“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” she said to Will. “You’re thinking I’m much too young to do a good job.”
“I certainly think you’re very young.”
“You people go to a university at eighteen and stay there for four years. We start at sixteen and go on with our education till we’re twenty-four—half-time study and half-time work. I’ve been doing biology and at the same time doing this job for two years. So I’m not quite such a fool as I look. Actually I’m a pretty good nurse.”
“A statement,” said Mr. Bahu, “which I can unequivocally confirm. Miss Radha is not merely a good nurse; she’s an absolutely first-rate one.”
But what he really meant, Will felt sure as he studied the expression on that face of a much-tempted monk, was that Miss Radha had a first-rate midriff, first-rate navel, and first-rate breasts. But the owner of the navel, midriff and breasts had clearly resented Savonarola’s admiration, or at any rate the way it had been expressed. Hopefully, overhopefully, the rebuffed Ambassador was returning the attack.
The spirit lamp was lighted and, while the needle was being boiled, little Nurse Appu took her patient’s temperature.
“Ninety-nine point two.”
“Does that mean I have to be banished?” Mr. Bahu enquired.
“Not so far as he’s concerned,” the girl answered.
“So please stay,” said Will.
The little nurse gave him his injection of antibiotic, then, from one of the bottles in her bag, stirred a tablespoonful of some greenish liquid into half a glass of water.
“Drink this.”
It tasted like one of those herbal concoctions that health-food enthusiasts substitute for tea.
“What is it?” Will asked, and was told that it was an extract from a mountain plant related to valerian.
“It helps people to stop worrying,” the little nurse explained, “without making them sleepy. We give it to convalescents. It’s useful, too, in mental cases.”
“Which am I? Mental or convalescent?”
“Both,” she answered without hesitation.
Will laughed aloud. “That’s what comes of fishing for compliments.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” she assured him. “All I meant was that I’ve never met anybody from the outside who wasn’t a mental case.”
“Including the Ambassador?”
She turned the question back upon the questioner. “What do you think?”
Will passed it on to Mr. Bahu. “You’re the expert in this field,” he said.
“Settle it between yourselves,” said the little nurse. “I’ve got to go and see about my patient’s lunch.”
Mr. Bahu watched her go; then, raising his left eyebrow, he let fall his monocle and started methodically to polish the lens with his handkerchief. “You’re aberrated in one way,” he said to Will. “I’m aberrated in another. A schizoid (isn’t that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. Were you ever interested in power?” he asked after a moment of silence.
“Never.” Will shook his head emphatically. “One can’t have power without committing oneself.”
“And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of pushing other people around?”
“By a factor of several thousand times.”
“So it was never a temptation?”
“Never.” Then after a pause, “Let’s get down to business,” Will added in another tone.
“To business,” Mr. Bahu repeated. “Tell me something about Lord Aldehyde.”
“Well, as the Rani said, he’s remarkably generous.”
“I’m not interested in his virtues, only his intelligence. How bright is he?”
“Bright enough to know that nobody does anything for nothing.”
“Good,” said Mr. Bahu. “Then tell him from me that for effective work by experts in strategic positions he must be prepared to lay out at least ten times what he’s going to pay you.”
“I’ll write him a letter to that effect.”
“And do it today,” Mr. Bahu advised. “The plane leaves Shivapuram tomorrow evening, and there won’t be another outgoing mail for a whole week.”
“Thank you for telling me,” said Will. “And now—Her Highness and the shockable stripling being gone—let’s move on to the next temptation. What about sex?”
With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved a brown and bony hand back and forth in front of his face. “Just a distraction, that’s all. Just a nagging, humiliating vexation. But an intelligent man can always cope with it.”
“How difficult it is,” said Will, “to understand another man’s vices!”
“You’re right. Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen fit to curse him with. Pecca fortiter—that was Luther’s advice. But make a point of sinning your own sins, not someone else’s. And above all don’t do what the people of this island do. Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat—and the boat is perpetually sinking.”
“In spite of which, no rat is justified in leaving it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“A few of them may sometimes try to leave. But they never get very far. History and the other rats will always see to it that they drown with the rest of us. That’s why Pala doesn’t have the ghost of a chance.”
Carrying a tray, the little nurse re-entered the room.
“Buddhist food,” she said, as she tied a napkin round Will’s neck. “All except the fish. But we’ve decided that fishes are vegetables within the meaning of the act.”
Will started to eat.
“Apart from the Rani and Murugan and us two here,” he asked after swallowing the first mouthful, “how many people from the outside have you ever met?”
“Well, there was that group of American doctors,” she answered. “They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central Hospital.”
“What were they doing here?”
“They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!” She shook her head. “I tell you, Mr. Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end—made everybody’s hair stand on end in the whole hospital.”
“So you think our medicine’s pretty primitive?”
“That’s the wrong word. It isn’t primitive. It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics—but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won’t be necessary. Fantastic operations—but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it’s the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you’ve started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you’ve got a proverb: prevention is better than cure.”
“But cure,” said Will, “is so much more dramatic than prevention. And for the doctors it’s also a lot more profitable.”
“Maybe for your doctors,” said the little nurse. “Not for ours. Ours get paid for keeping people well.”
“How is it to be done?”
“We’ve been asking that question for a hundred years, and we’ve found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world.”
“And which are the best answers?”
“None of them is best without the others.”
“So there’s no panacea.”
“How can there be?” And she quoted the little rhyme that every student nurse had to learn by heart on the first day of her training.
“‘I’am a crowd, obeying as many laws
As it has members. Chemically impure
Are all ‘my’ beings. There’s no single cure
For what can never have a single cause.”
“So whether it’s prevention or whether it’s cure, we attack on all the fronts at once. All the fronts,” she insisted, “from diet to autosuggestion, from negative ions to meditation.”
“Very sensible,” was Will’s comment.
“Perhaps a little too sensible,” said Mr. Bahu. “Did you ever try to talk sense to a maniac?” Will shook his head. “I did once.” He lifted the graying lock that slanted obliquely across his forehead. Just below the hairline a jagged scar stood out, strangely pale against the brown skin. “Luckily for me, the bottle he hit me with was pretty flimsy.” Smoothing his ruffled hair, he turned to the little nurse. “Don’t ever forget, Miss Radha; to the senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king.” Mr. Bahu’s face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. “He gets lynched.”
Will laughed perfunctorily, then turned again to the little nurse.
“Don’t you have any candidates for the asylum?” he asked.
“Just as many as you have—I mean in proportion to the population. At least that’s what the textbook says.”
“So living in a sensible world doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
“Not to the people with the kind of body chemistry that’ll turn them into psychotics. They’re born vulnerable. Little troubles that other people hardly notice can bring them down. We’re just beginning to find out what it is that makes them so vulnerable. We’re beginning to be able to spot them in advance of a breakdown. And once they’ve been spotted, we can do something to raise their resistance. Prevention again—and, of course, on all the fronts at once.”
“So being born into a sensible world will make a difference even for the predestined psychotic.”
“And for the neurotics it has already made a difference. Your neurosis rate is about one in five or even four. Ours is about one in twenty. The one that breaks down gets
