"

Will shrugged his shoulders. "The excuse," he said, "is that I have my

mother to support."

"And of course you wouldn't enjoy being poor."

"I certainly wouldn't."

There was a silence.

"Well," said Susila at last, "let's get back to Africa."

"I'd been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to

mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line lor Uncle Joe. It

was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to

her."

"Next to the young woman you couldn't have liked less?"

"Couldn't have liked less," he repeated, "or disapproved of more. But if

you're an addict you've got to have your dope—the dope that you know in

advance is going to destroy you."

"It's a funny thing," she said reflectively, "but in Pala we have liardly

any addicts."

"Not even sex addicts?"

"The sex addicts are also person addicts. In other words, they're

lovers."

"But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love."

"Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose

and eyes, it doesn't follow that I'm always the same

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woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that's part of the

Art of Loving."

As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the

same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before—

the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to

a higher power—Rachel squared, Rachel to the rath. And the unhappiness

that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately

greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel.

Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own

resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own

remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the

pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting,

what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become

more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time—time not

only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and

nightclubs, at her horrible friends' cocktail parties, on weekends in the

country. "Just you and me, darling," she would say, "all alone together." All

alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the

almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through

all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the

craving persisted. After one of those dreadful weekends, he was as

hopelessly a Babs addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her

own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no

less hopelessly a Will Farnaby addict. Hopelessly so far as he was

concerned—for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow

him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the

addiction was always and irre-pressibly hopeful. She never ceased to

expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind,

unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the

repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding

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as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only

when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her

blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her

and going to live with Babs—it was only then that hope had finally given

place to hopelessness. "Do you mean it, Will—do you really mean it?" "I

really mean it." It was in hopelessness, in utter hopelessness, that she had

walked out to the car, had driven away into the rain—into her death. At the

funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised

himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again.

That evening, while he was sitting at his desk trying to write an article on

"What's Wrong with Youth," trying not to remember the hospital, the open

grave, and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was

startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of

condolence, no doubt. . . He had opened, and there, instead of the

telegram, was Babs—dramatically without makeup and all in black.

"My poor, poor Will!" They had sat down on the sofa in the living room,

and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried.

"When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou." An

hour later, needless to say, they were naked and in bed. After which he had

moved, earth to earth, into the pink alcove. Within three months, as any

fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an

absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One

thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it

was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.

"Do you really mean it, Babs?" She really meant it.

There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant

later, standingly loud and slightly out of time, "Here and now, boys,"

shouted a talking bird.

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"Shut up!" Will shouted back.

"Here and now, boys," the mynah repeated. "Here and now, boys.

Here and—"

"Shut up!"

There was silence.

"I had to shut him up," Will explained, "because of course he's

absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely

irrelevant. Or aren't they? What about your husband's death, for example?

Is that irrelevant?"

Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her

head. "In the context of what I have to do now— yes, completely irrelevant.

That's something I had to learn."

"Does one learn how to forget?"

"It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to

remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and

yet still be here, on the spot, with the living." She gave him a sad little smile

and added, "It isn't easy."

"It isn't easy," Will repeated. And suddenly all his defenses were down,

all his pride had left him. "Will you help me?" he asked.

"It's a bargain," she said, and held out her hand.

A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr. MacPhail had

entered the room.

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"Good evening, my dear. Good evening, Mr. Farnaby."

The tone was cheerful—not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind

of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely. And yet, before coming

here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as

Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully

emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discolored. Half a long lifetime of

love and lovalty and mutual forgiveness—and in another day or two it

would be all over; he would be alone. But sufficient unto the day is the evil

thereof-—sufficient unto the place and the person. "One has no right," her

father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital

together, "one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people. And no

right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad. One just has to accept one's

grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept..." His voice

broke. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. Five

minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in

the shadow of the huge stone Buddha. With a little plop, sharp and yet

liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into

the water. Thrusting up from

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the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the

air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had

opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny

beetles and the wild bees from the jungle. Darting, pausing in mid-flight,

darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragonflies were hawking

for

midges.

"Tathata," Dr. Robert had whispered. "Suchness."

For a long time they sat there in silence. Then, suddenly, he had

touched her shoulder.

"Look!"

She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing. Two small parrots had

perched on the Buddha's right hand and were going through the ritual of

courtship.

"Did you stop again at the lotus pool?" Susila asked aloud.

Dr. Robert gave her a little smile and nodded his head.

"How was Shivapuram?" Will enquired.

"Pleasant enough in itself," the doctor answered. "Its only defect is that

it's so close to the outside world. Up here one can simply ignore the

organized insanities and get on with one's work. Down there, with all those

antennae and listening posts and channels of communication that a

government has to have, the outside world is perpetually breathing down

one's neck. One hears it, feels it, smells it—yes, smells it."

"Has anything more than usually disastrous happened since I've been

here?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary at your end of the world. I wish I could say

the same about our end."

"What's the trouble?"

"The trouble is our next-door neighbor, Colonel Dipa. To begin with,

he's made another deal with the Czechs."

"More armaments?"

"Sixty million dollars' worth. It was on the radio this morning."

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"But what on earth for?"

"The usual reasons. Glory and power. The pleasures of vanity and the

pleasures of bullying. Terrorism and military parades at home; conquests

and Te Deums abroad. And that brings me to the second item of

unpleasant news. Last night the Colonel delivered another of his celebrated

Greater Rendang speeches." "Greater Rendang? What's that?"

"You may well ask," said Dr. Robert. "Greater Rendang is the territory

controlled by the Sultans of Rendang-Lobo between 1447 and 1483. It

included Rendang, the Nicobar Islands, about thirty percent of Sumatra and

the whole of Pala. Today, it's Colonel Dipa's Irredenta.'" "Seriously?"

"With a perfectly straight face. No, I'm wrong. With a purple, distorted

face and at the top of a voice that he has trained, after long practice, to

sound exactly like Hitler's. Greater Rendang or death!"

"But the great powers would never allow it." "Maybe they wouldn't like

to see him in Sumatra. But Pala— that's another matter." He shook his

head. "Pala, unfortunately, is in nobody's good books. We don't want the

Communists; but neither do we want the capitalists. Least of all do we want

the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose

on us—for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our

labor costs are low and investors' dividends will be correspondingly high.

And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat,

open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to

the setting up of yet another People's Democracy. We say no to both of

you, so we're unpopular everywhere. Regardless of their ideologies, all the

Great Powers may prefer a Rendang-controlled Pala with oil fields to an

independent Pala without. If Dipa attacks us, they'll say it's most

deplorable; but they won't lift a finger. And when he takes us over and calls

the oilmen in, they'll be delighted."

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"What can you do about Colonel Dipa?" Will asked.

"Except for passive resistance, nothing. We have no army and no

powerful friends. The Colonel has both. The most we can do, if he starts

making trouble, is to appeal to the United Nations. Meanwhile we shall

remonstrate with the Colonel about this latest Greater Rendang effusion.

Remonstrate through our minister in Rendang-Lobo, and remonstrate with

the great man in person when he pays his state visit to Pala ten days from

now."

"A state visit?"

"For the young Raja's coming-of-age celebrations. He was asked a

long time ago, but he never let us know for certain whether he was coming

or not. Today it was finally settled. We'll have a summit meeting as well as

a birthday party. But let's talk about something more rewarding. How did

you get on today, Mr. Farnaby?"

"Not merely well—gloriously. I had the honor of a visit from your

reigning monarch."

"Murugan?"

"Why didn't you tell me he was your reigning monarch?"

Dr. Robert laughed. "You might have asked for an interview."

"Well, I didn't. Nor from the Queen Mother."

"Did the Rani come too?"

"At the command of her Little Voice. And, sure enough, the Little Voice

sent her to the right address. My boss, Joe Aldehyde, is one of her dearest

friends."

"Did she tell you that she's trying to bring your boss here, to exploit our

oil?"

"She did indeed."

"We turned down his latest offer less than a month ago. Did you know

that?"

Will was relieved to be able to answer quite truthfully that he didn't.

Neither Joe Aldehyde nor the Rani had told him of this most recent rebuff.

"My job," he went on, a little less truthfully, "is in the wood-pulp department,

not in petroleum." There was

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a silence. "What's my status here?" he asked at last. "Undesirable alien?"

"Well, fortunately you're not an armament salesman."

"Nor a missionary," said Susila.

"Nor an oilman—though on that count you might be guilty by

association."

"Nor even, so far as we know, a uranium prospector."

"Those," Dr. Robert concluded, "are the Alpha Plus undesirables. As a

journalist you rank as a Beta. Not the kind of person we should ever dream

of inviting to Pala. But also not the kind who, having managed to get here,

requires to be summarily deported."

"I'd like to stay here for as long as it's legally possible," said Will.

"May I ask why?"

Will hesitated. As Joe Aldehyde's secret agent and a reporter with a

hopeless passion for literature, he had to stay long enough to negotiate

with Bahu and earn his year of freedom. But there were other, more

avowable reasons. "If you don't object to personal remarks," he said, "I'll tell

you."

"Fire away," said Dr. Robert.

"The fact is that, the more I see of you people the better I like you. I

want to find out more about you. And in the process," he added, glancing at

Susila, "I might find out some interesting things about myself. How long

shall I be allowed to stay?"

"Normally we'd turn you out as soon as you're fit to travel. But if you're

seriously interested in Pala, above all if you're seriously interested in

yourself—well, we might stretch a point. Or shouldn't we stretch that point?

What do you say, Susila? After all, he does work for Lord Aldehyde."

Will was on the point of protesting again that his job was in the wood-

pulp department; but the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. The

seconds passed. Dr. Robert repeated his question.

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"Yes," Susila said at last, "we'd be taking a certain risk. But personally

. . . personally I'd be ready to take it. Am I right?" she turned to Will.

"Well, I think you can trust me. At least I hope you can." He laughed,

trying to make a joke of it; but to his annoyance and embarrassment, he felt

himself blushing. Blushing for what? he demanded resentfully of his

conscience. If anybody was being double-crossed, it was Standard of

California. And once Dipa had moved in, what difference would it make

who got the concession? Which would you rather be eaten by—a wolf or a

tiger? So far as the lamb is concerned, it hardly seems to matter. Joe would

be no worse than his competitors. All the same, he wished he hadn't been

in such a hurry to send off that letter. And why, why couldn't that dreadful

woman have left him in peace?

Through the sheet he felt a hand on his undamaged knee. Dr. Robert

was smiling down at him.

"You can have a month here," he said. "I'll take full responsibility for

you. And we'll do our best to show you everything."

"I'm very grateful to you."

"When in doubt," said Dr. Robert, "always act on the assumption that

people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing

they are. That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young

man." Turning to Susila, "Let's see," he said, "how old were you when the

Old Raja died?"

"Just eight."

"So you remember him pretty well."

Susila laughed. "Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk

about himself. 'Quote "I" (unquote) like sugar in my tea.' What a darling

man."

"And what a great one!"

Dr. MacPhail got up and, crossing to the bookcase that stood between

the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album,

much the worse for tropical weather and

135

fish insects. "There's a picture of him somewhere," he said as he turned

over the pages. "Here we are."

Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in

spectacles and a loincloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an

extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.

"What is he doing?" he asked.

"Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter," the doctor answered.

"It was a habit my poor father could never break him of."

"Did your father disapprove of phalluses?"

"No, wo," said Dr. MacPhail. "My father was all for them. It was the

symbol that he disapproved of."

"Why the symbol?"

"Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from

the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or

homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical

container."

"And the Raja had a weakness for containers?"

"Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He'd

always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black

basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old."

"I see," said Will Farnaby.

"Buttering the family lingam—it was an act of piety, it expressed a

beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is

totally different from the cosmic mystery it's supposed to stand for. And the

beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea—what do they have

in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever.

Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my

father. He'd drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he'd actually been the

milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn't

bear to give up. And, I don't have to tell you, he should never have been

asked to give it up.

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But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He'd

amended Goethe—Alles vergdnglkhe ist nicht ein Gleich-nis. His ideal was

pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum and pure

experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and

then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and

crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting—he'd

have liked to abolish them all."

"Where would the arts have come in?" Will questioned.

"They wouldn't have come in at all," Dr. MacPhail answered. "And that

was my father's blindest spot—poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he

didn't. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out

there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of

science—that was something he simply couldn't understand. Let's find his

picture."

Dr. MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a

craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.

"What a Scotsman!" Will commented.

"And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese."

"One doesn't see a trace of them."

"Whereas his grandfather, who hailed from Perth, might almost have

passed for a Rajput."

Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval

face and black side-whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on

which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top hat.

"Your great-grandfather?"

"The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr. Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal

Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was

properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being

convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing

satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going

through life with the

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noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft

counting the minutes to spring the trap."

Will laughed.

"Yes," Dr. Robert agreed, "it does seem pretty comic. But it didn't then.

Then it was serious—much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was

known for certain that ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race

were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they'd

never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn't believe

sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And

the proof that they didn't believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical,

observable fact that their souls were not at peace. Perfect faith is defined

as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of

mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically

nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is

predestined to eternal punishment. Quod erat demonstrandum.''''

"One wonders," said Susila, "why they didn't all go mad."

"Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads.

Up here." Dr. MacPhail tapped his bald spot. "With the tops of their heads

they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T. But their

glands and their guts knew better— knew that it was all sheer bosh. For

most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly

Pickwickian sense. James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that

his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers. They were to

believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on

half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not

merely up there, in the attic. Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes

with it were to be forced into them. How? By giving them hell now and

threatening them with hell hereafter. And if, in their devilish perversity, they

refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and

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threaten hotter fires. And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy

rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every

misdemeanor. Tell them that by nature they're totally depraved, then beat

them for being what they inescapably are."

Will Farnaby turned back to the album.

"Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?"

"We had an oil painting," said Dr. MacPhail. "But the dampness was

too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it. He was a

splendid specimen. Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah. You

know—majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that

covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins. The only relic of him that

remains is a pencil drawing of his house."

He turned back another page and there it was.

"Solid granite," he went on, "with bars on all the windows. And, inside

that cozy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity! Systematic

inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness'

sake. Dr. Andrew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it."

"Didn't the children get any help from their mother?"

Dr. MacPhail shook his head.

"Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James

himself. Maybe an even better Calvinist than he was. Being a woman, she

had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome. But she

did overcome them—heroically. Far from restraining her husband, she

urged him on, she backed him up. There were homilies before breakfast

and at the midday dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and

learning the Epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day's

delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with

a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as

well as boys, in order of seniority."

"It always makes me feel slightly sick," said Susila. "Pure sadism."

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"No, not pure," said Dr. MacPhail. "Applied sadism. Sadism with an

ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a

religious conviction. And that's a subject," he added, turning to Will, "that

somebody ought to make a historical study of—the relation between

theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that,

wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow

up to think of God as 'Wholly Other'—isn't that the fashionable argot in your

part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up

without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent. A people's

theology reflects the state of its children's bottoms. Look at the Hebrews—

enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of

Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father

of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and

Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little

buttocks—therefore tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not

divided. And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in

the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children

and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of

slavery."

"But child-beating," Will objected, "has quite gone out of fashion

nowadays. And yet it's precisely at this moment that it has become modish

to hold forth about the Wholly Other."

Dr. MacPhail waved the objection away. "It's just a case of reaction

following action. By the second half of the nineteenth century freethinking

humanitarianism had become so strong that even good Christians were

influenced by it and stopped beating their children. There were no weals on

the younger generation's posterior; consequently, it ceased to think of God

as the Wholly Other and proceeded to invent New Thought, Unity, Christian

Science—all the semi-Oriental heresies in which God is the Wholly

Identical. The movement was well under way in

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William James's day, and it's been gathering momentum ever since.

But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat

Neo-Orthodoxy. Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly

Other! Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther—back, in a word, to the

two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian

thought. Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk. Augustine was beaten

by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained,

Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father,

but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on

his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich—without Luther

and his flagellation theology these monstrosities could never have come

into existence. Or take the flagellation theology of Augustine, as carried to

its logical conclusions by Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like

James MacPhail and Janet Cameron. Major premise: God is Wholly Other.

Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children's

bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been

doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip,

whip!"

There was a silence. Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the

granite person in the rope walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly

phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene

cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries

endured because of them. And when it wasn't Augustine with his

"benignant asperity," it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn't

Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was a genial Mao

reducing them to slavery.

"Don't you sometimes despair?" he asked.

Dr. MacPhail shook his head. "We don't despair," he said, "because

we know that things don't necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they've

always been."

"We know that they can be a great deal better," Susila added.

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"Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now,

on this absurd little island."

"But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our

example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of

humanity in the midst of your worldwide wilderness of monkeys—that,

alas," said Dr. MacPhail, "is another question. One's justified in feeling

extremely pessimistic about the current situation. But despair, radical

despair—no, I can't see any justification for that."

"Not even when you read history?"

"Not even when I read history."

"I envy you. How do you manage to do it?"

"By remembering what history is—the record of what human beings

have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous

bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or

religious dogma."

He turned again to the album. "Let's get back to the house in the Royal

Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin's God,

in His inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies.

'The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his

mother to shame.' Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and

physical torture—the perfect Pavlovian setup. But, unfortunately for

organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less

reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the

conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and

Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home,

nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty

years was slowly sacrificed to the aging and finally senile and driveling

patriarch. So far, so good. But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern

changed. Annie was pretty. At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain

of dragoons. But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total

depravity and God's good pleasure were crim-

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inally incorrect. The marriage was forbidden. It looked as though Annie

were predestined to share the fate of Jean. She stuck it out for ten years;

then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an

East Indiaman. There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness—the

first she had ever known. Her face was transfigured by a kind of

supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life. Then the Indiaman sailed

for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao. Four months later, pregnant,

friendless and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay. Meanwhile

Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a

company of actors. In the house by the rope walk nobody, thenceforward,

was ever allowed to refer to his existence. And finally there was Andrew,

the youngest, the Benjamin. What a model child! He was obedient, he

loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more

accurately than any of the other children had done. Then, just in time to

restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening

playing with his genitals. He was whipped till the blood came; was caught

again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary

confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly

committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on

account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer. For the

rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell.

Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them—

which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom

of the garden—by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for

him."

"And to think," Will Farnaby commented, "to think that people complain

about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did

have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give

me the idiot every time."

"Agreed," said Dr. MacPhail. "But mightn't there be a third

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possibility? Mightn't there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an

imbecile nor a paranoiac?"

"Somebody, for a change, completely sane," said Susila.

"Yes, for a change," Dr. MacPhail repeated. "For a blessed change.

And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of

people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn't ruin. By all the

rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to

have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental

athlete. Which only shows," Dr. Robert added parenthetically, "how

hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really

are. Freudism and behaviorism—poles apart but in complete agreement

when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between

individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very

simply. They ignore them. They blandly pretend that the facts aren't there.

Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really

exists, or even to explain it theoretically. Look at what happened, for,

example, in this particular case. Andrew's brothers and sisters were either

tamed by their conditioning or destroyed. Andrew was neither destroyed

nor tamed. Why? Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped

turning at a lucky number. He had a more resilient constitution than the

others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different

temperament. His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest

of their unfortunate brood. Andrew came through with flying colors, almost

without a scar."

"In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?"

"That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of

medical studies at Edinburgh. He was only a boy—just over seventeen.

(They started young in those days.) In the dissecting room the boy found

himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which

his fellow students kept

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up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers. Listening at first with

horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance. But

nothing happened. The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed

fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then,

of the clap. Fear gave place in Andrew's mind to a wonderful sense of relief

and deliverance. Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his

own. His first utterance of a four-letter word—what a liberation, what a

genuinely religious experience! And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read

Tom Jones, he read Hume's 'Essay on Miracles,' he read the infidel

Gibbon. Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he

read La Mettrie, he read Dr. Caba-nis. Man is a machine, the brain

secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. How simple it all was, how

luminously obvious! With all the fervor of a convert at a revival meeting, he

decided for atheism. In the circumstances it was only to be expected. You

can't stomach St. Augustine any more, you can't go on repeating the

Athanasian rigmarole. So you pull the plug and send them down the drain.

What bliss! But not for very long. Something, you discover, is missing. The

experimental baby was flushed out with the theological dirt and soapsuds.

But nature abhors a vacuum. Bliss gives place to a chronic discomfort, and

now you're afflicted, generation after generation, by a succession of

Wesleys, Puseys, Moodys and Billys—Sunday and Graham—all working

like beavers to pump the theology back out of the cesspool. They hope, of

course, to recover the baby. But they never succeed. All that a revivalist

can do is to siphon up a little of the dirty water. Which, in due course, has

to be thrown out again. And so on, indefinitely. It's really too boring and, as

Dr. Andrew came at last to realize, wholly unnecessary. Meanwhile here he

was, in the first flush of his new-found freedom. Excited, exultant—but

quietly excited, exultant behind that appearance of grave and courteous

detachment which he habitually presented to the world." "What about his

father?" Will asked. "Did they have a battle?"

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"No battle. Andrew didn't like battles. He was the sort of man who

always goes his own way, but doesn't advertise the fact, doesn't argue with

people who prefer another road. The old man was never given the

opportunity of putting on his Jeremiah act. Andrew kept his mouth shut

about Hume and La Mettrie and went through the traditional motions. But

when his training was finished, he just didn't come home. Instead, he went

to London and signed up, as surgeon and naturalist, on HMS Melampus,

bound for the South Seas with orders to chart, survey, collect specimens

and protect Protestant missionaries and British interests. The cruise of the

Melampus lasted for a full three years. They called at Tahiti, they spent two

months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group. After Perth, the

islands seemed like Eden—but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of

Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and

Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking. It was paradise,

but it wouldn't do, it wouldn't do. They sailed on. They visited Fiji and the

Carolines and the Solomons. They charted the northern coast of New

Guinea and, in Borneo, a party went ashore, trapped a pregnant orangutan

and climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu. Then followed a week at Panay,

a fortnight in the Mergui Archipelago. After which they headed west to the

Andamans and from the Andamans to the mainland of India. While ashore,

my great-grandfather was thrown from his horse and broke his right leg.

The captain of the Melampus found another surgeon and sailed for home.

Two months later, as good as new, Andrew was practicing medicine at

Madras. Doctors were scarce in those days and sickness fearfully common.

The young man began to prosper. But life among the merchants and

officials of the presidency was oppressively boring. It was an exile, but an

exile without any of the compensations of exile, an exile without adventure

or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical

equivalent of Swansea or Hudders-field. But still he resisted the temptation

to book a passage on the

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next homebound ship. If he stuck it out for five years, he would have

enough money to buy a good practice in Edinburgh—no, in London, in the

West End. The future beckoned, rosy and golden. There would be a wife,

preferably with auburn hair and a modest competence. There would be four

or five children— happy, unwhipped and atheistic. And his practice would

grow, his patients would be drawn from circles ever more exalted. Wealth,

reputation, dignity, even a knighthood. Sir Andrew MacPhail stepping out of

his brougham in Belgrave Square. The great Sir Andrew, physician to the

Queen. Summoned to St. Petersburg to operate on the Grand Duke, to the

Tuileries, to the Vatican, to the Sublime Porte. Delightful phantasies! But

the facts, as it turned out, were to be far more interesting. One fine morning

a brown-skinned stranger called at the surgery. In halting English he gave

an account of himself. He was from Pala and had been commanded by His

Highness, the Raja, to seek out and bring back with him a skillful surgeon

from the West. The rewards would be princely. Princely, he insisted. There

and then Dr. Andrew accepted the invitation. Partly, of course, for the

money; but mostly because he was bored, because he needed a change,

needed a taste of adventure. A trip to the Forbidden Island—the lure was

irresistible."

"And remember," Susila interjected, "in those days Pala was much

more forbidden than it is now."

"So you can imagine how eagerly young Dr. Andrew jumped at the

opportunity now offered by the Raja's ambassador. Ten days later his ship

dropped anchor off the north coast of the forbidden island. With his

medicine chest, his bag of instruments, and a small tin trunk containing his

clothes and a few indispensable books, he was rowed in an outrigger

canoe through the pounding surf, carried in a palanquin through the streets

of Shivapuram and set down in the inner courtyard of the royal palace. His

royal patient was eagerly awaiting him. Without being given time to shave

or change his clothes, Dr. Andrew was

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ushered into the presence—the pitiable presence of a small brown man in

his early forties, terribly emaciated under his rich brocades, his face so

swollen and distorted as to be barely human, his voice reduced to a hoarse

whisper. Dr. Andrew examined him. From the maxillary antrum, where it

had its roots, a tumor had spread in all directions. It had filled the nose, it

had pushed up into the socket of the right eye, it had half blocked the

throat. Breathing had become difficult, swallowing acutely painful, and

sleep an impossibility—for whenever he dropped off, the patient would

choke and wake up frantically struggling for air. Without radical surgery, it

was obvious, the Raja would be dead within a couple of months. With

radical surgery, much sooner. Those were the good old days, remember—

the good old days of septic operations without benefit of chloroform. Even

in the most favorable circumstances surgery was fatal to one patient out of

four. Where conditions were less propitious, the odds declined—fifty-fifty,

thirty to seventy, zero to a hundred. In the present case the prognosis could

hardly have been worse. The patient was already weak and the operation

would be long, difficult and excruciatingly painful. There was a good chance

that he would die on the operating table and a virtual certainty that, if he

survived, it would only be to die a few days later of blood poisoning. But if

he should die, Dr. Andrew now reflected, what would be the fate of the

alien surgeon who had killed a king? And, during the operation, who would

hold the royal patient down while he writhed under the.knife? Which of his

servants or courtiers would have the strength of mind to disobey, when the

master screamed in agony or positively commanded them to let him go?

"Perhaps the wisest thing would be to say, here and now, that the case

was hopeless, that he could do nothing, and ask to be sent back to Madras

forthwith. Then he looked again at the sick man. Through the grotesque

mask of his poor deformed face the Raja was looking at him intently—

looking with the eyes of a

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condemned criminal begging the judge for mercy. Touched by the appeal,

Dr. Andrew gave him a smile of encouragement and all at once, as he

patted the thin hand, he had an idea. It was absurd, crackbrained,

thoroughly discreditable; but all the same, all the same ...

"Five years before, he suddenly remembered, while he was still at

Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing

the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism.

Elliotson had had the effrontery to talk of painless operations performed on

patients in the mesmeric trance.

"The man was either a gullible fool or an unscrupulous knave. The so-

called evidence for such nonsense was manifestly worthless. It was all

sheer humbug, quackery, downright fraud— and so on for six columns of

righteous indignation. At the time—for he was still full of La Mettrie and

Hume and Cabanis— Dr. Andrew had read the article with a glow of

orthodox approval. After which he had forgotten about the very existence of

animal magnetism. Now, at the Raja's bedside, it all came back to him—the

mad professor, the magnetic passes, the amputations without pain, the low

death rate and the rapid recoveries. Perhaps, after all, there might be

something in it. He was deep in these thoughts when, breaking a long

silence, the sick man spoke to him. From a young sailor who had deserted

his ship at Rendang-Lobo and somehow made his way across the Strait,

the Raja had learned to speak English with remarkable fluency, but , also,

in faithful imitation of his teacher, with a strong Cockney accent. That

Cockney accent," Dr. MacPhail repeated with a little laugh. "It turns up

again and again in my great-grandfather's memoirs. There was something,

to him, inexpressibly improper about a king who spoke like Sam Weller.

And in this case the impropriety was more than merely social. Besides

being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite

refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude

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oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also of deep religious

experience and spiritual insight. That such a man should express himself in

Cockney was something that an Early Victorian Scotsman who had read

The Pickwick Papers could never get over. Nor, in spite of all my great-

grandfather's tactful coaching, could the Raja ever get over his impure

diphthongs and dropped aitches. But all that was in the future. At their first

tragic meeting, that shocking, lower-class accent seemed strangely

touching. Laying the palms of his hands together in a gesture of

supplication, the sick man whispered, ' 'Elp me, Dr. MacPhile, 'elp me.'

"The appeal was decisive. Without any further hesitation, Dr. Andrew

took the Raja's thin hands between his own and began to speak in the

most confident tone about a wonderful new treatment recently discovered

in Europe and employed as yet by only a handful of the most eminent

physicians. Then, turning to the attendants who had been hovering all this

time in the background, he ordered them out of the room. They did not

understand the words; but his tone and accompanying gestures were

unmistakably clear. They bowed and withdrew. Dr. Andrew took off his

coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and started to make those famous magnetic

passes, about which he had read with so much skeptical amusement in

The Lancet. From the crown of the head, over the face and down the trunk

to the epigastrium, again and again until the patient falls into a trance—'or

until' (he remembered the derisive comments of the anonymous writer of

the article) 'until the presiding charlatan shall choose to say that his dupe is

now under the magnetic influence.' Quackery, humbug and fraud. But all

the same, all the same ... He worked away in silence. Twenty passes, fifty

passes. The sick man sighed and closed his eyes. Sixty, eighty, a hundred,

a hundred and twenty. The heat was stifling, Dr. Andrew's shirt was

drenched with sweat, and his arms ached. Grimly he repeated the same

absurd gesture. A hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy-five, two

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hundred. It was all fraud and humbug; but all the same he was determined

to make this poor devil go to sleep, even if it took him the whole day to do

it. 'You are going to sleep,' he said aloud as he made the two hundred and

eleventh pass. 'You are going to sleep.' The sick man seemed to sink more

deeply into his pillows, and suddenly Dr. Andrew caught the sound of a

rattling wheeze. 'This time,' he added quickly, 'you are not going to choke.

There's plenty of room for the air to pass, and you're not going to choke.'

The Raja's breathing grew quiet. Dr. Andrew made a few more passes,

then decided that it would be safe to take a rest. He mopped his face, then

rose, stretched his arms and took a couple of turns up and down the room.

Sitting down again by the bed, he took one of the Raja's sticklike wrists and

felt for the pulse. An hour before it had been running at almost a hundred;

now the rate had fallen to seventy. He raised the arm: the hand hung limp

like a dead man's. He let go, and the arm dropped by its own weight and

lay, inert and unmoving, where it had fallen. 'Your Highness,' he said, and

again, more loudly, 'Your Highness.' There was no answer. It was all

quack-ery, humbug and fraud, but all the same it worked, it obviously

worked."

A large, brightly colored mantis fluttered down onto the rail at the foot

of the bed, folded its pink and white wings, raised its small flat head, and

stretched out its incredibly muscular front legs in the attitude of prayer. Dr.

MacPhail pulled out a magnify- ing glass and bent forward to examine it.

"Gongylus gongyloides," he pronounced. "It dresses itself up to look

like a flower. When unwary flies and moths come sailing in to sip the

nectar, it sips them. And if it's a female, she eats her lovers." He put the

glass away and leaned back in his chair. "What one likes most about the

universe," he said to Will Farnaby, "is its wild improbability. Gongylus

gongyloides, Homo sapiens, my great grandfather's introduction to Pala

and hypnosis—what could be more unlikely?"

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"Nothing," said Will. "Except perhaps my introduction to Pala and

hypnosis, Pala via a shipwreck and a precipice; hypnosis by way of a

soliloquy about an English cathedral."

Susila laughed. "Fortunately I didn't have to make all those passes

over you. In this climate! I really admire Dr. Andrew. It sometimes takes

three hours to anesthetize a person with the passes."

"But in the end he succeeded?"

"Triumphantly."

"And did he actually perform the operation?"

"Yes, he actually performed the operation," said Dr. MacPhail. "But not

immediately. There had to be a long preparation. Dr. Andrew began by

telling his patient that henceforward he would be able to swallow without

pain. Then, for the next three weeks, he fed him up. And between meals he

put him into trance and kept him asleep until it was time for another

feeding. It's wonderful what your body will do for you if you only give it a

chance. The Raja gained twelve pounds and felt like a new man. A new

man full of new hope and confidence. He knew he was going to come

through his ordeal. And so, incidentally, did Dr. Andrew. In the process of

fortifying the Raja's faith he had fortified his own. It was not a blind faith.

The operation, he felt quite certain, was going to be successful. But this

unshakable confidence did not prevent him from doing everything that

might contribute to its success. Very early in the proceedings he started to

work on the trance. The trance, he kept telling his patient, was becoming

deeper every day, and on the day of the operation it would be much deeper

than it had ever been before. It would also last longer. 'You'll sleep,' he

assured the Raja, 'for four full hours after the operation's over; and when

you awake, you won't feel the slightest pain.' Dr. Andrew made these

affirmations with a mixture of total skepticism and complete confidence.

Reason and past experience assured him that all this was impossible. But

in the present context past experience had

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proved to be irrelevant. The impossible had already happened, several

times. There was no reason why it shouldn't happen again. The important

thing was to say that it would happen—so he said it, again and again. All

this was good; but better still was Dr. Andrew's invention of the rehearsal."

"Rehearsal of what?"

"Of the surgery. They ran through the procedure half a dozen times.

The last rehearsal was on the morning of the operation. At six, Dr. Andrew

came to the Raja's room and, after a little cheerful talk, began to make the

passes. In a few minutes the patient was in deep trance. Stage by stage,

Dr. Andrew described what he was going to do. Touching the cheekbone

near the Raja's right eye, he said, T begin by stretching the skin. And now

with this scalpel' (and he drew the tip of a pencil across the cheek) 'I make

an incision. You feel no pain, of course—not even the slightest discomfort.

And now the underlying tissues are being cut and you still feel nothing at

all. You just lie there, comfortably asleep, while I dissect the cheek back to

the nose. Every now and then I stop to tie a blood vessel; then I go on

again. And when that part of the work is done, I'm ready to start on the

tumor. It has its roots there in the antrum and it has grown upwards, under

the cheekbone, into the eye socket, and downwards into the gullet. And as

I cut it loose, you lie there as before, feeling nothing, perfectly comfortable,

completely relaxed. And now I lift your head.' Suiting his action to the

words, he lifted the Raja's head and bent it forward on the limp neck. 'I lift it

and bend it so that you can get rid of the blood that's run down into your

mouth and throat. Some of the blood has got into your windpipe, and you

cough a little to get rid of it; but it doesn't wake you.' The Raja coughed

once or twice, then, when Dr. Andrew released his hold, dropped back onto

the pillows, still fast asleep. 'And you don't choke even when I work on the

lower end of the tumor in your gullet.' Dr. Andrew opened the Raja's mouth

and thrust two fingers down his throat. 'It's

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just a question of pulling it loose, that's all. Nothing in that to make you

choke. And if you have to cough up the blood, you can do it in your sleep.

Yes, in your sleep, in this deep, deep sleep.'

"That was the end of the rehearsal. Ten minutes later, after making

some more passes and telling his patient to sleep still more deeply, Dr.

Andrew began the operation. He stretched the skin, he made the incision,

he dissected the cheek, he cut the tumor away from its roots in the antrum.

The Raja lay there perfectly relaxed, his pulse firm and steady at seventy-

five, feeling no more pain than he had felt during the make-believe of the

rehearsal. Dr. Andrew worked on the throat; there was no choking. The

blood flowed into the windpipe; the Raja coughed but did not awake. Four

hours after the operation was over, he was still sleeping; then, punctual to

the minute, he opened his eyes, smiled at Dr. Andrew between his

bandages and asked, in his singsong Cockney, when the operation was to

start. After a feeding and a sponging, he was given some more passes and

told to sleep for four more hours and to get well quickly. Dr. Andrew kept it

up for a full week. Sixteen hours of trance each day, eight of waking. The

Raja suffered almost no pain and, in spite of the thoroughly septic

conditions under which the operation had been performed and the

dressings renewed, the wounds healed without suppuration. Remembering

the horrors he had witnessed in the Edinburgh infirmary, the yet more

frightful horrors of the surgical wards at Madras, Dr. Andrew could hardly

believe his eyes. And now he was given another opportunity to prove to

himself what animal magnetism could do. The Raja's eldest daughter was

in the ninth month of her first pregnancy. Impressed by what he had

done for her husband, the Rani sent for Dr. Andrew. He found her sitting

with a frail frightened girl of sixteen, who knew just enough broken Cockney

to be able to tell him she was going to die—she and her baby too. Three

black birds had confirmed it by flying on three successive days across

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her path. Dr. Andrew did not try to argue with her. Instead, he asked her to

lie down, then started to make the passes. Twenty minutes later the girl

was in a deep trance. In his country, Dr. Andrew now assured her, black

birds were lucky—a presage of birth and joy. She would bear her child

easily and without pain. Yes, with no more pain than her father had felt

during his operation. No pain at all, he promised, no pain whatsoever.

"Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive

suggestion, it all came true. When the Raja woke up for his evening meal,

he found his wife sitting by his bed. 'We have a grandson,' she said, 'and

our daughter is well. Dr. Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried

to her room, to give them both your blessing.' At the end of a month the

Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers.

Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the

Rani was convinced of it) his daughter's life as well, with Dr. Andrew as his

chief adviser."

"So he didn't go back to Madras?"

"Not to Madras. Not even to London. He stayed here in Pala."

"Trying to change the Raja's accent?"

"And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja's kingdom."

"Into what?"

"That was a question he couldn't have answered. In those early days

he had no plan-—only a set of likes and dislikes. There were things about

Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn't like at all. Things

about Europe that he detested, and things he passionately approved of.

Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and

things that filled him with disgust. People, he was beginning to understand,

are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them

to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a

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canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this

forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nip-pings, and make

the individual blooms more beautiful? That was the question to which,

implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up

to, Dr. Andrew and the Raja were trying to find an answer."

"And did they find an answer?"

"Looking back," said Dr. MacPhail, "one's amazed by what those two

men accomplished. The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the

Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist—what a

strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair,

moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with

complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge,

each man supplying the other's deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying

the other's native capacities. The Raja's was an acute and subtle mind; but

he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of

physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European

ways of thinking. No less intelligent, Dr. Andrew knew nothing, of course,

about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy. He also knew nothing, as

he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art

of living. In the months that followed the operation each became the other's

pupil and the other's teacher. And of course that was only a beginning.

They were not merely private citizens concerned with their private

improvement. The Raja had a million subjects and Dr. Andrew was virtually

his prime minister. Private improvement was to be the preliminary to public

improvement. If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to

make the best of both worlds—the Oriental and the European, the ancient

and the modern—it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same.

To make the best of both worlds—what am I saying? To make the best of

all the worlds—

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the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them,

the worlds of still unrealized potentialities. It was an enormous ambition, an

ambition totally impossible of fulfillment; but at least it had the merit of

spurring them on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread—

with results that sometimes proved, to everybody's astonishment, that they

had not been quite such fools as they looked. They never succeeded, of

course, in making the best of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying they

made the best of many more worlds than any merely prudent or sensible

person would have dreamed of being able to reconcile and combine."

" 'If the fool would persist in his folly,' " Will quoted from The Proverbs

of Hell, " 'he would become wise.' "

"Precisely," Dr. Robert agreed. "And the most extravagant folly of all is

the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr. Andrew were

now contemplating—the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage

between hell and heaven. But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an

enormous reward! Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently. Stupid

fools get nowhere; it's only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly

can make them wise or produce good results. Fortunately these two fools

were clever. Clever enough, for example, to embark on their folly in a

modest and appealing way. They began with pain relievers. The Palanese

were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you

crave, you assert yourself—and you live in a homemade hell. You become

detached—and you live in peace. 'I show you sorrow,' the Buddha had

said, 'and I show you the ending of sorrow.' Well, here was Dr. Andrew with

a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one

kind of sorrow, namely, physical pain. With the Raja himself or, for the

women, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr. Andrew gave

lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of

teachers, mothers, invalids.

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Painless childbirth—and forthwith all the women of Pala were

enthusiastically on the side of the innovators. Painless operations for stone

and cataract and hemorrhoids—and they had won the approval of all the

old and the ailing. At one stroke more than half the adult population

became their allies, prejudiced in their favor, friendly in advance, or at least

open-minded, toward the next reform."

"Where did they go from pain?" Will asked.

"To agriculture and language. To bread and communication. They got

a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they

set to work to give the Palanese a second language. Pala was to remain a

forbidden island; for Dr. Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that

missionaries, planters and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated.

But, while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the

natives must somehow be helped to get out—if not physically, at least with

their minds. But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi

alphabet were a prison without windows. There could be no escape for

them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and

could read the Latin script. Among the courtiers, the Raja's linguistic

accomplishments had already set a fashion. Ladies and gentlemen larded

their conversation with scraps of Cockney, and some of them had even

sent to Ceylon for English-speaking tutors. What had been a mode was

now transformed into a policy. English schools were set up and a staff of

Bengali printers, with their presses and their fonts of Caslon and Bodoni,

were imported from Calcutta. The first English book to be published at

Shivapuram was a selection from The Arabian Nights, the second, a

translation of The Diamond Sutra, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in

manuscript. For those who wished to read about Sindbad and Marouf, and

for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there

were now two cogent reasons for learning English.

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That was the beginning of the long educational process that turned us

at last into a bilingual people. We speak Palanese when we're cooking,

when we're telling funny stories, when we're talking about love or making it.

(Incidentally, we have the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in

Southeast Asia.) But when it comes to business, or science, or speculative

philosophy, we generally speak English. And most of us prefer to write in

English. Every writer needs a literature as his frame of reference; a set of

models to conform to or depart from. Pala had good painting and sculpture,

splendid architecture, wonderful dancing, subtle and expressive music—but

no real literature, no national poets or dramatists or storytellers. Just bards

reciting Buddhist and Hindu myths; just a lot of monks preaching sermons

and splitting metaphysical hairs. Adopting English as our stepmother

tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and

certainly the widest of presents. We gave ourselves a background, a

spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible

source of inspiration. In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being

creative in a field where we had never been creative before. Thanks to the

Raja and my great-grandfather, there's an Anglo-Palanese literature— of

which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light."

"On the dim side," she protested.

Dr. MacPhail shut his eyes, and, smiling to himself, began to recite:

"Thus-Gone to Thus-Gone, I with a Buddha's hand Offer the unplucked

flower, the frog's soliloquy Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared

mouth At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless Sky that makes

possible mountains and setting moon, This emptiness that is the womb of

love This poetry of silence."

He opened his eyes again. "And not only this poetry of silence," he

said. "This science, this philosophy, this theology of silence. And now it's

high time you went to sleep." He rose and moved towards the door. "I'll go

and get you a glass of fruit juice."

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" 'Patriotism is not enough.' But neither is anything else. Science is not

enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics