Island

14

She started the motor and they drove off-down to the bypass, up again to the high road beyond the other end of the village, and on into the compound of the Experimental Station. Susila pulled up at a small thatched bungalow like all the others. They climbed the six steps that led up to the veranda and entered a whitewashed living room.

To the left was a wide window with a hammock slung between the two wooden pillars at either side of the projecting bay. "For you," she said, pointing to the hammock. "You can put your leg up." And when Will had lowered himself into the net, "What shall we talk about?" she asked as she pulled up a wicker chair and sat down beside him.

"What about the good, the true and the beautiful? Or maybe," he grinned, "the ugly, the bad and the even truer."

"I'd thought," she said, ignoring his attempt at a witticism, "that we might go on where we left off last time-go on talking about you."

"That was precisely what I was suggesting-the ugly, the bad and the truer than all official truth."

"Is this just an exhibition of your conversational style?" she asked. "Or do you really want to talk about yourself?"

"Really," he assured her, "desperately. Just as desperately as I don't want to talk about myself. Hence, as you may have noticed, my unflagging interest in art, science, philosophy, politics, literature-any damned thing rather than the only thing that ultimately has any importance."

There was a long silence. Then in a tone of casual reminiscence, Susila began to talk about Wells Cathedral, about the calling of the jackdaws, about the white swans floating between the reflections of the floating clouds. In a few minutes he too was floating.

"I was very happy all the time I was at Wells," she said. "Wonderfully happy. And so were you, weren't you?"

Will made no answer. He was remembering those days in the green valley, years ago, before he and Molly were married, before they were lovers. What peace! What a solid, living, maggotless world of springing grass and flowers! And between them had flowed the kind of natural, undistorted feeling that he hadn't experienced since those far-off days when Aunt Mary was alive. The only person he had ever really loved-and here, in Molly, was her successor. What blessedness! Love transposed into another key-but the melody, the rich and subtle harmonies were the same. And then, on the fourth night of their stay, Molly had knocked on the wall that separated their rooms, and he had found her door ajar, had groped his way in darkness to the bed where, conscientiously naked, the Sister of Mercy was doing her best to play the part of the Wife of Love. Doing her best and (how disastrously!) failing.

Suddenly, as happened almost every afternoon, there was a loud rushing of wind and, muffled by distance, a hollow roaring of rain on thick foliage-a roaring that grew louder and louder as the shower approached. A few seconds passed, and then the raindrops were hammering insistently on the windowpanes. Hammering as they had hammered on the windows of his study that day of their last interview. "Do you really mean it, Will?"

The pain and shame of it made him want to cry aloud. He bit his lip.

"What are you thinking of?" Susila asked. It wasn't a matter of thinking. He was actually seeing her, actually hearing her voice. "Do you really mean it, Will?" And through the sound of the rain he heard himself answering, "I really mean it."

On the windowpane-was it here? or was it there, was it then?-the roar had diminished, as the gust spent itself, to a pattering whisper.

"What are you thinking of?" Susila insisted.

"I'm thinking of what I did to Molly."

"What was it that you did to Molly?"

He didn't want to answer; but Susila was inexorable.

"Tell me what it was that you did."

Another violent gust made the windows rattle. It was raining harder now-raining, it seemed to Will Farnaby, on purpose, raining in such a way that he would have to go on remembering what he didn't want to remember, would be compelled to say out loud the shameful things he must at all costs keep to himself.

"Tell me."

Reluctantly and in spite of himself, he told her.

" 'Do you really mean it, Will?' " And because of Babs-Babs, God help him! Babs, believe it or not!-he really did mean it, and she had walked out into the rain.

"The next time I saw her was in the hospital."

"Was it still raining?" Susila asked.

"Still raining."

"As hard as it's raining now?"

"Very nearly." And what Will heard was no longer this afternoon shower in the tropics but the steady drumming on the window of the little room where Molly lay dying.

"It's me," he was saying through the sound of the rain, "it's Will." Nothing happened; and then suddenly he felt the almost imperceptible movement of Molly's hand within his own. The voluntary pressure and then, after a few seconds, the involuntary release, the total limpness. "Tell me again, Will."

He shook his head. It was too painful, too humiliating. "Tell me again," she insisted. "It's the only way." Making an enormous effort, he started to tell the odious story yet once more. Did he really mean it? Yes, he really meant it-meant to hurt, meant perhaps (did one ever know what one really intended?) to kill. All for Babs, or the World Well Lost. Not his world, of course-Molly's world and, at the center of that world, the life that had created it. Snuffed out for the sake of that delicious smell in the darkness, of those muscular reflexes, that enormity of enjoyment, those consummate and intoxicat-ingly shameless skills.

"Good-bye, Will." And the door had closed behind her with a faint, dry click.

He wanted to call her back. But Babs's lover remembered the skills, the reflexes, and within its aura of musk, a body agonizing in the extremity of pleasure. Remembered these things and, standing at the window, watched the car move away through the rain, watched and was filled, as it turned the corner, with a shameful exultation. Free at last! Even freer, as he discovered three hours later in the hospital, than he had supposed. For now he was feeling the last faint pressure of her fingers; feeling the final message of her love. And then the message was interrupted. The hand went limp and now, suddenly, appallingly, there was no sound of breathing. "Dead," he whispered, and felt himself choking. "Dead."

"Suppose it hadn't been your fault," said Susila, breaking a long silence. "Suppose that she'd suddenly died without your having had anything to do with it. Wouldn't that have been almost as bad?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean, it's more than just feeling guilty about Molly's death. It's death itself, death as such, that you find so terrible." She was thinking of Dugald now. "So senselessly evil."

"Senselessly evil," he repeated. "Yes, perhaps that's why I had to be a professional execution watcher. Just because it was all so senseless, so utterly bestial. Following the smell of death from one end of the earth to the other. Like a vulture. Nice comfort able people just don't have any idea what the world is like. Not exceptionally, as it was during the war, but all the time. All the time." And as he spoke he was seeing, in a vision as brief and comprehensive and intensely circumstantial as a drowning man's, all the hateful scenes he had witnessed in the course of those well-paid pilgrimages to every hellhole and abattoir revolting enough to qualify as News. Negroes in South Africa, the man in the San Quentin gas chamber, mangled bodies in an Algerian farmhouse, and everywhere mobs, everywhere policemen and paratroopers, everywhere those dark-skinned children, stick-legged, potbellied, with flies on their raw eyelids, everywhere the nauseating smells of hunger and disease, the awful stench of death. And then suddenly, through the stench of death, mingled and impregnated with the stench of death, he was breathing the musky essence of Babs. Breathing the essence of Babs and remembering his little joke about the chemistry of purgatory and paradise. Purgatory is tetraethylene diamine and sulfureted hydrogen; paradise, very definitely, is symtrinitropsibutyl toluene, with an assortment of organic impurities-ha-ha-ha! (Oh, the delights of social life!) And then, quite suddenly, the odors of love and death gave place to a rank animal smell-a smell of dog.

The wind swelled up again into violence and the driving raindrops hammered and splashed against the panes. "Are you still thinking of Molly?" Susila asked. "I was thinking of something I'd completely forgotten," he answered. "I can't have been more than four years old when it happened, and now it's all come back to me. Poor Tiger." "Who was poor Tiger?" she questioned. Tiger, his beautiful red setter. Tiger, the only source of light in that dismal house where he had spent his childhood. Tiger, dear dear Tiger. In the midst of all that fear and misery, between the two poles of his father's sneering hate of everything and everybody and his mother's self-conscious self-sacrifice, what effortless good will, what spontaneous friendliness, what a bounding, barking irrepressible joy! His mother used to take him on her knee and tell him about God and Jesus. But there was more God in Tiger than in all her Bible stories. Tiger, so far as he was concerned, was the Incarnation. And then one day the Incarnation came down with distemper. "What happened then?" Susila asked.

"His basket's in the kitchen, and I'm there, kneeling beside it. And I'm stroking him-but his fur feels quite different from what it felt like before he was sick. Kind of sticky. And there's a bad smell. If I didn't love him so much, I'd run away, I couldn't bear to be near him. But I do love him, I love him more than anything or anybody. And while I stroke him, I keep telling him that he'll soon be well again. Very soon-tomorrow morning. And then all of a sudden he starts to shudder, and I try to stop the shuddering by holding his head between my hands. But it doesn't do any good. The trembling turns into a horrible convulsion. It makes me feel sick to look at it, and I'm frightened. I'm dreadfully frightened. Then the shuddering and the twitching die down and in a little while he's absolutely still. And when I lift his head and then let go, the head falls back-thump, like a piece of meat with a bone inside."

Will's voice broke, the tears were streaming down his cheeks, he was shaken by the sobs of a four-year-old grieving for his dog and confronted by the awful, inexplicable fact of death. With the mental equivalent of a click and a little jerk, his consciousness seemed to change gear. He was an adult again, and he had

ceased to float.

"I'm sorry." He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. "Well, that was my first introduction to the Essential Horror. Tiger was my friend, Tiger was my only consolation. That was something, obviously, that the Essential Horror couldn't tolerate. And it was the same with my Aunt Mary. The only person I ever really loved and admired and completely trusted; and, Christ, what the Essential Horror did to her!"

"Tell me," said Susila.

Will hesitated, then, shrugging his shoulders, "Why not?" he said. "Mary Frances Farnaby, my father's younger sister. Married at eighteen, just a year before the outbreak of the First World War, to a professional soldier. Frank and Mary, Mary and Frank-what harmony, what happiness!" He laughed. "Even outside of Pala there one can find occasional islands of decency. Tiny little atolls, or even, every now and then, a full-blown Tahiti-but always totally surrounded by the Essential Horror. Two young people on their private Pala. Then, one fine morning, it was August 4, 1914, Frank went overseas with the Expeditionary Force, and on Christmas Eve Mary gave birth to a deformed child that survived long enough for her to see for herself what the E.H. can do when it really tries. Only God can make a microcephalous idiot. Three months later, needless to say, Frank was hit by a piece of shrapnel and died in due course of gangrene. . . . All that," Will went on after a little silence, "was before my time. When I first knew her, in the twenties, Aunt Mary was devoting herself to the aged. Old people in insti tutions, old people cooped up in their own homes, old people living on and on as a burden to their children and grandchildren.

Struldbrugs, Tithonuses. And the more hopeless the decrepitude, the more crotchety and querulous the character, the better. As a child, how I hated Aunt Mary's old people! They smelt bad, they were frighteningly ugly, they were always boring and generally cross. But Aunt Mary really loved them-loved them through thick and thin, loved them in spite of everything. My mother used to talk a lot about Christian charity; but somehow one never believed what she said, just as one never felt any love in all the self-sacrificing things she was always forcing herself to do—no love, only duty. Whereas with Aunt Mary one was never in the slightest doubt. Her love was like a kind of physical radiation, something one could almost sense as heat or light. When she took me to stay with her in the country and later, when she came to town and I used to go and see her almost every day, it was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth. Then the Essential Horror got busy again. At the beginning she made a joke of it. 'Now I'm an Amazon,' she said after the first operation."

"Why an Amazon?" Susila asked.

"The Amazons had their right breast amputated. They were warriors and the breast got in the way when they were shooting with the long bow. 'Now I'm an Amazon,' " he repeated, and with his mind's eye could see the smile on that strong aquiline face, could hear, with his mind's ear, the tone of amusement in that clear, ringing voice. "But a few months later the other breast had to be cut off. After that there were the X rays, the radiation sickness and then, little by little, the degradation." Will's face took on its look of flayed ferocity. "If it weren't so unspeakably hideous, it would be really funny. What a masterpiece of irony! Here was a soul that radiated goodness and love and heroic charity. Then, for no known reason, something went wrong. Instead of flouting it, a little piece of her body started to obey the second law of thermodynamics. And as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity. The heroism went out of her, the love and the goodness evaporated. For the last months of her life she was no more the Aunt Mary I had loved and admired; she was somebody else, somebody (and this was the ironist's final and most exquisite touch) almost indistinguishable from the worst and weakest of the old people she had once befriended and been a tower of strength to. She had to be humiliated and degraded; and when the degradation was complete, she was slowly, and with a great deal of pain, put to death in solitude. In solitude," he insisted. "For of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you're suffering and dying; but they're standing by in another world. In your world you're absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you're alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure."

The essences of Babs and of Tiger, and when the cancer had gnawed a hole in the liver and her wasted body was impregnated with that strange, aromatic smell of contaminated blood, the essence of Aunt Mary dying. And in the midst of those essences, sickeningly or intoxicatedly aware of them, was an isolated consciousness, a child's, a boy's, a man's, forever isolated, irremediably alone. "And on top of everything else," he went on, "this woman was only forty-two. She didn't want to die. She refused to accept what was being done to her. The Essential Horror had to drag her down by main force. I was there; I saw it happening."

"And that's why you're the man who won't take yes for an answer?"

"How can anyone take yes for an answer?" he countered. "Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!"

Tiger exuberantly alive and joyful and full of God. And then Tiger transformed by the Essential Horror into a packet of garbage, which the vet had to come and be paid for removing.

And after Tiger, Aunt Mary. Maimed and tortured, dragged in the mud, degraded and finally, like Tiger, transformed into a packet of garbage-only this time it was the undertaker who had removed it, and a clergyman was hired to make believe that it was all, in some sublime and Pickwickian sense, perfectly O.K. Twenty years later another clergyman had been hired to repeat the same strange rigmarole over Molly's coffin. "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advan-tageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die."

Will uttered another of his hyena laughs. "What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement!"

"But you're the man who won't take yes for an answer. So why raise any objections?"

"I oughtn't to," he agreed. "But one remains an aesthete, one likes to have the no said with style. 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' " He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.

"And yet," said Susila, "in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying-three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies-but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."

"And rises again from the dead?" he asked sarcastically. "That's one of the questions the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did disbelieving. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that's the Buddha's advice) and get on with the job."

"Which job?"

"Everybody's job-enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness."

"But I don't want to be more aware," said Will. "I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary's death and the slums of Rendang-Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells-even of some delicious smells," he added as he caught, through the remembered essences of dog and cancer of the liver, a civetlike whiff of the pink alcove. "Less aware of my fat income and other people's subhuman poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies, 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I'm doing. Only too well. And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already."

"I'm not asking anything," she said. "I'm merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It'll help you to become aware of what you are in fact."

He shrugged his shoulders. "One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy."

"And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha's message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn't stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature."

"Absence of a soul-that's easy to cope with. But what about the presence of cancer, the presence of slow degradation? What about hunger and overbreeding and Colonel Dipa? Are they pure Suchness?"

"Of course. But, needless to say, it's desperately difficult for the people who are deeply involved in any of those evils to discover their Buddha Nature. Public health and social reform are the indispensable preconditions of any kind of general enlightenment."

"But in spite of public health and social reform, people still die. Even in Pala," he added ironically.

"Which is why the corollary of welfare has to be dhyana-all the yogas of living and dying, so that you can be aware, even in the final agony, of who in fact, and in spite of everything, you really are."

There was a sound of footsteps on the planking of the veranda, and a childish voice called, "Mother!" "Here I am, darling," Susila called back. The front door was flung open and Mary Sarojini came hur-rying into the room.

"Mother," she said breathlessly, "they want you to come at once. It's Granny Lakshmi. She's . . ." Catching sight for the first time of the figure in the hammock, she started and broke off. "Oh! I didn't know you were here."

Will waved his hand to her without speaking. She gave him a perfunctory smile, then turned back to her mother. "Granny Lakshmi suddenly got much worse," she said, "and Grandpa Robert is still up at the High Altitude Station, and they can't get through to him on the telephone." "Did you run all the way?" "Except where it's really too steep."

Susila put her arm round the child and kissed her, then very brisk and businesslike, rose to her feet. "It's Dugald's mother," she said.

"Is she . . . ?" He glanced at Mary Sarojini, then back at Susila. Was death taboo? Could one mention it before children? "You mean, is she dying?" He nodded. "We've been expecting it, of course," Susila went on. "But not today. Today she seemed a little better." She shook her head. "Well, I have to go and stand by-even if it is another world. And actually," she added, "it isn't quite so completely other as you think. I'm sorry we had to leave our business unfinished; but there'll be other opportunities. Meanwhile what do you want to do? You can stay here. Or I'll drop you at Dr. Robert's. Or you can come with me and Mary Sarojini."

"As a professional execution watcher?"

"Not as a professional execution watcher," she answered emphatically. "As a human being, as someone who needs to know how to live and then how to die. Needs it as urgently as we all do."

"Needs it," he said, "a lot more urgently than most. But shan't I be in the way?"

"If you can get out of your own way, you won't be in anyone else's."

She took his hand and helped him out of the hammock. Two minutes later they were driving past the lotus pool and the huge Buddha meditating under the cobra's hood, past the white bull, out through the main gate of the compound. The rain was over, in a green sky enormous clouds glowed like archangels. Low in the west the sun was shining with a brightness that seemed almost supernatural.

Soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. Da mi basin mille.

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

"What do you say to people who are dying?" he asked. "Do you tell them not to bother their heads about immortality and get on with the job?"

"If you like to put it that way-yes, that's precisely what we do. Going on being aware-it's the whole art of dying."

"And you teach the art?"

"I'd put it another way. We help them to go on practicing the art of living even while they're dying. Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us-that's the art of living, and that's what one can help the dying to go on practicing. To the very end. Maybe beyond the end."

"Beyond?" he questioned. "But you said that was something that the dying aren't supposed to think about."

"They're not being asked to think about it. They're being helped, if there is such a thing, to experience it. If there is such a thing," she repeated, "if the universal life goes on, when the separate me-life is over."

"Do you personally think it does go on?"

Susila smiled. "What I personally think is beside the point. All that matters is what I may impersonally experience while I'm living, when I'm dying, maybe when I'm dead."

She swung the car into a parking space and turned off the engine. On foot they entered the village. Work was over for the day and the main street was so densely thronged that it was hard for them to pass.

"I'm going ahead by myself," Susila announced. Then to Mary Sarojini, "Be at the hospital in about an hour," she said. "Not before." She turned and, threading her way between the slowly promenading groups, was soon lost to view.

"You're in charge now," said Will, smiling down at the child by his side.

Mary Sarojini nodded gravely and took his hand. "Let's go and see what's happening in the square," she said.

"How old is your Granny Lakshmi?" Will asked as they started to make their way along the crowded street.

"I don't really know," Mary Sarojini answered. "She looksterribly old. But maybe that's because she's got cancer."

"Do you know what cancer is?" he asked.

Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. "It's what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they're crazy-just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies."

"And that's what has happened, I gather, to your Granny Lakshmi."

"And now she needs someone to help her die."

"Does your mother often help people die?"

The child nodded. "She's awfully good at it."

"Have you ever seen anyone die?"

"Of course," Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. "Let me see." She made a mental calculation. "I've seen five people die. Six, if you count babies."

"I hadn't seen anyone die when I was your age."

"You hadn't?"

"Only a dog."

"Dogs die easier than people. They don't talk about it beforehand."

"How do you feel about. . . about people dying?"

"Well, it isn't nearly so bad as having babies. That's awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn't hurt at all. They've turned off the pain."

"Believe it or not," said Will, "I've never seen a baby being born."

"Never?" Mary Sarojini was astonished. "Not even when you were at school?"

Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-in Hospital. "Not even at school," he said aloud.

"You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?"

"In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."

The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. "Crazy," she said. "Or were your teachers just stupid?"

Will laughed. "They were high-minded educators dedicated to mens sana in corpore sano and the maintenance of our sublime Western Tradition. But meanwhile tell me something. Weren't you ever frightened?"

"By people having babies?"

"No, by people dying. Didn't that scare you?"

"Well, yes-it did," she said after a moment of silence.

"So what did you do about it?"

"I did what they teach you to do-tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened."

"And which of you was it?"

"This one." Mary Sarojini pointed a forefinger into her open mouth. "The one that does all the talking. Little Miss Gibber- that's what Vijaya calls her. She's always talking about all the nasty things I remember, all the huge, wonderful, impossible things I imagine I can do. She's the one that gets frightened."

"Why is she so frightened?"

"I suppose it's because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her. Talking out loud or talking to herself. But there's another one who doesn't get frightened."

"Which one is that?"

"The one that doesn't talk-just looks and listens and feels what's going on inside. And sometimes," Mary Sarojini added, "sometimes she suddenly sees how beautiful everything is. No, that's wrong. She sees it all the time, but / don't-not unless she-makes me notice it. That's when it suddenly happens. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dog's messes." She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet.

From the narrow street they had emerged into the marketplace. The last of the sunlight still touched the sculptured spire of the temple, the little pink gazebos on the roof of the town hall; but here in the square there was premonition of twilight and under the great banyan tree it was already night. On the stalls between its pillars and hanging ropes the market women had turned on their lights. In the leafy darkness there were islands of form and color, and from hardly visible nonentity brown-skinned figures stepped for a moment into brilliant exis tence, then back again into nothingness. The spaces between the tall buildings echoed with a confusion of English and Palanese, of talk and laughter, of street cries and whistled tunes, of dogs barking, parrots screaming. Perched on one of the pink gazebos, a pair of mynah birds called indefatigably for attention and compassion. From an open-air kitchen at the center of the square rose the appetizing smell of food on the fire. Onions, peppers, turmeric, fish frying, cakes baking, rice on the boil-and through these good gross odors, like a reminder from the Other Shore, drifted the perfume, thin and sweet and ethereally pure, of the many-colored garlands on sale beside the fountain.

Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women's necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.

Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.

A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. "Are you that man from the Outside?" she asked.

"Almost infinitely from the outside," he assured her.

She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.

"We're all very sorry for you," she said.

They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.

"What's it all about?" Will asked.

"It's about girls and boys sleeping together," Mary Sarojini answered.

"Oh-I see." He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child's untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day-or dying.

"And the part that made them laugh," Mary Sarojini went on, "was where he said the Future Buddha won't have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He'll have his Enlightenment while he's in bed with the princess."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" Will asked.

She nodded emphatically. "It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too."

"You're perfectly right," said Will. "Being a man, I hadn't thought of the princess."

The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.

"Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously- Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.

Love-and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void."

The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense min gled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.

"Who were Paul and Freud?" Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.

Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.

"No wonder the song says, Don't take them seriously," she-concluded.

"After which," said Will, "we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex."

"Oedipus?" Mary Sarojini repeated. "But that's the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they're giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It's nice."

"Nice?" he repeated. "Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?"

"But he doesn't put out his eyes," said Mary Sarojini.

"He does where /hail from."

"Not here. He only says he's going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They're talked out of it."

"Who by?"

"The boy and girl from Pala."

"How do they get into the act?" Will asked.

"I don't know. They're just there. 'Oedipus in Pala'-that's what the play is called. So why shouldn't they be there?"

"And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?"

"Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope round her neck and he's got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn't know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper-and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus-all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn't know any better."

"Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls-they want to marry their fathers."

"Which fathers and mothers?" Mary Sarojini asked. "We have such a lot of them."

"You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?"

"There's twenty-two of them in our MAC."

"Safety in numbers!"

"But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they'd taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake."

They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.

A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the facade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted "Oedipus" in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.

"Give ear to our afflictions," the old man piped. The king cocked his head and listened.

"I hear the groans of dying men," he said. "I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication."

"Supplication!" said the deity in the clouds. "That's the spirit." He patted himself on the chest.

"They had some kind of a virus," Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. "Like Asian flu, only a lot worse."

"We repeat the appropriate litanies," the old priest querulously piped, "we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us."

"Only a god can help."

"Hear, hear!" shouted the presiding deity.

"But by what means?"

"Only a god can say."

"Correct," said the god in his basso profundo, "absolutely correct."

"Creon, my wife's brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns-as very soon he must-we shall know what heaven advises."

"What heaven bloody well commands!" the basso profundo emended.

"Were people really so silly?" Mary Sarojini asked, as the audience laughed.

"Really and truly," Will assured her.

A phonograph started to play the Dead March in Saul.

From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet-and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.

"Dead," said Oedipus as he watched them pass. "And another dead. And yet another, another."

"That'll teach them!" the basso profundo broke in. "I'll learn you to be a toad!"

Oedipus continued:

"The soldier's bier, the whore's; the babe stone-cold Pressed to the ache of unsucked breasts; the youth in horror Turning away from the black swollen face That from his moonlit pillow once looked up, Eager for kisses. Dead, all dead, Mourned by the soon to die and by the doomed Borne with reluctant footing to the abhorred Garden of cypresses where one huge pit Yawns to receive them, stinking to the moon."

While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand, arm in arm, downstage and a little left of center.

"But we, meanwhile," said the boy when Oedipus had fin ished:

"Are bound for rosier gardens and the absurd Apocalyptic rite that in the mind Calls forth from the touched skin and melting flesh The immanent Infinite."

"What about Me?" the basso profundo rumbled from the welkin. "You seem to forget that I'm Wholly Other."

Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note-tuba and double bass- prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.

"Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden."

In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. "Death, death, death, death ..."

"But life knows more than one note," said the boy.

"Life," the girl chimed in, "can sing both high and low."

"And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music."

"A richer music," the girl repeated.

And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.

The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.

There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi and primed with oracles. For the next few minutes the dialogue was all in Palanese, and Mary Sarojini had to act as interpreter.

"Oedipus asks him what God said; and the other one says that what God said was that it was all because of some man having killed the old king, the one before Oedipus. Nobody had ever caught him, and the man was still living in Thebes, and this virus that was killing everybody had been sent by God-that's what ( scon says he was told-as a punishment. I don't know why all these people who hadn't done anything to anybody had to be punished; but that's what he says God said. And the virus won't stop till they catch the man that killed the old king and send him away from Thebes. And of course Oedipus says he's going to do everything he can to find the man and get rid of him."

From his downstage corner the boy began to declaim, this rime in English:

While the audience was still laughing, another group of mourners emerged from the wings and slowly crossed the stage.

"Karuna," said the girl in the foreground, "compassion. The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering."

Feeling a touch on his arm, Will turned and found himself looking into the beautiful sulky face of young Murugan.

"I've been hunting for you everywhere," he said angrily, as though Will had concealed himself on purpose just to annoy him. He spoke so loudly that many heads were turned and there were calls for quiet.

"You weren't at Dr. Robert's, you weren't at Susila's," the boy nagged on, regardless of the protests.

"Quiet, quiet ..."

"Quiet!" came a tremendous shout from Basso Profundo in the clouds. "Things have come to a pretty pass," the voice added grumblingly, "when God simply can't hear Himself speak."

"Hear, hear," said Will, joining in the general laughter. He-rose and, followed by Murugan and Mary Sarojini, hobbled towards the exit.

"Didn't you want to see the end?" Mary Sarojini asked, and turning to Murugan, "You really might have waited," she said in a tone of reproof.

"Mind your own business!" Murugan snapped.

Will laid a hand on the child's shoulder. "Luckily," he said, "your account of the end was so vivid that I don't have to see ii with my own eyes. And of course," he added ironically, "His Highness must always come first."

Murugan pulled an envelope out of the pocket of those white-silk pajamas which had so bedazzled the little nurse and handed it to Will. "From my mother." And he added, "It's urgent."

"How good it smells!" Mary Sarojini commented, sniffing at the rich arua of sandalwood that surrounded the Rani's missive.

Will unfolded three sheets of heaven-blue notepaper em bossed with five golden lotuses under a princely crown. How many underlinings, what a profusion of capital letters! He started to read.

Ma Petite Voix, cher Farnaby, avait raison-AS usual! I had been told again and again what Our Mutual Friend was predestined to do for poor little Pala and (through the financial support which Pala will permit him to contribute to the Crusade of the Spirit) for the whole world. So when I read his cable (which arrived a few minutes ago, by way of the faithful Bahu and his diplomatic colleague in London), it came as no surprise to learn that Lord A. has given you Full Powers (and, it goes without saying, the wherewithal) to negotiate on his behalf-on our behalf; for his advantage is also yours, mine and (since in our different ways we are all Crusaders) the spirit's!!

But the arrival of Lord A.'s cable is not the only piece of news I have to report. Events (as we learned this afternoon from Bahu) are rushing towards the Great Turning Point of Palanese History-rushing far more rapidly than I had previously thought to be possible. For reasons which are partly political (the need to offset a recent decline in Colonel D.'s popularity), partly Economic (the burdens of Defense are too onerous to be borne by Rendang alone) and partly Astrological (these days, say theMa Peti Experts, are uniquely favorable for a joint venture by Rams-myself and Murugan-and that typical Scorpion, Colonel D.) it has been decided to precipitate an Action originally planned for the night of the lunar eclipse next November. This being so, it is essential that the three of us here should meet without delay to decide what must be Done, in these new and swiftly changing Circumstances, to promote our special interests, material and Spiritual. The so-called "Accident" which brought you to our shores at this most critical Moment of Time was, as you must recognize, Manifestly Providential. It remains for us to collaborate, as dedicated Crusaders, with that divine power which has so unequivocally espoused our Cause. So come at once! Murugan has the motorcar and will bring you to our modest Bungalow, where, I assure you, my dear Farnaby, you will receive a very warm welcome from bien sincerement votre, Fatima R.

Will folded up the three odorous sheets of scrawled blue paper and replaced them in their envelope. His face was expressionless; but behind this mask of indifference he was violently angry. Angry with this ill-mannered boy before him, so ravishing in his white silk pajamas, so odious in his spoiled silliness. Angry, as he caught another whiff of the letter, with that grotesque monster of a woman, who had begun by ruining her son, in the name of mother love and chastity, and was now egging him on, in the name of God and an assortment of Ascended Masters, to become a bomb-dropping spiritual crusader under the oily ban ner of Joe Aldehyde. Angry, above all, with himself for having so wantonly become involved with this ludicrously sinister couple, in heaven only knew what kind of a vile plot against all the human decencies that his refusal to take yes for an answer had never prevented him from secretly believing in and (how passionately! ) longing for.

"Well, shall we go?" said Murugan in a tone of airy confidence. He was evidently assuming as axiomatic that, when Fatima R. issued a command, obedience must necessarily be complete and unhesitating.

Feeling the need to give himself a little more time to cool off, Will made no immediate answer. Instead, he turned away to look at the now distant puppets. Jocasta, Oedipus and Creon were sitting on the palace steps, waiting, presumably, for the arrival of Tiresias. Overhead, Basso Profundo was momentarily napping. A party of black-robed mourners was crossing the stage. Near the footlights the boy from Pala had begun to declaim in blank verse:

There was a ripple of plucked strings, then the long-drawn notes of a flute.

"Shall we go?" Murugan repeated.

But Will held up his hand for silence. The girl puppet had moved to the center of the stage and was singing:

Losing all patience, Murugan caught hold of Will's arm and gave him a savage pinch. "Are you coming?" he shouted.

Will turned on him angrily. "What the devil do you think you're doing, you little fool?" He jerked his arm out of the boy's grasp.

Intimidated, Murugan changed his tone. "I just wanted to know if you were ready to come to my mother's."

"I'm not ready," Will answered, "because I'm not going."

"Not going?" Murugan cried in a tone of incredulous amazement. "But she expects you, she . . ."

"Tell your mother I'm very sorry, but I have a prior engagement. With someone who's dying," Will added.

"But this is frightfully important."

"So is dying."

Murugan lowered his voice. "Something's happening," he whispered.

"I can't hear you," Will shouted through the confused noises of the crowd.

Murugan glanced about him apprehensively, then risked a somewhat louder whisper. "Something's happening, something tremendous."

"Something even more tremendous is happening at the hos pital."

"We just heard . . ." Murugan began. He looked around again, then shook his head. "No, I can't tell you-not here. That's why you must come to the bungalow. Now. There's no time to lose."

Will glanced at his watch. "No time to lose," he echoed and, turning to Mary Sarojini, "We must get going," he said. "Which way?"

"I'll show you," she said, and they set offhand in hand.

"Wait," Murugan implored, "wait!" Then, as Will and Mary Sarojini held on their course, he came dodging through the crowd in pursuit. "What shall I tell her?" he wailed at their heels.

The boy's terror was comically abject. In Will's mind anger gave place to amusement. He laughed aloud. Then, halting, "What would you tell her, Mary Sarojini?" he asked.

"I'd tell her exactly what happened," said the child. "I mean, if it was my mother. But then," she added on second thought, "my mother isn't the Rani." She looked up at Murugan. "Do you belong to an MAC?" she enquired.

Of course he didn't. For the Rani the very idea of a Mutual Adoption Club was a blasphemy. Only God could make a Mother. The Spiritual Crusader wanted to be alone with her God-given victim.

"No MAC." Mary Sarojini shook her head. "That's awful!

You might have gone and stayed for a few days with one of your other mothers."

Still terrified by the prospect of having to tell his only mother about the failure of his mission, Murugan began to harp almost hysterically on a new variant of the old theme. "I don't know what she'll say," he kept repeating. "I don't know what she'll say."

"There's only one way to find out what she'll say," Will told him. "Go home and listen."

"Come with me," Murugan begged. "Please." He clutched at Will's arm.

"I told you not to touch me." The clutching hand was hastily withdrawn. Will smiled again. "That's better!" He raised his staff in a farewell gesture. "Bonne nuit, Altesse." Then to Mary Sarojini, "Lead on, MacPhail," he said in high good humor.

"Were you putting it on?" Mary Sarojini asked. "Or were you really angry?"

"Really and truly," he assured her. Then he remembered what he had seen in the school gymnasium. He hummed the opening notes of the Rakshasi Hornpipe and banged the pavement with his ironshod staff.

"Ought I to have stamped it out?"

"Maybe it would have been better."

"You think so?"

"He's going to hate you as soon as he's stopped being frightened."

Will shrugged his shoulders. He couldn't care less. But as the past receded and the future approached, as they left the arc lamps of the marketplace and climbed the steep dark street that wound uphill to the hospital, his mood began to change. Lead on, MacPhail-but towards what, and away from what? Towards yet another manifestation of the Essential Horror and away from all hope of that blessed year of freedom which Joe Aldehyde had promised and that it would be so easy and (since Pala was doomed in any event) not so immoral or treacherous to earn, And not only away from the hope of freedom; away quite possi bly, if the Rani complained to Joe and if Joe became sufficiently indignant, from any further prospects of well-paid slavery as a professional execution watcher. Should he turn back, should he try to find Murugan, offer apologies, do whatever that dreadful woman ordered him to do? A hundred yards up the road, the lights of the hospital could be seen shining between the trees.

"Let's rest for a moment," he said.

"Are you tired?" Mary Sarojini enquired solicitously.

"A little."

He turned and, leaning on his staff, looked down at the market place. In the light of the arc lamps the town hall glowed pink, like a monumental serving of raspberry sherbet. On the temple spire he could see, frieze above frieze, the exuberant chaos of Indie sculpture-elephants and Bodhisattvas, demons, supernat ural girls with breasts and enormous bottoms, capering Shivas, rows of past and future Buddhas in quiet ecstasy. Below, in the space between sherbet and mythology, seethed the crowd, and somewhere in that crowd was a sulky face and a pair of white satin pajamas. Should he go back? It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do. But an inner voice-not little, like the Rani's, but stentorian-shouted, "Squalid! Squalid!" Con science? No. Morality? Heaven forbid! But supererogatory squalor, ugliness and vulgarity beyond the call of duty-these were things which, as a man of taste, one simply couldn't be a party to.

"Well, shall we go on?" he said to Mary Sarojini.

They entered the lobby of the hospital. The nurse at the desk had a message for them from Susila. Mary Sarojini was to go directly to Mrs. Rao's, where she and Tom Krishna would spend the night. Mr. Farnaby was to be asked to come at once to Room 34.

"This way," said the nurse, and held open a swing door.

Will stepped forward. The conditioned reflex of politeness clicked automatically into action. "Thank you," he said, and smiled. But it was with a dull, sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that he went hobbling towards the apprehended future.

"The last door on the left," said the nurse. But now she had to get back to her desk in the lobby. "So I'll leave you to go on alone," she added as the door closed behind her.

Alone, he repeated to himself, alone-and the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous. This long corridor with its green-painted walls was the very same corridor along which, a year ago, he had walked to the little room where Molly lay dying. The nightmare was recurrent. Foredoomed and conscious, he moved on towards its horrible consummation. Death, yet another vision of death.

Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four . . . He knocked and waited, listening to the beating of his heart. The door opened and he found himself face to face with little Radha.

"Susila was expecting you," she whispered.

Will followed her into the room. Rounding a screen, he caught a glimpse of Susila's profile silhouetted against a lamp, of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of clawlike hands. Once again the Essential Horror. With a shudder he turned away. Radha motioned him to a chair near the open window. He sat down and closed his eyes-closed them physically against the present, but, by that very act, opened them inwardly upon that hateful past of which the present had reminded him. He was there in that other room, with Aunt Mary. Or rather with the person who had once been Aunt Mary, but was now this hardly recognizable somebody else-somebody who had never so much as heard of the charity and courage which had been the very essence of Aunt Mary's being; somebody who was filled with an indiscriminate hatred for all who came near her, loathing them, whoever they might be, simply because they didn't have cancer, because they weren't in pain, had not been sentenced to die before their time. And along with this malignant envy of other people's health and happiness had gone a bitterly queru lous self-pity, an abject despair.

"Why to me? Why should this thing have happened to me?"

He could hear the shrill complaining voice, could see that tearstained and distorted face. The only person he had ever really loved or wholeheartedly admired. And yet, in her degrada tion, he had caught himself despising her-despising, positively hating. To escape from the past, he reopened his eyes. Radha, he saw, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged and upright, in the posture of meditation. In her chair beside the bed Susila seemed to beholding the same kind of focused stillness. He looked at the face on the pillow. That too was still, still with a serenity that might almost have been the frozen calm of death. Outside, in the leafy darkness, a peacock suddenly screamed. Deepened by contrast, the ensuing silence seemed to grow pregnant with mysterious and appalling meanings.

"Lakshmi." Susila laid a hand on the old woman's wasted arm. "Lakshmi," she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. "You mustn't go to sleep."

Not go to sleep? But for Aunt Mary, sleep-the artificial sleep that followed the injections-had been the only respite from the self-lacerations of self-pity and brooding fear.

"Lakshmi!"

The face came to life.

"I wasn't really asleep," the old woman whispered. "It's just my being so weak. I seem to float away."

"But you've got to be here," said Susila. "You've got to know you're here. All the time." She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman's shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table.

Lakshmi sniffed, opened her eyes, and looked up into Susila's face. "I'd forgotten how beautiful you were," she said. "But then Dugald always did have good taste." The ghost of a mischievous smile appeared for a moment on the fleshless face. "What do you think, Susila?" she added after a moment and in another tone. "Shall we see him again? I mean, over there?"

In silence Susila stroked the old woman's hand. Then, suddenly smiling, "How would the Old Raja have asked that question?" she said. "Do you think 'we' (quote, unquote) shall see 'him' (quote, unquote) 'over there' (quote, unquote) ?"

"But what do you think?"

"I think we've all come out of the same light, and we're all going back into the same light."

Words, Will was thinking, words, words, words. With an effort, Lakshmi lifted a hand and pointed accusingly at the lamp on the bed table.

"It glares in my eyes," she whispered.

Susila untied the red silk handkerchief knotted around her throat and draped it over the lamp's parchment shade. From white and mercilessly revealing, the light became as dimly, warmly rosy as the flush, Will found himself thinking, on Babs's rumpled bed, whenever Porter's Gin proclaimed itself in crimson.

"That's much better," said Lakshmi. She shut her eyes. Then, after a long silence, "The light," she broke out, "the light. It's here again." Then after another pause, "Oh, how wonderful," she whispered at last, "how wonderful!" Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.

Susila took the old woman's hand in both of hers. "Is the pain bad?" she asked.

"It would be bad," Lakshmi explained, "if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn't. The pain's here; but I'm somewhere else. It's like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain."

"Is the light still there?"

Lakshmi shook her head. "And looking back, I can tell you exactly when it went away. It went away when I started talking about the pain not being really mine."

"And yet what you were saying was good."

"I know-but I was saying it." The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi's face.

"What are you thinking of?" Susila asked.

"Socrates."

"Socrates?"

"Gibber, gibber, gibber-even when he'd actually swallowed the stuff. Don't let me talk, Susila. Help me to get out of my own light."

"Do you remember that time last year," Susila began after a silence, "when we all went up to the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude Station? You and Robert and Dugald and me and the two children-do you remember?"

Lakshmi smiled with pleasure at the recollection.

"I'm thinking specially of that view from the west side of the temple-the view out over the sea. Blue, green, purple-and the shadows of the clouds were like ink. And the clouds themselves-snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember, Lakshmi?"

"You mean, about the Clear Light?"

"About the Clear Light," Susila confirmed. "Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they've seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they've been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born? I was the first to answer," said Susila, smiling to herself. "And as I'd just been reading something by some American behaviorist, I didn't stop to think-I just gave you the (quote, unquote) 'scientific point of view.' People equate Mind (whatever that may be) with hallucinations of light, because they've looked at a lot of sunsets and found them very impressive. But Robert and Dugald would have none of it. The Clear Light, they insisted, comes first. You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what's always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time. You agreed with them, Lakshmi-do you remember? You said, 'I'd like to be on your side, Susila, if only because it isn't good for these men of ours to be right all the time. But in this case-surely it's pretty obvious-in this case they are right.' Of course they were right, and of course I was hopelessly wrong. And, needless to say, you had known the right answer before you asked the question."

"I never knew anything," Lakshmi whispered. "I could only see.'"

"I remember your telling me about seeing the Clear Light," said Susila. "Would you like me to remind you of it?"

The sick woman nodded her head.

"When you were eight years old," said Susila. "That was the first time. An orange butterfly on a leaf, opening and shutting its wings in the sunshine-and suddenly there was the Clear Light of pure Suchness blazing through it, like another sun."

"Much brighter than the sun," Lakshmi whispered.

"But much gentler. You can look into the Clear Light and not be blinded. And now remember it. A butterfly on a green leaf, opening and shutting its wings-and it's the Buddha Nature totally present, it's the Clear Light outshining the sun. And you were only eight years old."

"What had I done to deserve it?"

Will found himself remembering that evening, a week or so before her death, when Aunt Mary had talked about the wonderful times they had had together in her little Regency house near Arundel where he had spent the better part of all his holidays. Smoking out the wasps' nests with fire and brimstone, having picnics on the downs or under the beeches. And then the sausage rolls at Bognor, the gypsy fortuneteller who had proph esied that he would end up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the black-robed, red-nosed verger who had chased them out of Chichester Cathedral because they had laughed too much. "Laughed too much," Aunt Mary had repeated bitterly. "Laughed too much ..."

"And now," Susila was saying, "think of that view from the Shiva temple. Think of those lights and shadows on the sea, those blue spaces between the clouds. Think of them, and then let go of your thinking. Let go of it, so that the not-Thought can come through. Things into Emptiness. Emptiness into Suchness. Suchness into things again, into your own mind. Remember what it says in the Sutra. 'Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Bud dha Amitabha.' "

"The same as the light," Lakshmi repeated. "And yet it's all dark again."

"It's dark because you're trying too hard," said Susila. "Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. 'Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.' I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly-it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered."

Completely unencumbered . . . Will thought of poor Aunt Mary sinking deeper and deeper with every step into the quicksands. Deeper and deeper until, struggling and protesting to the last, she had gone down, completely and forever, into the Essential Horror. He looked again at the fleshless face on the pillow and saw that it was smiling.

"The Light," came the hoarse whisper, "the Clear Light. It's here-along with the pain, in spite of the pain."

"And where are youV Susila asked.

"Over there, in the corner." Lakshmi tried to point, but the raised hand faltered and fell back, inert, on the coverlet. "I can see myself there. And she can see my body on the bed."

"Can she see the Light?"

"No. The Light's here, where my body is."

The door of the sickroom was quietly opened. Will turned his head and was in time to see Dr. Robert's small spare figure emerging from behind the screen into the rosy twilight.

Susila rose and motioned him to her place beside the bed. Dr. Robert sat down and, leaning forward, took his wife's hand in one of his and laid the other on her forehead.

"It's me," he whispered.

"At last. . ."

A tree, he explained, had fallen across the telephone line. No communication with the High Altitude Station except by road. They had sent a messenger in a car, and the car had broken down. More than two hours had been lost. "But thank goodness," Dr. Robert concluded, "here I finally am."

The dying woman sighed profoundly, opened her eyes for a moment and looked up at him with a smile, then closed them again. "I knew you'd come."

"Lakshmi," he said very softly. "Lakshmi." He drew the tips of his fingers across the wrinkled forehead, again and again. "My little love." There were tears on his cheeks; but his voice was firm and he spoke with the tenderness not of weakness, but of power.

"I'm not over there any more," Lakshmi whispered.

"She was over there in the corner," Susila explained to her father-in-law. "Looking at her body here on the bed."

"But now I've come back. Me and the pain, me and the Light, me and you-all together."

The peacock screamed again and, through the insect noises that in this tropical night were the equivalent of silence, far off but clear came the sound of gay music, flutes and plucked strings and the steady throbbing of drums.

"Listen," said Dr. Robert. "Can you hear it? They're dancing."

"Dancing," Lakshmi repeated. "Dancing."

"Dancing so lightly," Susila whispered. "As though they had wings."

The music swelled up again into audibility.

"It's the Courting Dance," Susila went on.

"The Courting Dance. Robert, do you remember?"

"Could I ever forget?"

Yes, Will said to himself, could one ever forget? Could one ever forget that other distant music and, nearby, unnaturally quick and shallow, the sound of dying breath in a boy's ears? In the house across the street somebody was practicing one of those Brahms Waltzes that Aunt Mary had loved to play. One-two and three and One-two and three and O-o-o-ne two three, One- and One and Two-Three and One and . . . The odious stranger who had once been Aunt Mary stirred out of her artificial stupor and opened her eyes. An expression of the most intense malignity had appeared on the yellow, wasted face. "Go and tell them to stop," the harsh, unrecognizable voice had almost screamed. And then the lines of malignity had changed into the lines of despair, and the stranger, the pitiable odious stranger started to sob uncontrollably. Those Brahms Waltzes-they were the pieces, out of all her repertory, that Frank had loved best.

Another gust of cool air brought with it a louder strain of the

gay, bright music.

"All those young people dancing together," said Dr. Robert. "All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness! It's all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force. Their joy and our love-Susila's love, my love-all working together, all reinforcing one another. Love and joy enveloping you, my darling; love and joy carrying you up into the peace of the Clear Light. Listen to the music. Can you still hear it, Lakshmi?"

"She's drifted away again," said Susila. "Try to bring her

back."

Dr. Robert slipped an arm under the emaciated body and lifted it into a sitting posture. The head drooped sideways onto

his shoulder.

"My little love," he kept whispering. "My little love . . ."

Her eyelids fluttered open for a moment. "Brighter," came the barely audible whisper, "brighter." And a smile of happiness intense almost to the point of elation transfigured her face.

Through his tears Dr. Robert smiled back at her. "So now you can let go, my darling." He stroked her gray hair. "Now you can let go. Let go," he insisted. "Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it any more. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying here like a pile of worn-out clothes."

In the fleshless face the mouth had fallen carvernously open, and suddenly the breathing became stertorous.

"My love, my little love . . ." Dr. Robert held her more closely. "Let go now, let go. Leave it here, your old worn-out body, and go on. Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light ..."

Susila picked up one of the limp hands and kissed it, then turned to little Radha.

"Time to go," she whispered, touching the girl's shoulder.

Interrupted in her meditation, Radha opened her eyes, not) ded and, scrambling to her feet, tiptoed silently towards the door. Susila beckoned to Will and, together, they followed her. In silence the three of them walked along the corridor. At the swing door Radha took her leave.

"Thank you for letting me be with you," she whispered.

Susila kissed her. "Thank you for helping to make it easier for Lakshmi."

Will followed Susila across the lobby and out into the warm odorous darkness. In silence they started to walk downhill towards the marketplace.

"And now," he said at last, speaking under a strange compul sion to deny his emotion in a display of the cheapest kind of cynicism, "I suppose she's trotting off to do a little maithunn with her boy friend."

"As a matter of fact," said Susila calmly, "she's on night duty. But if she weren't, what would be the objection to her going on from the yoga of death to the yoga of love?"

Will did not answer immediately. He was thinking of what had happened between himself and Babs on the evening of Molly's funeral. The yoga of antilove, the yoga of resented addiction, of lust and the self-loathing that reinforces the self and makes it yet more loathsome.

"I'm sorry I tried to be unpleasant," he said at last.

"It's your father's ghost. We'll have to see if we can exorcise it."

They had crossed the marketplace and now, at the end of the short street that led out of the village, they had come to the open space where the jeep was parked. As Susila turned the car onto the highway, the beam of their headlamps swept across a small green car that was turning downhill into the bypass.

"Don't I recognize the royal Baby Austin?"

"You do," said Susila, and wondered where the Rani and Murugan could be going at this time of night.

"They're up to no good," Will guessed. And on a sudden impulse he told Susila of his roving commission from Joe Aldehyde, his dealings with the Queen Mother and Mr. Bahu.

"You'd be justified in deporting me tomorrow," he concluded.

"Not now that you've changed your mind," she assured him. "And anyhow nothing you did could have affected the real issue. Our enemy is oil in general. Whether we're exploited by Southeast Asia Petroleum or Standard of California makes no difference."

"Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring

against you?"

"They make no secret of it."

"Then why don't you get rid of them?"

"Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli."

"So what can you do?"

"Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome, and be prepared for the worst."

"And what will you do if the worst happens?"

"Try to make the best of it, I suppose. Even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom. One perceives in private, one remembers and imagines in private, one loves in private, and one dies in private-even under Colonel Dipa." Then after a silence, "Did Dr. Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?" she asked. And when Will nodded, "Would you like to try it?"

"Now?"

"Now. That is, if you don't mind being up all night with it."

"I'd like nothing better."

"You may find that you never liked anything worse," Susila warned him. "The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you're lucky, or if you've made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from-back to here, back to New Rotham sted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different."