Island
"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 rad
iated 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 advantageth 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 hurrying 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 basia 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."