CHAPTER EIGHT

 

"Good evening, my dear.  Good evening, Mr Farnaby."

      The tone was cheerful - not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely.  And yet, before coming here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discoloured.  Half a long lifetime of love and loyalty and mutual forgiveness - and in another day or two it would be all over! he would be alone.  But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof - sufficient unto the place and the person.  "One has no right," her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, "one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people.  And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad.  One just has to accept one's grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic.  Accept, accept ...” His voice broke.  Looking up at him, she saw his face was wet with tears.  Five minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in the shadow of the huge stone Buddha.  With a little plop, sharp yet liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into the water.  Thrusting up from the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny beetles and the wild bees from the jungle.  Darting, pausing in mid-flight, darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragonflies were hawking for midges.

      "Tathata," Dr Robert had whispered.  "Suchness."

      For a long time they sat there in silence.  Then, suddenly, he had touched her shoulder.

      "Look!"

      She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing.  Two small parrots had perched on the Buddha's right hand and were going through the ritual of courtship.

      "Did you stop again at the lotus pool?" Susila asked aloud.

      Dr Robert gave her a little smile and nodded his head.

      "How was Shivapuram?" Will inquired.

      "Pleasant enough in itself," the doctor answered.  "Its only defect is that it's so close to the outside world.  Up here one can ignore all those organized insanities, and get on with one's work.  Down there, with all the antennae and listening posts and channels of communication that a government has to have, the outside world is perpetually breathing down one's neck.  One hears it, feels it - yes, smells it."  He wrinkled up his face into a grimace of comic disgust.

      "Has anything more than usually disastrous happened since I've been here?"

      "Nothing out of the ordinary at your end of the world.  I wish I could say the same about our end."

      "What's the trouble?"

      "The trouble is our next-door neighbour, Colonel Dipa.  To begin with, he's made another deal with the Czechs."

      "More armaments?"

      "Sixty million dollars' worth.  It was on the radio this morning."

      "But what on earth for?"

      "The usual reasons.  Glory and power.  The pleasures of vanity and the pleasures of bullying.  Terrorism and military parades at home; conquests and Te Deums abroad.  And that brings me to the second item of unpleasant news.  Last night the Colonel delivered another of his celebrated Greater Rendang speeches."

      "Greater Rendang?  What's that?"

      "You may well ask," said Dr Robert.  "Greater Rendang is the territory controlled by the Sultans of Rendang-Lobo between 1447 and 1483.  It included Rendang, the Nicobar Islands, about thirty per cent of Sumatra and the whole of Pala.  Today, it's Colonel Dipa's Irredenta."

      "Seriously?"

      "With a perfectly straight face.  No, I'm wrong.  With a purple, distorted face and at the top of a voice that he has trained, after long practice, to sound exactly like Hitler's.  Greater Rendang or death!"

      "But the great powers would never allow it."

      "Maybe they wouldn't like to see him in Sumatra.  But Pala - that's another matter."  He shook his head.  "Pala, unfortunately, is in nobody's good books.  We don't want the Communists; but neither do we want the Capitalists.  Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us - for different reasons, of course.  The West wants it because our labour costs are low and investors' dividends will be correspondingly high.   And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People's Democracy.  We say no to both of you, so we're unpopular everywhere.  Regardless of their ideologies, all the Great Powers may prefer a Rendang-controlled Pala with oil fields to an independent Pala without.  If Dipa attacks us, they'll say it's most deplorable; but they won't lift a finger.  And when he takes us over and calls the oil-men in, they'll be delighted."

      "What can you do about Colonel Dipa?" Will asked.

      "Except for passive resistance, nothing.  We have no army and no powerful friends.  The Colonel has both.  The most we can do, if he starts making trouble, is to appeal to the United Nations.  Meanwhile we shall remonstrate with the Colonel about this latest Greater Rendang effusion.  Remonstrate through our minister in Rendang-Lobo, and remonstrate with the great man in person when he pays his state visit to Pala ten days from now."

      "A state visit?"

      For the young Raja's coming-of-age celebrations.  He was asked a long time ago, but he never let us know for certain whether he was coming or not.  Today it was finally settled.  We'll have a summit meeting as well as a birthday party.  But let's talk about something more rewarding.  How did you get on today, Mr Farnaby?"

      "Not merely well - gloriously.  I had the honour of a visit from your reigning monarch."   

      "Murugan?"

      "Why didn't you tell me he was your reigning monarch?"

      Dr Robert laughed.  "You might have asked for an interview."

      "Well, I didn't.  Nor from the Queen Mother."

      "Did the Rani come too?"

      "At the command of her Little Voice.  And sure enough, the Little Voice sent her to the right address.  My boss, Joe Aldehyde is one of her dearest friends."

      "Did she tell you that she's trying to bring your boss here, to exploit our oil?"

      "She did indeed."

      "We turned down his latest offer less than a month ago.  Did you know that?"

      Will was relieved to be able to answer quite truthfully that he didn't.  Neither Joe Aldehyde nor the Rani had told him of this most recent rebuff.  "My job," he went on, a little less truthfully, "is in the wood-pulp department, not in petroleum."  There was a silence.  "What's my status here?" he asked at last.  "Undesirable alien?"

      "Well, fortunately you're not an armament salesman."

      "Nor a missionary," said Susila.

      "Nor an oil-man - though on that count you might be guilty of association."

      "Nor even, so far as we know, a uranium prospector."

      "Those," Dr Robert concluded, "are the Alpha Plus undesirables.  As a journalist you rank as a Beta.  Not the kind of person we should ever dream of inviting to Pala.  But also not the kind who, having managed to get here, requires to be summarily deported."

      "I'd like to stay here for as long as it's legally possible," said Will.

      "May I ask why?"

      Will hesitated.  As Joe Aldehyde's secret agent and a reporter with a hopeless passion for literature, he had to stay long enough to negotiate with Bahu and earn his year of freedom.  But there were other, more avowable reasons.  "If you don't object to personal remarks," he said, "I'll tell you."

      "Fire away," said Dr Robert.

      "The fact is that, the more I see of you people, the better I like you.  I want to find out more about you.  And in the process," he added, glancing at Susila, "I might find out some interesting things about myself.  How long shall I be allowed to stay?"

      "Normally we'd turn you out as soon as you're fit to travel.  But if you're seriously interested in Pala, above all if you're seriously interested in yourself - well, we might stretch a point.  Or shouldn't we stretch that point?  What do you say, Susila?  After all, he does work for Lord Aldehyde."

      Will was on the point of protesting again that his job was in the wood-pulp department; but the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing.  The seconds passed.  Dr Robert repeated his question.

      "Yes," Susila said at last, "we'd be taking a certain risk.  But personally ... personally I'd be ready to take it.  Am I right?"  She turned to Will.

      "Well, I think you can trust me.  At least I hope you can."  He laughed, trying to make a joke of it; but to his annoyance and embarrassment, he felt himself blushing.  Blushing for what, he demanded resentfully of his conscience?  If anybody was being double-crossed, it was Standard of California.  And once Dipa had moved in, what difference would it make who got the concession?  Which would you rather be eaten by - a wolf or a tiger?  So far as the lamb is concerned, it hardly seems to matter.  Joe would be no worse than his competitors.  All the same, he wished he hadn't been in such a hurry to send off that letter.  And why, why couldn't that dreadful woman have left him in peace?

      Through the sheet he felt a hand on his undamaged knee.  Dr Robert was smiling down at him.

      "You can have a month here," he said.  "I'll take full responsibility for you.  And we'll do our best to show you everything."

      "I'm very grateful to you."

      "When in doubt," said Dr Robert, "always act on the assumption that people are more honourable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are.  That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young man."  Turning to Susila, "Let's see," he said, "how old were you when the Old Raja died?"

      "Just eight."

      "So you remember him pretty well."

      Susila laughed.  "Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk about himself.  'Quote "I" unquote like sugar in my tea.'  What a darling man."

      "And what a great one!"

      Dr MacPhail got up and crossing to the bookcase that stood between the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album, much the worse for tropical weather and fish insects.  "There's a picture of him somewhere," he said as he turned over the pages.  "Here we are."

      Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in spectacles and a loin cloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.

      "What is he doing?" he asked.

      "Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter," the doctor answered.  "It was a habit my poor father could never break him of."

      "Did your father disapprove of phalluses?"

      "No, no," said Dr MacPhail.  "My father was all for them.  It was the symbol that he disapproved of."

      "Why the symbol?"

      "Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean.  Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized.  Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container."

      "And the Raja had a weakness for containers?"

      "Not for containers in general.  Just this one particular tin can.  He'd always felt a special attachment to the family lingam.  It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old."

      "I see," said Will Farnaby.

      "Buttering the family lingam - it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea.  But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it's supposed to stand for.  And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea - what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery?  Nothing whatsoever.  Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well.  Better than my father.  He'd drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he'd actually been the milk.  But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn't bear to give up.  And I don't have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up.  But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan.  He'd amended Goethe - Alles vergängliche ist NICHT ein Gleinchnis.  His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum, and pure experimental mysticism at the other.  Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences.  Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting - he'd have liked to abolish them all."

      "Where would the arts have come in?" Will questioned.

      "They wouldn't have come in at all," Dr MacPhail answered.  "And that was my father's blindest spot - poetry.  He said he liked it; but in fact he didn't.  Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science - that was something he simply couldn't understand.  Let's find his picture."

      Dr MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.

      "What a Scotsman!" Will commented.

      "And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese."

      "One doesn't see a trace of them."

      "Whereas his grandfather who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput."

      Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top-hat.

      "Your great-grandfather?"

      "The first MacPhail of Pala.  Dr Andrew.  Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill.  Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap."

      Will laughed.

      "Yes," Dr Robert agreed, "it does seem pretty comic.  But it didn't then.  Then it was serious - much more serious than the H-bomb is today.  It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone.  Why?  Either because they'd never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn't believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone.  And the proof that they didn't believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical, observable face that their souls were not at peace.  Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind.  But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses.  Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith.  Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment.  Quod erat demonstrandum."

      "One wonders," said Susila, "why they didn't all go mad."

      "Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads.  Up here."  Dr MacPhail tapped his bald spot.  "With the tops of their heads they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T.  But their glands and their guts knew better - knew that it was all sheer bosh.  For most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly Pickwickian sense.  James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers.  They were to believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not merely up there, in the attic.  Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes with it were to be forced into them.  How?  By giving them hell now and threatening them with hell hereafter.  And if, in their devilish perversity, they refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and threaten hotter fires.  And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every misdemeanour.  Tell them that by nature they're totally depraved, then beat them for being what they inescapably are."

      Will Farnaby turned back to the album.

      "Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?"

      "We had an oil painting," said Dr MacPhail.  "But the dampness was too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it.  He was a splendid specimen.  Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah.  You know - majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins.  The only relic of him that remains is a pencil drawing of his house."

      He turned back another page and there it was.

      "Solid granite," he went on, "with bars on all the windows.  And, inside that cosy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity!  Systematic inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness' sake.  Dr Andew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it."

      "Didn't the children get any help from their mother?"

      Dr MacPhail shook his head.

      "Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James himself.  Being a woman, she had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome.  But she did overcome them - heroically.  Far from restraining her husband, she urged him on, she backed him up.  There were homilies before breakfast and at the midday dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and learning the epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day's delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as well as boys, in order of seniority."

      "It always makes me feel slightly sick," said Susila.  "Pure sadism."

      "No, not pure," said Dr MacPhail.  "Applied sadism.  Sadism with an ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a religious conviction.  And that's a subject," he added, turning to Will, "that somebody ought to make a historical study of - the relations between theology and corporal punishment in childhood.  I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as 'Wholly Other' - isn't that the fashionable argot in your part of the world?  Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent.  A people's theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms.  Look at the Hebrews - enthusiastic childbeaters.  And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith.  Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy.  Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been non-violent.  No laceration of little buttocks - therefore Tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided.  And look at the Quakers.  They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened?  They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery."

      "But child-beating," Will objected, "has quite gone out of fashion nowadays.  And yet it's precisely at this moment that it has become modish to hold forth about the Wholly Other."

      Dr MacPhail waved the objection away.  "It's just a case of reaction following action.  By the second half of the nineteenth century free-thinking humanitarianism had become so strong that even good Christians were influenced by it and stopped beating their children.  There were no weals on the younger generation's posterior; consequently it ceased to think of God as the Wholly Other and proceeded to invent New Thought, Unity, Christian Science - all the semi-Oriental heresies in which God is the Wholly Identical.  The movement was well under way in William James' day, and it's been gathering momentum ever since.  But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat Neo-Orthodoxy.  Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly Other!  Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther - back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought.  Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk.  Augustine was beaten by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained.  Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother.  The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since.  Prussianism and the Third Reich - without Luther and his flagellation-theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence.  Or take the flagellation-theology of Augustine, as carried to its logical conclusions Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like James MacPhail and Janet Cameron.  Major premise: God is Wholly Other.  Minor premise: man is totally depraved.  Conclusion: Do to your children's bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!"

      There was a silence.  Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the granite person in the rope-walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries endured because of them.  And when it wasn't Augustine with his 'benignant asperity', it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn't Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was genial Mao reducing them to slavery.

      "Don't you sometimes despair?" he asked.

      Dr MacPhail shook his head.  "We don't despair," he said, "because we know that things don't necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they've always been."

      "We know that they can be a great deal better," Susila added.  "Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island."

      "But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of humanity in the midst of your world-wide wilderness of monkeys - that, alas," said Dr MacPhail, "is another question.  One's justified in feeling extremely pessimistic about the current situation.  But despair, radical despair - no, I can't see any justification for that."

      "Not even when you read history?"

      "Not even when I read history."

      "I envy you.  How do you manage to do it?"

      "By remembering what history is - the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma."  He turned again to the album.  "Let's get back to that house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin's God, in his inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies.  'The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.'  Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture - the perfect Pavlovian set-up.  But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs.  On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work.  Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth.  Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the ageing and finally senile and drivelling patriarch.  So far, so good.  But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern changed.  Annie was pretty.  At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain of dragoons.  But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total depravity and God's good pleasure were criminally incorrect.  The marriage was forbidden.  It looked as though Annie were predestined to share the fate of Jean.  She stuck it out for ten years; then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an East Indiaman.  There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness - the first she had ever known.  Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life.  Then the Indiaman sailed for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao.  Four months later, pregnant, friendless, and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay.  Meanwhile Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a company of actors.  In the house by the rope-walk nobody, thenceforward, was ever allowed to refer to his existence.  And finally there was Andrew, the youngest, the Benjamin.  What a model child!  He was obedient, he loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more accurately than any of the other children had done.  Then, just in time to restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening playing with his genitals.  He was whipped till the blood came; was caught again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer.  For the rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell.  Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them - which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom of the garden - by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for him."

      "And to think," Will Farnaby commented, "to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning!  Look what life was like when it did have a meaning.  A tale told by an idiot, or a tale told by a Calvinist?  Give me the idiot every time."

      "Agreed," said Dr MacPhail.  "But mightn't there be a third possibility?  Mightn't there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?"

      "Somebody, for a change, completely sane," said Susila.

      "Yes, for a change," Dr MacPhail repeated.  "For a blessed change.  And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn't ruin.  By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavolvian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple.  In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete.  Which only shows," Dr Robert added parenthetically, "how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are.  Freudianism and Behaviourism - poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the build-in, congenital differences between individuals.  How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts?  Very simply.  They ignore them.  They blandly pretend that the facts aren't there.  Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really exists, or even to explain it theoretically.  Look at what happened, for example, in this particular case.  Andrew's brothers and sisters were either tamed by their conditioning, or destroyed.  Andrew was neither destroyed nor tamed.  Why?  Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped turning at a lucky number.  He had a more resilient constitution than the others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different temperament.  His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest of their unfortunate brood.  Andrew came through with flying colours, almost without a scar."

      "In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?"

      "That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of medical studies at Edinburgh.  He was only a boy - just over seventeen.  (They started young in those days.)  In the dissecting room the boy found himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which his fellow students kept up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers.  Listening at first with horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance.  But nothing happened.  The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then, of the clap.  Fear gave place in Andrew's mind to a wonderful sense of relief and deliverance.  Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his own.  His first utterance of a four-letter word - what a liberation, what a genuinely religious experience!  And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read Tom Jones, he read Hume's Essay on Miracles, he read the infidel Gibbon.  Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he read La Mettrie, he read Dr Cabanis.  Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.  How simple it all was, how luminously obvious!  With all the fervour of a convert at a revival meeting, he decided for atheism.  In the circumstances it was only to be expected.  You can't stomach St Augustine any more, you can't go on repeating the Athanasian rigmarole.  So you pull the plug and send them down the drain.  What bliss!  But not for very long.  Something, you discover, is missing.  The experimental baby was flushed out with the theological dirt and soapsuds.  But nature abhors a vacuum.  Bliss gives place to a chronic discomfort, and now you're afflicted, generation after generation, by a succession of Wesleys, Puseys, Moodies and Billies - Sunday and Graham - all working like beavers to pump the theology back out of the cesspool.  They hope, of course, to recover the baby.  But they never succeed.  All that a revivalist can do is siphon up a little of the dirty water.  Which, in due course, has to be thrown out again.  And so on, indefinitely.  It's really too boring and, as Dr Andrew came at last to realize, wholly unnecessary.  Meanwhile here he was, in the first flush of his new-found freedom.  Excited, exultant - but quietly excited, exultant behind that appearance of grave and courteous detachment which he habitually presented to the world."

      "What about his father?" Will asked.  "Did they have a battle?"

      "No battle.  Andrew didn't have battles.  He was the sort of man ho always goes his own way, but doesn't advertise the fact, doesn't argue with people who prefer another road.  The old man was never given the opportunity of putting on his Jeremiah act.  Andrew kept his mouth shut about Hume and Le Mettrie, and went through the traditional motions.  But when his training was finished, he just didn't come home.  Instead, he went to London and signed up, as surgeon and naturalist on H.M.S. Melampus, bound for the South Seas with orders to chart, survey, collect specimens, and protect Protestant missionaries and British interests.  The cruise of the Melampus lasted for a full three years.  They called at Tahiti, they spent two months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group.  After Perth, the islands seemed like Eden - but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking.  It was paradise, but it wouldn't do, it wouldn't do.  They sailed on.  They visited Fiji and the Carolines and the Solomons.  They charted the northern coast of New Guinea and, in Borneo, a party went ashore, trapped a pregnant orang-utan and climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu.  Then followed a week at Pannoy, a fortnight in the Mergui Archipelago.  After which they headed West to the Andamans and from the Andamans to the mainland of India.  While ashore, my great-grandfather was thrown from his horse and broke his right leg.  The captain of the Melampus found another surgeon and sailed for home.  Two months later, as good as new, Andrew was practising medicine at Madras.  Doctors were scarce in those days and sickness fearfully common.  The young man began to prosper.  But life among the merchants and officials of the Presidency was oppressively boring.  It was an exile, an exile without adventure or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical equivalent of Swansea or Huddersfield.  But still he resisted the temptation to book a passage on the next homebound ship.  If he stuck it out for five years, he would have enough money to buy a good practice in Edinburgh - no, in London, in the West End.  The future beckoned, rosy and golden.  There would be a wife, preferably with auburn hair and a modest competence.  There would be four or five children - happy, unwhipped and atheistic.  And his practice would grow, his patients would be drawn from circles ever more exalted.  Wealth, reputation, dignity, even a knighthood.  Sir Andrew MacPhail stepping out of his brougham in Belgrave Square.  The great Sir Andrew, physician to the Queen.  Summoned to St Petersburg to operate on the Grand Duke, to the Tuileries, to the Vatican, to the Sublime Porte.  Delightful phantasies!  But the facts, as it turned out, were to be far more interesting.  One fine morning a brown-skinned stranger called at his surgery.  In halting English he gave an account of himself.  He was from Pala and had been commanded by His Highness, the Raja, to seek out and bring back with him a skilful surgeon from the West.  The rewards would be princely.  Princely, he insisted.  There and then Dr Andrew accepted the invitation.  Partly, of course, for the money; but mostly because he was bored, because he needed a change, needed a taste of adventure.  A trip to the Forbidden Island - the lure was irresistible."

      "And remember," Susila interjected, "in those days Pala was much more forbidden than it is now."

      "So you can imagine how eagerly young Dr Andrew jumped at the opportunity now offered by the Raja's ambassador.  Ten days later his ship dropped anchor off the north coast of the forbidden island.  With his medicine chest, his bag of instruments and a small tin trunk containing his clothes and a few indispensable books, he was rowed in an outrigger canoe through the pounding surf, carried in a palanquin through the streets of Shivapuram and set down in the inner courtyard of the royal palace.  His royal patient was eagerly awaiting him.  Without being given time to shave or change his clothes, Dr Andrew was ushered into the presence - the pitiable presence of a small brown man in his early forties, terribly emaciated under his rich brocades, his face so swollen and distorted as to be barely human, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper.  Dr Andrew examined him.  From the maxillary antrum, where it had its roots, a tumour had spread in all directions.  It had filled the nose, it had pushed up into the socket of the right eye, it had half-blocked the throat.  Breathing had become difficult, swallowing acutely painful and sleep an impossibility - for whenever he dropped off, the patient would choke and wake up frantically struggling for air.  Without radical surgery, it was obvious, the Raja would be dead within a couple of months.  With radical surgery, much sooner.  Those were the good old days, remember - the good old days of septic operations without benefit of chloroform.  Even in the most favourable circumstances surgery was fatal to one patient out of four.  When conditions were less propitious, the odds declined - fifty-fifty, thirty to seventy, zero to a hundred.  In the present case the prognosis could hardly have been worse.  The patient was already weak and the operation would be long, difficult and excruciatingly painful.  There was a good chance that he would die on the operating table and a virtual certainty that, if he survived, it would only be to die a few days later of blood poisoning.  But if he should die, Dr Andrew now reflected, what would be the fate of the alien surgeon who had killed a king?  And, during the operation, who would hold the royal patient down while he writhed under the knife?  Which of his servants or courtiers would have the strength of mind to disobey, when the master screamed in agony or positively commanded them to let go?

      "Perhaps the wisest thing would be to say, here and now, that the case was hopeless, that he could do nothing, and ask to be sent back to Madras forthwith.  Then he looked again at the sick man.  Through the grotesque mask of his poor deformed face the Raja was looking at him intently - looking with the eyes of a condemned criminal begging the judge for mercy.  Touched by the appeal, Dr Andrew gave him a smile of encouragement and all at once, as he patted the thin hand, he had an idea.  It was absurd, crack-brained, thoroughly discreditable; but all the same, all the same ..."

      "Five years before, he suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in the Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism.  Elliotson had had the effrontery to talk of painless operations performed on patients in the mesmeric trance.

      "The man was either a gullible fool or an unscrupulous knave.  The so-called evidence for such nonsense was manifestly worthless.  It was all sheer humbug, quackery, downright fraud - and so on for six columns of righteous indignation.  At the time - for he was still full of La Mettrie and Hume and Cabanis - Dr Andrew had read the article with a glow of orthodox approval.  After which he had forgotten about the very existence of animal magnetism.  Now, at the Raja's bedside, it all came back to him - the mad Professor, the magnetic passes, the amputations without pain, the low death-rate, and rapid recoveries.  Perhaps, after all, there might be something in it.  He was deep in these thoughts, when, breaking a long silence, the sick man spoke to him.  From a young sailor who had deserted his ship at Rendang-Lobo and somehow made his way across the strait, the Raja had learned to speak English with remarkable fluency, but also, in faithful imitation of his teacher, with a strong cockney accent.  That cockney accent," Dr MacPhail repeated with a little laugh.  "It turns up again and again in my great-grandfather's memoirs.  There was something, to him, inexpressibly improper about a king who spoke like Sam Weller.  And in this case the impropriety was more than merely social.  Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also of deep religious experience and spiritual insight.   That such a man should express himself in cockney was something that an Early Victorian Scotsman who had read The Pickwick Papers could never get over.  Nor, in spite of all my great-grandfather's tactful coaching, could the Raja ever get over his impure diphthongs and dropped aitches.  But all that was in the future.  At their first tragic meeting, that shocking, lower-class accent seemed strangely touching.  Laying the palms of his hands together in a gesture of supplication, the sick man whispered, ''Elp me, Dr MacPhail, 'elp me.'

      "The appeal was decisive.  Without any further hesitation, Dr Andrew took the Raja's thin hands between his own and began to speak in the most confident tone about a wonderful new treatment recently discovered in Europe and employed as yet by only a handful of the most eminent physicians.  Then, turning to the attendants who had been hovering all this time in the background, he ordered them out of the room.  They did not understand the words; but his tone and accompanying gestures were unmistakably clear.  They bowed and withdrew.  Dr Andrew took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and started to make those famous magnetic passes, about which he had read with so much sceptical amusement in the Lancet.  From the crown of the head, over the face and down the trunk to the epigastrium, again and again until the patient falls into a trance - 'or until' (he remembered the derisive comments of the anonymous writer of the article) 'until the presiding charlatan shall choose to say that his dupe is now under the magnetic influence.'  Quackery, humbug, and fraud.  But all the same, all the same ... He worked away in silence.  Twenty passes, fifty passes.  The sick man sighed and closed his eyes.  Sixty, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty.  The heat was stifling, Dr Andrew's shirt was drenched with sweat, and his arms ached.  Grimly he repeated the same absurd gesture.  A hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy-five, two hundred.  It was all fraud and humbug; but all the same he was determined to make this poor devil go to sleep, even if it took him the whole day to do it.  'You are going to sleep,' he said aloud as he made the two hundred and eleventh pass.  'You are going to sleep.'  The sick man seemed to sink more deeply into his pillows, and suddenly Dr Andrew caught the sound of a rattling wheeze.  'This time,' he added quickly, 'you are not going to choke.  There's plenty of room for the air to pass, and you're not going to choke.'  The Raja's breathing grew quite quiet.  Dr Andrew made a few more passes, then decided that it would be safe to take a rest.  He mopped his face, then rose, stretched his arms and took a couple of turns up and down the room.  Sitting down again by the bed, he took one of the Raja's stick-like wrists and felt for the pulse.  An hour before it had been running at almost a hundred; now the rate had fallen to seventy.  He raised his arm; the hand hung limp like a dead man's.  He let go, and the arm dropped by its own weight and lay, inert and unmoving, where it had fallen.  'Your Highness,' he said, and again, more loudly, 'Your Highness.'  There was no answer.  It was all quackery, humbug, and fraud, but all the same it worked, it obviously worked."

      A large, brightly coloured mantis fluttered down on to the rail at the foot of the bed, folded its pink and white wings, raised its small flat head and stretched out its incredibly muscular front legs in the attitude of prayer.  Dr MacPhail pulled out a magnifying glass and bent forward to examine it.

      "Gongylus gongyloides," he pronounced.  "It dresses itself up to look like a flower.  When unwary flies and moths come sailing in to sip the nectar, it sips them.  And if it's a female, she eats her lovers."  He put the glass away and leaned back in his chair.  Gongylus gongyloides, Homo sapiens, my great-grandfather's introduction to Pala and hypnosis - what could be more unlikely?"

      "Nothing," said Will.  "Except perhaps my introduction to Pala and hypnosis, Pala via a shipwreck and a precipice; hypnosis by way of a soliloquy about an English cathedral."

      Susila laughed.  "Fortunately I didn't have to make all those passes over you.  In this climate!  I really admire Dr Andrew.  It sometimes takes three hours to anaesthetize with the passes."

      "But in the end he succeeded?"

      "Triumphantly."

      "And did he actually perform the operation?"

      "Yes, he actually performed the operation," said Dr MacPhail.  "But not immediately.  There had to be a long preparation.  Dr Andrew began by telling his patient that henceforward he would be able to swallow without pain.  Then, for the next three weeks, he fed him up.  And between meals he put him into trance and kept him asleep until it was time for another feeding.  It's wonderful what your body will do for you if you only give it a chance.  The Raja gained twelve pounds and felt like a new man.  A new man full of hope and confidence.  He knew he was going to come through his ordeal.  And so, incidentally, did Dr Andrew.  In the process of fortifying the Raja's faith, he had fortified his own.  It was not a blind faith.  The operation, he felt quite certain, was going to be successful.  But this unshakeable confidence did not prevent him from doing everything that might contribute to its success.  Very early in the proceedings he started to work on the trance.  The trance, he kept telling his patient, was becoming deeper every day, and on the day of the operation it would be much deeper than it had ever been before.  It would also last longer.  'You'll sleep,' he assured the Raja, 'for four full hours after the operation's over; and when you awake, you won't feel the slightest pain.'  Dr Andrew made these affirmations with a mixture of total scepticism and complete confidence.  Reason and past experience assured him that all this was impossible.  But in the present context past experience had proved to be irrelevant.  The impossible had already happened, several times.  There was no reason why it shouldn't happen again.  The important thing was to say that it would happen - so he said it, again and again.  And this was good; but better still was Dr Andrew's invention of the rehearsal."

      "Rehearsal of what?"

      "Of the surgery.  They ran through the procedure half a dozen times.  The last rehearsal was on the morning of the operation.  At six, Dr Andrew came to the Raja's room and, after a little cheerful talk, began to make the passes.  In a few minutes the patient was in deep trance.  Stage by stage, Dr Andrew described what he was going to do.  Touching the cheekbone near the Raja's right eye, he said, 'I begin by stretching the skin.  And now, with this scalpel' (and he drew the tip of a pencil across the cheek), 'I make an incision.  You feel no pain, of course - not even the slightest discomfort.  And now the underlying tissues are being cut and you still feel nothing at all.  You just lie there, comfortably asleep, while I dissect the cheek back to the nose.  Every now and then I stop to tie a blood vessel; then I go on again.  And when that part of the work is done, I'm ready to start on the tumour.  It has its roots there in the antrum and it has grown upwards, under the cheekbone, into the eye socket, and downwards in the gullet.  And as I cut it loose, you lie there as before, feeling nothing, perfectly comfortable, completely relaxed.  And now I lift your head.'  Suiting his action to the words, he lifted the Raja's head and bent it forward on the limp neck.  'I lift it and bend it so that you can get rid of the blood that's run down into your mouth and throat.  Some of the blood has got into your windpipe, and you cough a little to get rid of it; but it doesn't wake you.'  The Raja coughed once or twice, then, when Dr Andrew released his hold, dropped back on to the pillows, still fast asleep.  'And you don't choke even when I work on the lower end of the tumour in your gullet.'  Dr Andrew opened the Raja's mouth and thrust two fingers down his throat.  'It's just a question of pulling it loose, that's all.  Nothing in that to make you choke.  And if you have to cough up the blood, you can do it in your sleep.  Yes, in your sleep, in this deep, deep sleep.'

      "That was the end of the rehearsal.  Ten minutes later, after making some more passes and telling his patient to sleep still more deeply, Dr Andrew began the operation.  He stretched the skin, he made the incision, the dissected the cheek, he cut the tumour away from its roots in the antrum.  The Raja lay there perfectly relaxed, his pulse firm and steady at seventy-five, feeling no more pain than he had felt during the make-believe of the rehearsal.  Dr Andrew worked on the throat; there was no choking.  The blood flowed into the windpipe; the Raja coughed but did not awake.  Four hours after the operation was over, he was still sleeping; then, punctual to the minute, he opened his eyes, smiled at Dr Andrew between his bandages and asked, in his sing-song cockney, when the operation was to start.  After a feeding and a sponging, he was given some more passes and told to sleep for four more hours and to get well quickly.  Dr Andrew kept it up for a full week.  Sixteen hours of trance each day, eight of waking.  The Raja suffered almost no pain and, in spite of the thoroughly septic conditions under which the operation had been performed and the dressings renewed, the wounds healed without suppuration.  Remembering the horrors he had witnessed in the Edinburgh Infirmary, the yet more frightful horrors of the surgical wards at Madras, Dr Andrew could hardly believe his eyes.  And now he was given another opportunity to prove to himself what animal magnetism could do.  The Raja's eldest daughter was in the ninth month of her first pregnancy.  Impressed by what he had done for her husband, the Rani sent for Dr Andrew.  He found her sitting with a frail frightened girl of sixteen, who knew just enough broken cockney to be able to tell him she was going to die - she and her baby too.  Three black birds had confirmed it by flying on three successive days across her path.  Dr Andrew did not try to argue with her.  Instead, he asked her to lie down, then started to make the passes.  Twenty minutes later the girl was in a deep trance.  In his country, Dr Andrew now assured her, black birds were lucky - a presage of birth and joy.  She would bear her child easily and without pain.  Yes, with no more pain than her father had felt during his operation.  No pain at all, he promised, no pain whatsoever.

      "Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive suggestion, it all came true.  When the Raja woke up for his evening meal, he found his wife sitting by his bed.  'We have a grandson,' she said, 'and our daughter is well.  Dr Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried to her room, to give them both your blessing.'  At the end of a month the Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers.  Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the Rani was convinced of it) his daughter's life as well, with Dr Andrew as his chief adviser."

      "So he didn't go back to Madras?"

      "Not to Madras.  Not even to London.  He stayed here in Pala."

      "Trying to change the Raja's accent?"

      "And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja's kingdom."

      "Into what?"

      "That was a question he couldn't have answered.  In those early days he had no plan - only a set of likes and dislikes.  There were things about Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn't like at all.  Things about Europe that he detested and things he passionately approved of.  Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and things that filled him with disgust.  People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture.  It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.  Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings and make the individual blooms more beautiful?  That was the question to which, implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up to, Dr Raja and Dr Andrew were trying to find an answer."

      "And did they find an answer?"

      "Looking back," said Dr MacPhail, "one's amazed by what those two men accomplished.  The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist - what a strangely assorted pair!  But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other's deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other's native capacities.  The Raja's was an acute and subtle mind; but he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European ways of thinking.  No less intelligent, Dr Andrew knew nothing, of course, about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy.  He also knew nothing, as he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art of living.  In the months that followed the operation each became the other's pupil and the other's teacher.  And of course that was only a beginning.  They were not merely private citizens concerned with their private improvement.  The Raja had a million subjects and Dr Andrew was virtually his Prime Minister.  Private improvement was to be the preliminary to public improvement.  If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to make the best of both worlds - the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern - it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same.  To make the best of both worlds - what am I saying?  To make the best of all the worlds - the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities.  It was an enormous ambition, an ambition totally impossible of fulfilment; but at least it had the merit of spurring them on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread - with results that sometimes proved, to everybody's astonishment, that they had not been quite such fools as they looked.  They never succeeded, of course, in making the best of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying, they made the best of many more worlds than any merely prudent or sensible person would have dreamed of being able to reconcile and combine."

      "'If the fool would persist in his folly,'" Will quoted from The Proverbs of Hell, "'he would become wise.'"

      "Precisely," Dr Robert agreed.  "And the most extravagant folly of all is the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr Andrew were now contemplating - the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell and heaven.  But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an enormous reward!  Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently.  Stupid fools get nowhere; it's only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly can make them wise or produce good results.  Fortunately these two fools were clever.  Clever enough, for example, to embark on their folly in a modest and appealing way.  They began with pain relievers.  The Palanese were Buddhists.  They knew how misery is related to mind.  You cling, you crave, you assert yourself - and you live in a home-made hell.  You become detached - and you live in peace.  'I show you sorrow,' the Buddha had said, 'and I show you the ending of sorrow.'  Well, here was Dr Andrew with a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one kind of sorrow, namely physical pain.  With the Raja himself or, for the women, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr Andrew gave lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of teachers, mothers, invalids.  Painless childbirth - and forthwith all the women of Pala were enthusiastically on the side of the innovators.  Painless operations for stone and cataract and haemorrhoids - and they had won the approval of all the old and the ailing.  At one stroke more than half the adult population became their allies, prejudiced in their favour, friendly in advance, or at least open-minded, towards the next reform."

      "Where did they go from pain?" Will asked.

      "To agriculture and language.  They got a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they set to work to give the Palanese a second language.  Pala was to remain a forbidden island; for Dr Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that missionaries, planters, and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated.  But while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the natives must somehow be helped to get out - if not physically, at least with their minds.  But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi alphabet were a prison without windows.  There could be no escape for them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and could read the Latin script.  Among the courtiers, the Raja's linguistic accomplishments had already set a fashion.  Ladies and gentlemen larded their conversation with scraps of cockney, and some of them even sent to Cylon [Sri Lanka] for English-speaking tutors.  What had been a mode was now transformed into a policy.  English schools were set up and a staff of Bengali printers, with their presses and their founts of Caslon and Bodoni, were imported from Calcutta.  The first English book to be published at Shivapuram was a selection from The Arabian Nights, the second, a translation from The Diamond Sutra, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in manuscript.  For those who wished to read about Sinbad and Marouf, and for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there were now two cogent reasons for learning English.  That was the beginning of the long educational process that turned us at last into a bi-lingual people.  We speak Palanese when we're cooking, when we're telling funny stories, when we're talking about love or making it.  (Incidentally, we have the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in South-East Asia.)  But when it comes to business, or science, or speculative philosophy, we generally speaking English.  And most of us prefer to write in English.  Every writer needs a literature as his frame of reference; a set of models to conform to or to depart from.  Pala had good painting and sculpture, splendid architecture, wonderful dancing, subtle and expressive music - but no real literature, no national poets or dramatists or story tellers.  Just bards reciting Buddhist and Hindu myths; just a lot of monks preaching sermons and splitting metaphysical hairs.  Adopting English as our stepmother tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and certainly the widest of presents.  We gave ourselves a background, a spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible source of inspiration.  In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being creative in a field where we had never been creative before.  Thanks to the Raja and my great-grandfather, there's an Anglo-Palanese literature - of which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light."

      "On the dim side," she protested.

      Dr MacPhail shut his eyes and, smiling to himself, began to recite:

 

                                             "Thus-Gone to Thus-Gone, I with a Buddha's hand

                                               Offer the unplucked flower, the frog's soliloquy

                                               Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared mouth

                                               At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless

                                               Sky that makes possible mountains and setting moon.

                                               This emptiness that is the womb of love,

                                               This poetry of silence."

 

      He opened his eyes again.  "And not only this poetry of silence," he said.  "This science, this philosophy, this theology of silence.  And now it's high time you went to sleep."  He rose and moved towards the door.  "I'll go and get you a glass of fruit juice."