Island (31 page)

“Yes, False Spirituality,” the Rani was repeating. “Talking about Liberation; but always, because of his obstinate refusal to follow the True Path, always working for greater Bondage. Acting the part of humility. But in his heart, he was so full of pride, Mr. Farnaby, that he refused to recognize any Spiritual Authority
Higher than his own. The Masters, the Avatars, the Great Tradition—they meant nothing to him. Nothing at all. Hence those dreadful scarecrows. Hence that blasphemous rhyme that the children have been taught to sing. When I think of those Poor Innocent Little Ones being deliberately perverted, I find it hard to contain myself, Mr. Farnaby, I find it…”

“Listen, Mother,” said Murugan, who had been glancing impatiently and ever more openly at his wrist watch, “if we want to be back by dinnertime we’d better get going.” His tone was rudely authoritative. Being at the wheel of a car—even of this senile Baby Austin—made him feel, it was evident, considerably larger than life. Without waiting for the Rani’s answer he started the motor, shifted into low and, with a wave of the hand, drove off.

“Good riddance,” said Susila.

“Don’t you love your dear Queen?”

“She makes my blood boil.”

“So stamp it out,” Will chanted teasingly.

“You’re quite right,” she agreed, with a laugh. “But unfortunately this was an occasion when it just wasn’t feasible to do a Rakshasi Hornpipe.” Her face brightened with a sudden flash of mischief, and without warning she punched him, surprisingly hard, in the ribs. “There!” she said. “Now I feel much better.”

S
HE 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 after
noon 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 intoxicatingly 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 comfortable 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 institutions, 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.”