Island

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

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

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

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

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

  "But in the end he succeeded?"

  "Triumphantly."

  "And did he actually perform the operation?"

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

  "Rehearsal of what?"

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

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

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

  "So he didn't go back to Madras?"

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

  "Trying to change the Raja's accent?"

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

  "Into what?"

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

  "And did they find an answer?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "On the dim side," she protested.

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

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

  Offer the unplucked flower, the frog's soliloquy

  Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared mouth

  At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless

  Sky that makes possible mountains and setting moon,

  This emptiness that is the womb of love

  This poetry of silence."

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