CHAPTER FOUR

 

Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini had gone to take their siesta with the gardener's children next door. In her darkened living-room, Susila MacPhail sat alone with her memories of past happiness and the present pain of her bereavement.  The clock in the kitchen struck the half hour.  It was time for her to go.  With a sigh she rose, put on her sandals and walked out into the tremendous glare of the tropical afternoon.  She looked up at the sky.  Over the volcanoes enormous clouds were climbing towards the zenith.  In an hour it would be raining.  Moving from one pool of shadow to the next, she made her way along the tree-lined path.  With a sudden rattle of quills a flock of pigeons broke out of one of the towering peepul trees.  Green-winged and coral-billed, their breasts changing colour 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, haunting even the perceptions, of those who have undergone an amputation.  "Amputation," she whispered to herself, "amputation ...” Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off.  Amputation was no excuse for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as ever and her children, all the other children, had as much need to be loved and helped and taught.  If his absence was so constantly present, that was to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

      But here was the doctor's bungalow.  She mounted the steps, crossed the verandah and walked into the living-room.  Her father-in-law was seated near the window, sipping cold tea from an earthenware mug and reading the Journal de Mycologie.  He looked up as she approached, and gave her a welcoming smile.

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

      She bent down and kissed his stubbly cheek.

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

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

      "What's he like?"

      "The physique of a Messiah.  But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission.  And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out.  His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it."

      "So I suppose he's very unhappy."

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

      "Does he know he laughs like a hyena?"

      "Knows and is rather proud of it.  Even makes epigrams about it.  'I'm the man who won't take yes for an answer.'"

      "Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

      "Not badly.  But he's running a temperature.  I've started him on antibiotics.  Now it's up to you to raise his resistance and give the vis medicatrix naturae a chance."

      "I'll do my best."  Then after a silence, "I went to see Lakshmi," 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 hypodermic or needle in a vein, the most abject and irrational terror."

      He thought of the time, in the early days of their marriage, when he had lost his temper and called her a coward for making such a fuss.  Lakshmi had cried and, having submitted to her martyrdom, had heaped coals of fire upon his head by begging to be forgiven.  "Lakshmi, Lakshmi ...” And now in a few days she would be dead.  After thirty-seven years.  "What did you talk about?" he asked aloud.

      "Nothing in particular," Susila answered.  But the truth was that they had talked about Dugald and that she couldn't bring herself to repeat what had passed between them.  "My first baby," the dying woman had whispered.  "I didn't know that babies could be so beautiful."  In their skull-deep, skull-dark sockets the eyes had brightened, the bloodless lips had smiled.  "Such tiny, tiny hands," the faint hoarse voice went on, "such a greedy little mouth!"  And an almost fleshless hand tremblingly touched the place where, before last year's operation, her breast had been.  "I never knew," she repeated.  And, before the event, how could she have known?  It had been a revelation, an apocalypse of touch and love.  "Do you know what I mean?"  And Susila had nodded.  Of course she knew - had known it in relation to her own two children, known it, in those other apocalypses of touch and love, with the man that little Dugald of the tiny hands and greedy mouth had grown into.  "I used to be afraid for him," the dying woman had whispered.  "He was so strong, such a tyrant, he could have hurt and bullied and destroyed.  If he'd married another woman ... I'm so thankful it was you!"  From the place where the breast had been the fleshless hand moved out and came to rest on Susila's arm.  She had bent her head and kissed it.  They were both crying.

      Dr MacPhail sighed, looked up and, like a man who has climbed out of the water, gave himself a little shake.  "The castaway's name is Farnaby," he said.  "Will Farnaby."

      "Will Farnaby," Susila repeated.  "Well, I'd better go and see what I can do for him."  She turned and walked away.

      Dr MacPhail looked after her, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.  He thought of his son, he thought of his wife - of Lakshmi slowly wasting to extinction, of Dugald like a bright fiery flame suddenly snuffed out.  Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and 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 of Hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Journal de Mycologie.  That was another of the irrelevancies that somehow took its place in the pattern.  The words of one of the old Raja's queer little poems came to his mind.

 

                                                     All things, to all things

                                                     perfectly indifferent,

                                                     perfectly work together

                                                     in discord for a Good beyond

                                                     good, for a Being more

                                                     timeless in transience, more

                                                     eternal in its dwindling than

                                                     God there is heaven.

 

      The door creaked, and an instant later Will heard light footsteps and the rustle of skirts.  Then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a woman's voice, low-pitched and musical, asked him how he was feeling.

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

      There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy - only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassability and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

      "I'm feeling miserable."

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

      Reluctantly Will turned his head and opened his eyes. An adult, darker version of Mary Sarojini was sitting there beside the bed, smiling at him with friendly solicitude.  To smile back at her would have cost him too great an effort; he contented himself with saying "How do you do," then pulled the sheet a little higher and closed his eyes again.

      Susila looked down at him in silence - at the bony shoulders, at the cage of ribs under a skin whose Nordic pallor made him seem, to her Palanese eyes, so strangely frail and vulnerable, at the sunburnt face, emphatically featured like a carving intended to be seen at a distance - emphatic and yet sensitive, the quivering, more than naked face, she found herself thinking, of a man who had been flayed and left to suffer.

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

      "I don't care where I'm from," Will muttered irritably.  "Now where I'm going.  From hell to hell."

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

      He tried not to listen; but ears have no lids; there was no escape from that intruding voice.

      "There was a girl in my psychology class," it was saying, "her people lived at Wells.  She asked me to stay with them for the first month of the summer vacation.  Do you know Wells?"

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

      "I used to love walking there by the water," Susila went on, "looking across the moat at the cathedral," - and thinking, while she looked at the cathedral, of Dugald under the palm trees on the beach, of Dugald giving her her first lesson in rock climbing.  "You're on the rope.  You're perfectly safe.  You can't possibly fall ..."  Can't possibly fall, she repeated bitterly - and then remembered here and now, remembered that she had a job to do, remembered, as she looked again at the flayed emphatic face, that here was a human being in pain.  "How lovely it was," she went on, "and how marvellously peaceful!"

      The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and in some strange way more remote.  Perhaps that was why he no longer resented its intrusion.

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

      The voice was almost chanting now - chanting, it seemed, out of some other world.

      "I can shut my eyes," it chanted on, "can shut my eyes and see it all so clearly.  Can see the church - and it's enormous, much taller than the huge trees round the bishop's palace.  Can see the green grass and the water and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between the buttresses.  And listen!  I can hear the bells.  The bells and the jackdaws.  The jackdaws in the tower - can you hear the jackdaws?"

      Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as he now heard those parrots in the trees outside his window.  He was here and at the same time he was there - here in this dark, sweltering room near the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the edge of the Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound of the bells dying away into the green silence.

      "And there are white clouds," the voice was saying, "and the blue sky between them is so pale, so delicate, so exquisitely tender."

      Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April weekend he had spent there, before the disaster of the marriage, with Molly.  There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildnesss of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry.  Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation.  That was how it should have been with himself and Molly - how it had been then.

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

      Yes, the swans.  White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet - a breathing mirror that heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images were forever breaking and coming together again, disintegrating and being made whole.

      "Like the inventions of heraldry.  Romantic, impossibly beautiful.  And yet there they are - real birds in a real place.  So near to me now that I can almost touch them - and yet so far away, thousands of miles away.  Far away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly, majestically ...

      Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting as the curved white breasts advanced - lifting, parting, sliding back in ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead behind them.  He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could hear the jackdaws in the tower, could catch, through the nearer mingling of disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat, weedy smell of that Gothic moat in the far-away green valley.

      "Effortlessly floating," Will said to himself.  "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 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 the 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 her forehead, and suddenly the words transformed themselves into the things and events for which they stood; the images turned into facts.  He actually was floating.

      "Floating," the voice softly insisted.  "Floating like a white bird on the water.  Floating on a great river of life - a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep.  A sleeping river.  But it flows irresistibly.

      "Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance.  And it's into that peace that you're floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it's sleeping.  And I'm floating with it."  She was speaking for the stranger.  She was speaking on another level for herself.  "Effortlessly floating.  Not having to do anything at all.  Just letting go, just allowing myself to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it's going - and knowing all the time that where it's going is where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace.  Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation."

      Involuntarily, unconsciously, Will Farnaby gave a deep sigh.  How silent the world had become!  Silent with a deep crystalline silence, even though the parrots were still busy out there beyond the shutters, even though the voice still chanted here beside him.  Silence and emptiness and through the silence and the emptiness flowed the river, sleeping and irresistible.

      Susila looked down at the face on the pillow.  It seemed suddenly very young, child-like 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 be more absolute, the emptiness more enormous.

      "Asleep on the sleeping river," the voice was saying.  "And above the river, in the pale sky, there are huge white clouds.  And as you look at them, you begin to float up towards them.  Yes, you begin to float up towards them, and the river now is a river in the air, an invisible river that carries you on, carries you up, higher and higher."

      Upwards, upwards through the silent emptiness.  The image was the thing, the words became the experience.

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

      Yes, there was the Jungfrau, dazzingly white against the blue.  There was Monte Rosa ...

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

      He breathed deeply and the new life flowed into him.  And now a little wind came blowing across the snowfields, cool against his skin, deliciously cool.  And, as though echoing his thoughts, as though describing his experience, the voice said, "Coolness.  Coolness and sleep.  Through coolness into more life.  Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness, into living peace."

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

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

      She nodded.

      "I talked to him about a place in England," she said.  "He went off more quickly than I'd expected.  After that I gave him some suggestions about his temperature ..."

      "And the knee, I hope."

      "Of course."

      "Direct suggestion?"

      "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."