“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 Fátima. 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
