"So stamp it out," the children shouted again in unison, and the boards trembled under their pounding feet. "So stamp it out."
"Don't imagine," Mrs. Narayan resumed, "that this is the only kind of dancing we teach. Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important. But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression. Expressive movements, in this case, expressive gesture. If you had come yesterday, when our visiting master was here, I could have shown you how we teach that kind of dancing. Not today unfortunately. He won't be here again before Tuesday."
"What sort of dancing does he teach?"
Mrs. Narayan tried to describe it. No leaps, no high kicks, no running. The feet always firmly on the ground. Just bendings and sideways motions of the knees and hips. All expression confined to the arms, wrists and hands, to the neck and head, the face and, above all, the eyes. Movement from the shoulders upwards and outwards--movement intrinsically beautiful and at the same time charged with symbolic meaning. Thought taking shape in ritual and stylized gesture. The whole body transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, or attitudes modulating from significance to significance like a poem or a piece of music. Movements of the muscles representing movements of Consciousness, the passage of Suchness into the many, of the many into the immanent and ever-present One.
"It's meditation in action," she concluded. "It's the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures."
They left the gymnasium by a different door from that through which they had entered and turned left along a short corridor.
"What's the next item?" Will asked.
"The Lower Fourth," Mrs. Narayan answered, "and they're working on Elementary Practical Psychology."
She opened a green door.
"Well, now you know," Will heard a familiar voice saying. "Nobody has to feel pain. You told yourselves that the pin wouldn't hurt--and it didn't hurt."
They stepped into the room and there, very tall in the midst of a score of plump or skinny little brown bodies, was Susila MacPhail. She smiled at them, pointed to a couple of chairs in a corner of the room, and turned back to the children. "Nobody has to feel pain," she repeated. "But never forget: pain always means that something is wrong. You've learned to shut pain off, but don't do it thoughtlessly, don't do it without asking yourselves the question: What's the reason for this pain? And if it's bad, or if there's no obvious reason for it, tell your mother about it, or your teacher, or any grown-up in your Mutual Adoption Club. Then shut off the pain. Shut it off knowing that, if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand?...And now," she went on, after all the questions had been asked and answered. "Now let's play some pretending games. Shut your eyes and pretend you're looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?"
Of course they could see him. The one-legged mynah was evidently an old friend.
"See him just as clearly as you saw him today at lunchtime. And don't stare at him, don't make any effort. Just see what comes to you, and let your eyes shift--from his beak to his tail, from his bright little round eye to his one orange leg."
"I can hear him too," a little girl volunteered. "He's saying 'Karuna, karuna!'"
"That's not true," another child said indignantly. "He's saying 'Attention!'"
"He's saying both those things," Susila assured them. "And probably a lot of other words besides. But now we're going to do some real pretending. Pretend that there are two one-legged mynah birds. Three one-legged mynah birds. Four one-legged mynah birds. Can you see all four of them?"
They could.
"Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And now let's make them change their color. They're white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue--and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They're purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale-green leg. Goodness, what's happening! There aren't five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?" Some of them could--without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn't go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals.
"Just make twelve of them," she said. "Or if twelve is too many, make ten, make eight. That's still an awful lot of mynahs. And now," she went on, when all the children had conjured up all the purple birds that each was capable of creating, "now they're gone." She clapped her hands. "Gone! Every single one of them. There's nothing there. And now you're not going to see mynahs, you're going to see me. One me in yellow. Two mes in green. Three mes in blue with pink spots. Four mes in the brightest red you ever saw." She clapped her hands again. "All gone. And this time it's Mrs. Narayan and that funny-looking man with a stiff leg who came in with her. Four of each of them. Standing in a big circle in the gymnasium. And now they're dancing the Rakshasi Hornpipe. 'So stamp it out, so stamp it out.'"
There was a general giggle. The dancing Wills and Principals must have looked richly comical.
Susila snapped her fingers.
"Away with them! Vanish! And now each of you sees three of your mothers and three of your fathers running round the playground. Faster, faster, faster! And suddenly they're not there any more. And then they are there. But next moment they aren't. They are there, they aren't. They are, they aren't..."
The giggles swelled into squeals of laughter and at the height of the laughter a bell rang. The lesson in Elementary Practical Psychology was over.
"What's the point of it all?" Will asked when the children had run off to play and Mrs. Narayan had returned to her office.
"The point," Susila answered, "is to get people to understand that we're not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we're disturbed by what's going on inside our heads, we can do something about it. It's all a question of being shown what to do and then practicing--the way one learns to write or play the flute. What those children you saw here were being taught is a very simple technique--a technique that we'll develop later on into a method of liberation. Not complete liberation, of course. But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread. This technique won't lead you to the discovery of your Buddha Nature: but it may help you to prepare for that discovery--help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future."
"'Hauntings,'" Will agreed, "is the word."
"But one doesn't have to be haunted. Some of the ghosts can be laid quite easily. Whenever one of them appears, just give it the imagination treatment. Deal with it as we dealt with those mynahs, as we dealt with you and Mrs. Narayan. Change its clothes, give it another nose, multiply it, tell it to go away, call it back again and make it do something ridiculous. Then abolish it. Just think what you could have done about your father, if someone had taught you a few of these simple little tricks when you were a child! You thought of him as a terrifying ogre. But that wasn't necessary. In your fancy you could have turned the ogre into a grotesque. Into a whole chorus of grotesques. Twenty of them doing a tap dance and singing, 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.' A short course in Elementary Practical Psychology, and your whole life might have been different."
How would he have death with Molly's death, Will wondered as they walked out towards the parked jeep. What rites of imaginative exorcism could he have practiced on that white, musk-scented succubus who was the incarnation of his frantic and abhorred desires?
But here was the jeep. Will handed Susila the keys and laboriously hoisted himself into his seat. Very noisily, as though it were under some neurotic compulsion to overcompensate for its diminutive stature, a small and aged car approached from the direction of the village, turned into the driveway and, still clattering and shuddering, came to a halt beside the jeep.
They turned
. There, leaning out of the window of the royal Baby Austin, was Murugan, and beyond him, vast in white muslin and billowy like a cumulus cloud, sat the Rani. Will bowed in her direction and evoked the most gracious of smiles, which was switched off as soon as she turned to Susila, whose greeting was acknowledged only with the most distant of nods.
"Going for a drive?" Will asked politely.
"Only as far as Shivapuram," said the Rani.
"If this wretched little crate will hold together that long," Murugan added bitterly. He turned the ignition key. The motor gave a last obscene hiccup and died.
"There are some people we have to see," the Rani went on. "Or rather One Person," she added in a tone charged with conspiratorial significance. She smiled at Will and very nearly winked.
Pretending not to understand that she was talking about Bahu, Will uttered a noncommittal "Quite," and commiserated with her on all the work and worry that the preparations for next week's coming-of-age party must entail.
Murugan interrupted him. "What are you doing out here?" he asked.
"I've spent the afternoon taking an intelligent interest in Palanese education."
"Palanese education," the Rani echoed. And again, sorrowfully, "Palanese" (pause) "Education." She shook her head.
"Personally," said Will, "I liked everything I saw and heard of it--from Mr. Menon and the Principal to Elementary Practical Psychology, as taught," he added, trying to bring Susila into the conversation, "by Mrs. MacPhail here."
Still studiedly ignoring Susila, the Rani pointed a thick accusing finger at the scarecrows in the field below.
"Have you seen those, Mr. Farnaby?"
He had indeed. "And where but in Pala," he asked, "can one find scarecrows which are simultaneously beautiful, efficient, and metaphysically significant?"
"And which," said the Rani in a voice that was vibrant with a kind of sepulchral indignation, "not only scare the birds away from the rice; they also scare little children away from the very idea of God and His Avatars." She raised her hand. "Listen!"
Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini had been joined by five or six small companions and were making a game of tugging at the strings that worked the supernatural marionettes. From the group came a sound of shrill voices piping in unison. At their second repetition, Will made out the words of the chantey.
Pully, hauly, tug with a will;
The gods wiggle-waggle, but the sky stands still.
"Bravo!" he said, and laughed.
"I'm afraid I can't be amused," said the Rani severely. "It isn't funny. It's Tragic, Tragic."
Will stuck to his guns. "I understand," he said, "that these charming scarecrows were an invention of Murugan's grandfather."
"Murugan's grandfather," said the Rani, "was a very remarkable man. Remarkably intelligent, but no less remarkably perverse. Great gifts--but, alas, how maleficently used! And what made it all so much worse, he was full of False Spirituality."
"False Spirituality?" Will eyed the enormous specimen of True Spirituality and, through the reek of hot petroleum products, inhaled the incenselike, otherworldly smell of sandalwood. "False Spirituality?" And suddenly he found himself wondering--wondering and then, with a shudder, imagining--what the Rani would look like if suddenly divested of her mystic's uniform and exposed, exuberantly and steatopygously naked, to the light. And now multiply her into a trinity of undressed obesities, into two trinities, ten trinities. Applied Practical Psychology--with a vengeance!
"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."
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 sha
me 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 intoxicatingly shameless skills.