Island

  "It all sounds," said Will, "suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes."

  "Nothing," she assured him, "could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn't run by the government, it's run by its members. And we're not militaristic. We're not interested in turning out good party members; we're only interested in turning out good human beings. We don't inculcate dogmas. And finally we don't take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there's no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world--better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They're foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can't get rid of them, can't take a holiday from them, can't go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It's freedom, if you like--but freedom in a telephone booth."

  "Locked in," Will elaborated, "(and I'm thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who'd been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr's appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped."

  "And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you."

  "That's not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!"

  "Not so lyrical! Free, let's say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman--but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn't guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They're apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that's a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they're going to have to live when they're grown up. 'Holy,' 'healthy,' 'whole'--they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family."

  "Amen," said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. "What happens," he asked after a pause, "when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?"

  "It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That's because, fundamentally, they're very happy at home. I wasn't, and so when I walked out, I'd sometimes stay away for a whole month."

  "And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?"

  "It's not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that's being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that's being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn't think," she added, "that it's only when they're in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn't just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights--brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while the mother's doing something else. Duties as well as privileges--but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer--working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying..." She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald's mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, "But what about you?" she went on. "I've been so busy talking about families that I haven't even asked you how you're feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last."

  "Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?"

  Susila smiled. "You did it to yourself," she assured him. "I merely pressed the buttons."

  "Which buttons?"

  "Memory buttons, imagination buttons."

  "And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?"

  "If you like to call it that."

  "What else can one call it?"

  "Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?"

  "But what did happen?"

  "Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn't we?"

  "We certainly did," he agreed. "And yet I don't believe I even so much as looked at you."

  He was looking at her now, though--looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.

  "How could you look at me?" she said. "You'd gone off on your vacation."

  "Or was I pushed off?"

  "Pushed? No." She shook her head. "Let's say seen off, helped off." There was a moment of silence. "Did you ever," she resumed, "try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?"

  Will thought of the small neighbor who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.

  "Poor little darling!" Susila went on. "He means so well, he's so anxious to help."

  "But the paint's on the carpet, the fingerprints are all over the walls..."

  "So that in the end you have to get rid of him. 'Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!'"

  There was a silence.

  "Well?" he questioned at last.

  "Don't you see?"

  Will shook his head.

  "What happens when you're ill, when you've been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you?"

  "Who else?"

  "You?" she insisted. "You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?"

  "Oh, I see what you're driving at."

  "At last!" she mocked.

  "Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?"

  "Don't ask me," she answ
ered. "That's a question for a neurotheologian."

  "Meaning what?" he asked.

  "Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology."

  "And the children?"

  "The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups."

  "And so must be told to run along and play."

  "Exactly."

  "Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?" he asked.

  "Standard procedure," she assured him. "In your part of the world doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws." Her voice had modulated into a chant. "About white clouds floating in the sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life..."

  "Now, now," he protested. "None of that!"

  A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.

  "I know your tricks," he added, joining in the laughter.

  "Tricks?" Still laughing, she shook her head. "I was just explaining how I did it."

  "I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What's more, I give you leave to do it again--whenever it's necessary."

  "If you like," she said more seriously, "I'll show you how to press your own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary schools. The three R's plus rudimentary SD."

  "What's that?"

  "Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control."

  "Destiny Control?" He raised his eyebrows.

  "No, no," she assured him, "we're not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable."

  "And you control it by pressing your own buttons?"

  "Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we'd like to happen."

  "But does it happen?"

  "In many cases it does."

  "Simple!" There was a note of irony in his voice.

  "Wonderfully simple," she agreed. "And yet, so far as I know, we're the only people who systematically teach DC to their children. You just tell them what they're supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you say. But how? You never tell them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy."

  "Pure unadulterated idiocy," he agreed, remembering Mr. Crabbe, his housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings and the weekly sermons and the Commination Service on Ash Wednesday. "Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbor's wife. Amen."

  "If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don't take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they're apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells."

  "Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few."

  Susila shook her head.

  "No Alcatrazes here," she said. "No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other homemade imaginary universe. And it really isn't your fault. You're almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and your actual behavior."

  "'For the good that I would,'" he quoted, "'I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.'"

  "Who said that?"

  "The man who invented Christianity--St. Paul."

  "You see," she said, "the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them."

  "Except the supernatural method of having them realized by Somebody Else."

  Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.

  "There is a fountain fill'd with blood,

  Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,

  And sinners plunged beneath that flood

  Are cleansed of all their stains."

  Susila had covered her ears. "It's really obscene," she said.

  "My housemaster's favorite hymn," Will explained. "We used to sing it about once a week, all the time I was at school."

  "Thank goodness," she said, "there was never any blood in Buddhism! Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. 'If you won't believe that you're redeemed by my redeemer's blood, I'll drown you in your own.' Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of Christianity." Susila shuddered at the memory. "What a horror! And all because that poor ignorant man didn't know how to implement his good intentions."

  "And most of us," said Will, "are still in the same old boat. The evil that we would not, that we do. And how!"

  Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then, with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly's unhappiness, Molly's death, his own gnawing sense of guilt, and then the pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool must have known she inevitably would do--turned him out of her infernal gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.

  "What's the matter?" Susila asked.

  "Nothing. Why do you ask?"

  "Because you're not very good at hiding your feelings. You were thinking of something that made you unhappy."

  "You've got sharp eyes," he said, and looked away.

  There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated game which (as an English gentleman who was also a bohemian, also a would-be poet, also--in mere despair, because he knew he could never be a good poet--a hard-boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid, of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing. No, old friends would never do. But from this dark little outsider, this stranger to whom he already owed so much and with whom, though he knew nothing about her, he was already so intimate, there would come no foregone conclusions, no ex parte judgments--would come perhaps, he found himself hoping (he who had trained himself never to hope!), some unexpected enlightenment, some positive and practical help. (And, God knew, he needed help--though God also knew only too well that he would never say so, never sink so low as to ask for it.) Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, "Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys."

  Will decided to take the plunge--but to take it indirectly, by talking first, not about his problems, but about hers. Without looking at Susila (for that, he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.

  "Dr. MacPhail told me something about...about what happened to your husband."

  The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected, that was right and inevitable. "It'll be four months next Wednesday," she said. And then, meditatively, "Two people," she went on after a little silence, "two separate individuals--but they add up to something like a new creation. And then suddenly half of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn't die--can't die, mustn't die."

  "Mustn't die?"

  "For so many reasons--the children, oneself, the whole nature of things. But needless to say," she added, with a little smile that only accentuated the sadness in her eyes, "needless to
say the reasons don't lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just now--Destiny Control. And even that..." She shook her head. "DC can give you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless bereavement--no. And of course that's as it should be. It wouldn't be right if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you'd be less than human."

  "Less than human," he repeated. "Less than human..." Three short words; but how completely they summed him up! "The really terrible thing," he said aloud, "is when you know it's your fault that the other person died."

  "Were you married?" she asked.

  "For twelve years. Until last spring..."

  "And now she's dead?"

  "She died in an accident."

  "In an accident? Then how was it your fault?"

  "The accident happened because...well, because the evil that I didn't want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car--let her drive away into a head-on collision."

  "Did you love her?"

  He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

  "Was there somebody else--somebody you cared for more?"

  "Somebody I couldn't have cared for less." He made a grimace of sardonic self-mockery.

  "And that was the evil you didn't want to do, but did?"

  "Did and went on doing until I'd killed the woman I ought to have loved, but didn't. Went on doing it even after I'd killed her, even though I hated myself for doing it--yes, and really hated the person who made me do it."

  "Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?"

  Will nodded, and there was a silence.

  "Do you know what it's like," he asked at length, "to feel that nothing is quite real--including yourself?"

  Susila nodded. "It sometimes happens when one's just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It's like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high."

  "Or low," said Will. "In my case, the shift wasn't up, it was down. No, not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots."