دوشنبه ۲۶ شهریور ۰۳ | ۲۱:۰۱ ۵ بازديد
dfgdfg dfgfdgdf fdgdfgdfgdfg fdgggggggggggggggggg dfgfdgdfgdf dfgggg
دوشنبه ۲۶ شهریور ۰۳ | ۲۰:۴۱ ۵ بازديد
Review
Introduction
Nickel is a nutritionally essential trace metal for at
least several animal species, micro-organisms and plants,
and therefore either deficiency or toxicity symptoms can
occur when, respectively, too little or too much Ni is taken
up. Although a number of cellular effects of nickel have
been documented, a deficiency state in humans has not
been described [1-6]. Nickel and nickel compounds have
many industrial and commercial uses, and the progress
of industrialization has led to increased emission of pol-
lutants into ecosystems. Although Ni is omnipresent and
is vital for the function of many organisms, concentra-
tions in some areas from both anthropogenic release and
naturally varying levels may be toxic to living organisms
[6-8].
Inhalation exposure in occupational settings is a prima-
ry route for nickel-induced toxicity, and may cause toxic
effects in the respiratory tract and immune system [9]. The
exposure of the general population to nickel mainly con-
cerned oral intake, primarily through water and food, as a
contaminant in drinking water or as both a constituent and
contaminant of food [7, 10]. It is also known to affect non-
occupationally exposed individuals, especially those han-
dling stainless steel and nickel-plated articles of everyday
use, because nickel is a common sensitizing agent with a
high prevalence of allergic contact dermatitis [1, 11, 12].
This paper presents a current overview of the occur-
rence and sources of nickel in different parts of the envi-
ronment (air, water, soil, food) with particular emphasis
on polish measurements, as well as the effect of nickel on
living organisms.
Nickel: A Review of Its Sources and Environmental
Toxicology
M. Cempel, G. Nikel
Department of Environmental Toxicology, Interfaculty Institute of Maritime and Tropical Medicine,
Medical university of Gdańsk, powstania styczniowego 9B, 81-519 Gdynia, poland
Received: September 23, 2005
Accepted: December 27, 2005
Abstract
Nickel is a metal of widespread distribution in the environment: there are almost 100 minerals of which
it is an essential constituent and which have many industrial and commercial uses. Nickel and nickel com-
pounds belong to the classic noxious agents encountered in industry but are also known to affect non-oc-
cupationally exposed individuals. The general population may be exposed to nickel in the air, water and
food. Inhalation is an important route of occupational exposure to nickel in relation to health risks. Most
nickel in the human body originates from drinking water and food; however, the gastrointestinal route is of
lesser importance, due to its limited intestinal absorption. The toxicity and carcinogenicity of some nickel
compounds (in the nasal cavity, larynx and lungs) in experimental animals, as well as in the occupationally
exposed population, are well documented.
The objective of this paper is to summarize the current overview of the occurrence and sources of nickel
in the environment, and the effect of this metal and its compounds on living organisms. As this topic is very
broad, this review is briefly concerned with the toxicokinetics of nickel, its health effects and biological
monitoring.
Keywords: nickel, environment, sources, toxicokinetics, pollution
Polish J. of Environ. Stud. Vol. 15, No. 3 (2006), 375-382
Introduction
Nickel is a nutritionally essential trace metal for at
least several animal species, micro-organisms and plants,
and therefore either deficiency or toxicity symptoms can
occur when, respectively, too little or too much Ni is taken
up. Although a number of cellular effects of nickel have
been documented, a deficiency state in humans has not
been described [1-6]. Nickel and nickel compounds have
many industrial and commercial uses, and the progress
of industrialization has led to increased emission of pol-
lutants into ecosystems. Although Ni is omnipresent and
is vital for the function of many organisms, concentra-
tions in some areas from both anthropogenic release and
naturally varying levels may be toxic to living organisms
[6-8].
Inhalation exposure in occupational settings is a prima-
ry route for nickel-induced toxicity, and may cause toxic
effects in the respiratory tract and immune system [9]. The
exposure of the general population to nickel mainly con-
cerned oral intake, primarily through water and food, as a
contaminant in drinking water or as both a constituent and
contaminant of food [7, 10]. It is also known to affect non-
occupationally exposed individuals, especially those han-
dling stainless steel and nickel-plated articles of everyday
use, because nickel is a common sensitizing agent with a
high prevalence of allergic contact dermatitis [1, 11, 12].
This paper presents a current overview of the occur-
rence and sources of nickel in different parts of the envi-
ronment (air, water, soil, food) with particular emphasis
on polish measurements, as well as the effect of nickel on
living organisms.
Nickel: A Review of Its Sources and Environmental
Toxicology
M. Cempel, G. Nikel
Department of Environmental Toxicology, Interfaculty Institute of Maritime and Tropical Medicine,
Medical university of Gdańsk, powstania styczniowego 9B, 81-519 Gdynia, poland
Received: September 23, 2005
Accepted: December 27, 2005
Abstract
Nickel is a metal of widespread distribution in the environment: there are almost 100 minerals of which
it is an essential constituent and which have many industrial and commercial uses. Nickel and nickel com-
pounds belong to the classic noxious agents encountered in industry but are also known to affect non-oc-
cupationally exposed individuals. The general population may be exposed to nickel in the air, water and
food. Inhalation is an important route of occupational exposure to nickel in relation to health risks. Most
nickel in the human body originates from drinking water and food; however, the gastrointestinal route is of
lesser importance, due to its limited intestinal absorption. The toxicity and carcinogenicity of some nickel
compounds (in the nasal cavity, larynx and lungs) in experimental animals, as well as in the occupationally
exposed population, are well documented.
The objective of this paper is to summarize the current overview of the occurrence and sources of nickel
in the environment, and the effect of this metal and its compounds on living organisms. As this topic is very
broad, this review is briefly concerned with the toxicokinetics of nickel, its health effects and biological
monitoring.
Keywords: nickel, environment, sources, toxicokinetics, pollution
Polish J. of Environ. Stud. Vol. 15, No. 3 (2006), 375-382
Occurrence and Sources
Nickel (Ni) is the 24th most abundant element in the
Earth’s crust, comprising about 3% of the composition of
the earth. It is the 5th most abundant element by weight
after iron, oxygen, magnesium and silicon. It is a mem-
ber of the transition series and belongs to group VIII B
of the periodic table along with iron, cobalt, palladium,
platinum and five other elements. Nickel is a naturally oc-
curring element that can exist in various mineral forms.
As a member of the transition metal series, it is resistant
to corrosion by air, water and alkali, but dissolves readily
in dilute oxidizing acids. Natural nickel is a mixture of
five stable isotopes; nineteen other unstable isotopes are
known. Although it can exist in several different oxidation
states, the prevalent oxidation state under environmental
conditions is Ni(II), nickel in the +2 valence state. other
valences (-1, +1, +3, and +4) are also encountered, though
less frequently [9, 10, 13].
Nickel and nickel compounds have many industrial
and commercial uses. Most nickel is used for the produc-
tion of stainless steel and other nickel alloys with high
corrosion and temperature resistance. Nickel metal and
its alloys are used widely in the metallurgical, chemical
and food processing industries, especially as catalysts and
pigments. The nickel salts of greatest commercial impor-
tance are nickel chloride, sulphate, nitrate, carbonate, hy-
droxide, acetate and oxide [14, 15].
Nickel is one of many trace metals widely distributed in
the environment, being released from both natural sources
and anthropogenic activity, with input from both station-
ary and mobile sources. It is present in the air, water, soil
and biological material. Natural sources of atmospheric
nickel levels include wind-blown dust, derived from the
weathering of rocks and soils, volcanic emissions, forest
fires and vegetation. Nickel finds its way into the ambi-
ent air as a result of the combustion of coal, diesel oil and
fuel oil, the incineration of waste and sewage, and mis-
cellaneous sources [10, 14-18]. Environmental sources of
lower levels of nickel include tobacco, dental or orthopae-
dic implants, stainless steel kitchen utensils and inexpen-
sive jewellery [4]. Tobacco smoking is another, not neg-
ligible, source of non-occupational exposures to nickel. It
has been estimated that each cigarette contains nickel in
a quantity of 1.1 to 3.1 µg and that about 10-20% of the
nickel inhaled is present in the gaseous phase. According
to some authors, nickel in tobacco smoke may be present
in the form of nickel carbonyl, a form which is extremely
hazardous to human health. pipe tobacco, cigarettes and
other types of tobacco products do not greatly differ one
from another in the content of nickel [1, 16].
Air
Nickel concentrations in ambient air vary consider-
ably and the highest values have been reported from high-
ly industrialized areas. Typical average levels of airborne
nickel are: 0.00001-0.003 µg/m3 in remote areas; 0.003-
0.03 µg/m3 in urban areas having no metallurgical indus-
try; 0.07-0.77 µg/m 3 in nickel processing areas. In poland
the recommended nickel concentration in the atmospheric
air is set as 0.025 µg/m3 [1, 18, 19].
occupational exposure to nickel compounds is depen-
dent upon industrial processing and is usually substantially
higher than work-unrelated nickel exposure. The form of
nickel to which workers are exposed differs in the various
industries in which nickel is used and occurs through inha-
lation or dermal contact (inhalation is the primary route of
exposure), with ingestion taking place where there are poor
industrial hygiene practices [10, 20]. It usually involves the
inhalation of one of the following substances: dust of rela-
tively insoluble nickel compounds, aerosols derived from
nickel solutions (soluble nickel) and gaseous forms con-
taining nickel (usually nickel carbonyl) [16]. Many mea-
surements conducted at various workplaces at risk (cast-
ing, welding, battery manufacture etc.) have revealed that
the occupational concentrations may vary in a wide range
from micrograms to milligrams of nickel per m3 of air [1].
In nickel-producing or nickel-using industries, about 0.2%
of the work force may be exposed to considerable amounts
of airborne nickel, which may lead to the retention of 100
µg of nickel per day [1, 10, 14, 16, 20].
Water
Drinking water generally contains nickel at concentra-
tions less than 10 µg/l. Assuming a daily intake of 1.5 l of
water and a level of 5-10 µgNi/l, the mean daily intake of
nickel from water for adults would be between 7.5 and
15.0 µg. Tests conducted in the usA have revealed that
97% of the 2053 drinking water samples tested had nickel
concentrations below 20 µg/l and 80% of the samples had
less than 10 µg/l. In exceptional cases, values up to 75
µg/l are found and those as high as 200 µg/l were record-
ed only in the nickel ore mining areas. The incidence of
health impairments due to higher nickel intakes in drink-
ing water is extremely infrequent [16, 21].
The mean Ni content in 80 samples of drinking wa-
ter in Poland collected from an area affected by industrial
emissions (stalowa wola area) was 17 µg/l and in most of
the analyzed water samples did not exceed the allowable
concentration of 20 µg/l [22, 23].
The concentration of Ni in cold and hot water depends
on the quality of the pipes. In the case of metal pipes,
the level of Ni in hot water is lower than in cold water.
However, when pVC pipes are used the concentrations
are opposite [24].
soft drinking water and acidic beverages may dissolve
nickel from pipes and containers. leaching or corrosion
processes may contribute significantly to oral nickel in-
take, occasionally up to 1 mg/day. Nickel concentration
in screened households’ drinking water decreased signifi-
cantly after 10 min. of flushing in the morning from aver-
age 10.79 µg/l to 7.23 µg/l, respectively [14, 25].
The major sources of trace metal pollution in aquatic
ecosystems, including the ocean, are domestic wastewater
effluents (especially As, Cr, Cu, Mn and Ni) and non-fer-
rous metal smelters (Cd, Ni, pb and se). Nickel is easily
accumulated in the biota, particularly in the phytoplank-
ton or other aquatic plants, which are sensitive bioindica-
tors of water pollution. It can be deposited in the sediment
by such processes as precipitation, complexation and ad-
sorption on clay particles and via uptake by biota [16, 26,
27].
In lakes, the ionic form and the association with or-
ganic matter are predominant. on the basis of complex
investigations on lakes (more than 100 km distant from
the nearest source of pollution – enterprises of the copper-
nickel industry), it was discovered that there is intensive
precipitation of heavy metals and acid oxides within the
catchment area of lake kochejavr. levels of precipitation
of Ni of 0.9 mg/m2/year over long periods were found to
be dangerous for biological systems of fresh water catch-
ments [28].
In rivers, nickel is transported mainly as a precipitated
coating on particles and in association with organic mat-
ter. The concentrations of nickel in the biggest and only
navigable river in the South of Iran (River Karoon) were
from 69.3 to 110.7 µg/l in winter, and from 41.0 to 60.7
µg/l in spring, respectively. The results show that the pol-
lution has increased along the river, down to the estuary
at persian Gulf [8]. part of the nickel is transported via
rivers and streams into the ocean. In poland, nickel is gen-
erally transported via rivers into the Baltic Sea and in this
way the average value of anthropogenic Ni input is 57%.
Generally, in sea water nickel is present at concentrations
of 0.1- 0.5 µg/l [1, 16, 17, 29].
Soil
Nickel is generally distributed uniformly through the
soil profile but typically accumulates at the surface from
deposition by industrial and agricultural activities. Nickel
may present a major problem in land near towns, in indus-
trial areas, or even in agricultural land receiving wastes
such as sewage sludge. Its content in soil varies in a wide
range from 3 to 1000 mg/kg [1, 6, 17]. Nickel can exist
in soils in several forms: inorganic crystalline minerals
or precipitates, complexed or adsorbed on organic cation
surfaces or on inorganic cation exchange surfaces, water-
soluble, free-ion or chelated metal complexes in soil solu-
tion [6, 16, 21].
This metal apparently does not seem to be a major con-
cern outside urban areas at this time but may eventually
become a problem as a result of decreased soil pH caused
by reduced use of soil liming in agriculture and mobiliza-
tion as a consequence of increased acid rain [1, 6]. Mielke
et al. [30] investigated the effect of anthropogenic met-
als on the geochemical quality of urban soils. The median
nickel content was 3.9 µg/g for fresh alluvium samples
and 9.8 µg/g for urban alluvial soils (New orleans and
stratified by census tracts). overall, significantly higher
metal values occur in the inner city and lower values oc-
cur in outlying areas.
In poland, the level of nickel in 60 samples of the soil
collected from the stalowa wola area, which is affected
by industrial emissions, was higher (average 17.20 mg/kg)
than that in the reference samples (average 9.72 mg/kg).
All the values, however, were below the highest allowable
concentration [31]. similarly, nickel content in soils in al-
lotment gardens in post-flooded industrialized areas of the
Dolnośląski Region during 2000-01 also did not exceed
the highest allowable concentration [32, 33]. According to
the current polish regulation the allowable limit for nickel
in the soil depends on many factors, and for not industrial-
ized areas is set as 50 mg/kg d.w. [27, 34].
Food
Nickel is considered to be a normal constituent of
the diet and its compounds are generally recognized as
safe when used as a direct ingredient in human food [35].
little is known about the actual chemical forms of nickel
in various foods or whether dietary nickel has distinct “or-
ganic” forms with enhanced bioavailability analogous to
those of iron and chromium. Nickel levels in foodstuffs
generally range from less than 0.1 mg/kg to 0.5 mg/kg. A
few foods may have obtained nickel during the manufac-
turing process but in most it apparently occurred naturally
[16, 36].
Food processing methods apparently add to the nick-
el levels already present in foodstuffs via: 1. leaching
from nickel-containing alloys in food processing equip-
ment made from stainless steel; 2. the milling of flour; 3.
catalytic hydrogenation of fats and oils by use of nickel
catalysts [15, 17]. Rich food sources of nickel include oat-
meal, dried beans and peas, nuts, dark chocolate and soya
products, and consumption of these products in larger
amounts may increase the nickel intake to 900 µg/person/
day or more [37].
A requirement for nickel has not been conclusively
demonstrated in humans. Scattered studies indicate a
highly variable dietary intake of nickel but typical daily
intake of this metal from food ranges from 100-300 µg/
day in most countries. In France, the estimated weekly
intake for the general population of nickel from wine con-
sumption was, on the basis of 66 l/year/resident, 30.6 µg/
week (4.37 µg/day) [10, 14, 38].
Many measurements of nickel levels in several food
products were performed in poland. In 1990, a survey
was conducted on twenty-seven whole-day alimentary
rations at canteens in lublin and warsaw, as well as the
food rations of manual workers’ families in several pol-
ish towns. It was observed that daily nickel intake values,
according to the current dietary recommendations, may
be considered as safe (187-302 µg/day for the canteen ra-
tions and 183-341 µg/day for the family rations) [39]. Ac-
cording to leszczyńska and Gambuś [40], in 1996-1998
دوشنبه ۲۶ شهریور ۰۳ | ۲۰:۳۹ ۷ بازديد
kinds of voles and their
teeth are very distinctive,
archaeologists can use their
fossilised teeth to help date
sites. This is called the
“Vole Clock”!
Weight: 200g
Diet: Herbivore
Range: Europe
Weight: 100g
Diet: Herbivore
Range: Europe
Lemmings are extremely
common in cold places today,
like Norway and Sweden.
Many people think that they
jump off cliffs but this isn’t
actually true!
The rodents, which include mice, rats, voles, lemmings, hamsters and gerbils, all have a habit of
chewing things. In fact, that’s what the name “rodent” means!
HERBIVORES: RODENTS
WATER VOLE
NORWAY LEMMING
paintings in the world can
be found at Chauvet Cave
in France. One of the
beautiful pictures is of a
pride of cave lions hunting
bison.
Height: 1.2m (shoulder)
Weight: 315 kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia
Height: 1m (shoulder)
Weight: 160 kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia, Africa
Scimitar-toothed cat fossils
are very rare in Britain, but
one impressive fang was
found at Creswell Crags.
Their teeth were jagged like
knives, to help them tear
into the flesh of prey.
Did you know that the famous sabre-toothed cat never lived in Britain? These two big cats were
the closest thing to it that you would find in this part of the world.
PREDATORS: BIG CATS
CAVE LION
SCIMITAR-TOOTHED CAT
back to the grey wolf,
who was their ancient
ancestor. Archaeologists
think that humans started
to tame wolves during the
Ice Age.
Height: 0.7m (shoulder)
Weight: 40 kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia & N.
America
Height: 1m (shoulder)
Weight: 225kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia
Cave hyenas would grind
up bones with their teeth
to get the rich fat inside.
Swallowing bits of bone
made their poo fossilize,
something archaeologists call
“coprolite” (poo stone)!
Did you know that we have the most complete baby hyena fossil in Europe at Creswell Crags?
His name is Eric and he even has his own Fan Club!
PREDATORS: PACK HUNTERS
GREY WOLF
CAVE HYENA
soft and warm, so Ice Age
hunters may have trapped
them for their furs. Their
teeth were often used by
Ice Age people for
jewellery.
Height: 0.3m (shoulder)
Weight: <10 kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia &
N. America
Height: 0.7m (shoulder)
Weight: 25 kg
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia
Lynx stalk their prey and
use gaps in rocks to hide
themselves. When
they’re close, they
pounce… BAM! By being
sneaky they can kill
animals as large as deer!
Smaller predatory animals would eat little animals like rodents, birds, fish and even the young of
larger animals like deer.
PREDATORS: SOLO HUNTERS
ARCTIC FOX
EURASIAN LYNX
ferret is actually a tamed
polecat? People use
ferrets to catch rabbits
because they are so
flexible and good at
hunting.
Weight: 1kg
Diet: Omnivore
Range: Eurasia
Weight: 25kg
Diet: Omnivore
Range: Eurasia & N.
America
Wolverines have several
common names. They get
called “skunk bear” because
they are so smelly (but
not actually a bear), and
“glutton” because they eat
a lot.
These animals are closely related to weasels, otters and badgers. Animals of this family are called
mustelids and they are all very good hunters even though they are not very large.
PREDATORS: MUSTELIDS
EUROPEAN POLECAT
WOLVERINE
where Neanderthal people
buried their dead together
with bodies of cave bears.
Do you think bears were
special to Neanderthal
people?
Height: 1.5m (shoulder)
Weight: 500 kg
Diet: Omnivore
Range: Eurasia
Height: 1.0 m (shoulder)
Weight: 200 kg
Diet: Omnivore
Range: Europe, Asia,
N. America
Brown bears can still
be found across much
of the world. There
are lots of different
types, like grizzly
bears and Kodiak
bears.
Bears can be very fierce if they are protecting themselves, but they are not just predators. They
have a very mixed diet including meat, fish and plants. Cave bears were mostly vegetarian!
OMNIVORES: BEARS
CAVE BEAR
BROWN BEAR
liv ing in cold places.
They have feathered eyelids
to keep their eyes from
freezing and wide feathery
feet to help them walk in
the snow!
Weight: 600g
Diet: Herbivore
Range: Eurasia, N.
America
Weight: 300g
Diet: Carnivore
Range: Eurasia, N.
America, S.
America
All owls are fantastic
hunters with extremely
good eyesight. To help
their v ision, they can
rotate their head almost
completely around in a
circle!
As there were not many trees for much of the Ice Age, a lot of the birds back then were species
which nest in rocks or on the ground.
ICE AGE BIRDS
ROCK PTARMIGAN
SHORT-EARED OWL
shaggy coats of fur with
very long hairs which
can reach right down to
the ground. Can you
think of a use for this
fur?
Height: 1.5m (shoulder)
Weight: 400 kg
Diet: Herbivore
Range: Eurasia & N.
America
Height: 1m (shoulder)
Weight: 70 kg
Diet: Herbivore
Range: Europe
The ibex is a type of
agile mountain goat which
currently lives in the
Alps. Males are much
bigger than females and
have i
دوشنبه ۲۶ شهریور ۰۳ | ۲۰:۳۶ ۵ بازديد
ce 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!
2 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 hisgan 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
4 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 wower. 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. 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."ad 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,ted 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 eling that in these exotic circumstances the
child minner ear the crash of their impact. Under
her qught 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 ..."es, 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 Dutchhing."
"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 ashe had received from Mary Sarojini.
"To attention," said Dr. MacPhail.
"Attention to attention?""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.eign 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-arry 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 one pool of shadow to the next, she
made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills awould 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 vise 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 yets, 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 time that where it's going is
where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace.g 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,
thobert 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 somethinggrandfather—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.
41tler'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.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"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 servethat 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
Plights. 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 mothend 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 ess for honesty. And when the
impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I'm compelled malgre
moi to bear taught geology and was a
Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret
with his dinner, sa way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was
one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without
inhibition in tduties."
"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 *******ual 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 openor 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."
62 Island
Som" She wrinkled up her nose as
though she 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 Ambassappy?"
Once again the Rani said something inspirational about falsesmile 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 pinnacyou 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."
76 Island
"Well, as the Rani said, he's remarkably generous."
"I'm not 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."ove, 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'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 asxcept for a mouth and
an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't
born with 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?"d 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"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 s"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."
87except 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
philosopheing 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 Fe 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 yoalso 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 *******uality of children. What we're born with, what
we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a *******uality that isn't
concentrated on the genitals; it's a *******uality diffused throughout the whole
organism. That's the para 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.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 nd 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 Justicwho 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. Nobo 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 decedise 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."
91
"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 cu 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."
91
"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 eminine 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-
90 Island
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 coy. 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."
89
"Which brings us back to my original question. What is ntaithuna!"
"Maybe you'd better ask Radha."
Will turned to the li
"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 hiaid, "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
86 Island
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'?" ask 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?" "
With another of his twinkling smiles, "Those whom God
81
woulded 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 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— 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 t
80 Island
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, th 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
"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, "iinterested 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 *******?"
With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of
importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved e 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 rBut 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 tablespoonepeated. "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.
74 Island
"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 a
happiness and the wrong kind of freedom.other 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," s
Mr. Bahu deferentially acknowledged her interruption, then turned back
to Will. .,,lking 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 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 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 nod
"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 dor 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 anhad 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 cour 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 prmpetitors 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 thewhat 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 t 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 anytheir 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 ouying 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 uponwitness 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 fmore 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 Island
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 her. "Did you walk here?" he asked.'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
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 olonius 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 *******?"
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 c
50 Island
as his private ambassador. Confidentially," he added, "that's why we tookle 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
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-fiv
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 ha
There was a tap at the door. Will looked up from his book.
"Who's there?"o "You dirty swine!"
"Don't mention it," said Will with mock politeness.
What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amusedoud, "why should Dr. Robert and
the rest of them object?" Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizinghen, 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
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. B
curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a
statue's but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—-a Hellenistic face, 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
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 hetero*******ual 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 confiden
"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 f
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 Id 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
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
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 Island
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 pien 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 h
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 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 t
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 voic was there—here in this dark, sweltering room nearng 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 th
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
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.
medicatrix naturae a chance."ugald 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
"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 br
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 bungal
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
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 h
Murugan looked enormously relieved. "How do you do," he said, andickets 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 piousever 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
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 hop
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 for
"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 canno much as I might have," Will answered.e 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.
"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.
18 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 hi
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.
16 Island
"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
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 duestioning 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 ********tering 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 toght 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 ite 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
12 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.
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 s*******t. 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 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 s*******t 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.
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—
8 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
"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
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 beingmb 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, pal
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 staiIsland
"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!" The
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!
2 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 hisgan 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
4 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 wower. 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. 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."ad 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,ted 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 eling that in these exotic circumstances the
child minner ear the crash of their impact. Under
her qught 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 ..."es, 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 Dutchhing."
"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 ashe had received from Mary Sarojini.
"To attention," said Dr. MacPhail.
"Attention to attention?""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.eign 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-arry 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 one pool of shadow to the next, she
made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills awould 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 vise 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 yets, 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 time that where it's going is
where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace.g 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,
thobert 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 somethinggrandfather—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.
41tler'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.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"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 servethat 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
Plights. 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 mothend 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 ess for honesty. And when the
impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I'm compelled malgre
moi to bear taught geology and was a
Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret
with his dinner, sa way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was
one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without
inhibition in tduties."
"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 *******ual 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 openor 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."
62 Island
Som" She wrinkled up her nose as
though she 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 Ambassappy?"
Once again the Rani said something inspirational about falsesmile 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 pinnacyou 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."
76 Island
"Well, as the Rani said, he's remarkably generous."
"I'm not 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."ove, 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'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 asxcept for a mouth and
an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't
born with 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?"d 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"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 s"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."
87except 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
philosopheing 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 Fe 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 yoalso 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 *******uality of children. What we're born with, what
we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a *******uality that isn't
concentrated on the genitals; it's a *******uality diffused throughout the whole
organism. That's the para 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.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 nd 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 Justicwho 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. Nobo 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 decedise 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."
91
"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 cu 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."
91
"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 eminine 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-
90 Island
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 coy. 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."
89
"Which brings us back to my original question. What is ntaithuna!"
"Maybe you'd better ask Radha."
Will turned to the li
"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 hiaid, "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
86 Island
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'?" ask 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?" "
With another of his twinkling smiles, "Those whom God
81
woulded 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 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— 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 t
80 Island
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, th 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
"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, "iinterested 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 *******?"
With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of
importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved e 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 rBut 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 tablespoonepeated. "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.
74 Island
"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 a
happiness and the wrong kind of freedom.other 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," s
Mr. Bahu deferentially acknowledged her interruption, then turned back
to Will. .,,lking 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 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 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 nod
"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 dor 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 anhad 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 cour 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 prmpetitors 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 thewhat 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 t 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 anytheir 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 ouying 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 uponwitness 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 fmore 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 Island
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 her. "Did you walk here?" he asked.'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
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 olonius 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 *******?"
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 c
50 Island
as his private ambassador. Confidentially," he added, "that's why we tookle 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
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-fiv
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 ha
There was a tap at the door. Will looked up from his book.
"Who's there?"o "You dirty swine!"
"Don't mention it," said Will with mock politeness.
What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amusedoud, "why should Dr. Robert and
the rest of them object?" Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizinghen, 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
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. B
curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a
statue's but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—-a Hellenistic face, 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
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 hetero*******ual 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 confiden
"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 f
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 Id 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
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
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 Island
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 pien 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 h
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 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 t
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 voic was there—here in this dark, sweltering room nearng 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 th
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
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.
medicatrix naturae a chance."ugald 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
"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 br
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 bungal
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
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 h
Murugan looked enormously relieved. "How do you do," he said, andickets 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 piousever 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
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 hop
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 for
"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 canno much as I might have," Will answered.e 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.
"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.
18 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 hi
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.
16 Island
"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
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 duestioning 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 ********tering 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 toght 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 ite 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
12 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.
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 s*******t. 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 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 s*******t 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.
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—
8 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
"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
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 beingmb 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, pal
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 staiIsland
"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!" The
dfs3434