She shook her head.
“Mynahs are like the electric light,” she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”
“Why does he say those things?”
“Because somebody taught him,” she answered patiently. What an ass! her tone seemed to imply.
“But why did they teach him those things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now’?”
“Well…” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”
“And the mynahs fly about reminding you—is that it?”
She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.
“What’s your name?” she inquired.
Will introduced himself.
“My name’s Mary Sarojini MacPhail.”
“MacPhail?” It was too implausible.
“MacPhail,” she assured him.
“And your little brother is called Tom Krishna?” She nodded. “Well, I’m damned!”
“Did you come to Pala by the airplane?”
“I came out of the sea.”
“Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?”
“I did have one.” With his mind’s eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling…He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.
Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.
“Listen, Will,” she said, laying a hand on his forehead. “We’ve got to get rid of this.” Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.
“I wish I knew how,” he said between chattering teeth.
“How?” she repeated. “But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to.”
“Of course you don’t want to,” she said. “But you’ve got to. Listen to what the mynah’s saying.”
“Here and now, boys,” the bird was still exhorting. “Here and now, boys.”
“You can’t be here and now,” she went on, “until you’ve got rid of those snakes. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to, I don’t want to.” He was almost in tears.
“Then you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll be crawling about inside your head forever. And serve you right,” Mary Sarojini added severely.
He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.
“Remember what happened when you were a little boy,” Mary Sarojini was saying. “What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?”
She had taken him in her arms, had said, “My poor baby, my poor little baby.”
“She did that?” The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. “But that’s awful! That’s the way to rub it in. ‘My poor baby,’” she repeated derisively, “it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you’d never forget it.”
Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.
“Well, if you won’t do it yourself, I’ll have to do it for you. Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!”
“I almost stepped on him,” he whispered obediently. “And then I…” He couldn’t say it. “Then I fell,” he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.
All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.
“Say it again.”
“I almost stepped on him. And then…”
He heard himself whimpering.
“That’s right, Will. Cry—cry!”
The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.
“No, don’t do that,” she cried. “Let it come out if it wants to. Remember that snake, Will. Remember how you fell.”
The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.
“Now tell me what happened.”
“I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out.”
“Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?”
“I lost my balance, I fell.”
“Say it again, Will.” He was sobbing now. “Say it again,” she insisted.
“I fell.”
“Again.”
It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. “I fell.”
“Again, Will.” She was implacable. “Again.”
“I fell, I fell. I fell…”
Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.
“I fell,” he repeated for the hundredth time.
“But you didn’t fall very far,” Mary Sarojini now said.
“No, I didn’t fall very far,” he agreed.
“So what’s all the fuss about?” the child inquired.
There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what was all the fuss about? The snake hadn’t bitten him; he hadn’t broken his neck. And anyhow it had all happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby laughed aloud.
The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.
3
“WELL, I’M GLAD IT’S ALL SO AMUSING,” A DEEP VOICE SUDDENLY commented.
Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag. A man, he judged, in his late fifties. Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and what a strange beaky nose! And the eyes—how incongruously blue in the dark face!
“Grandfather!” he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.
The stranger turned from Will to the child.
“What was so funny?” he asked.
“Well,” Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her thoughts. “Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm yesterday and he got wrecked—somewhere down there. So he had to climb up the cliff. And there were some snakes, and he fell down. But luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright. Which was why he was shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through it a million times. And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn’t anything to worry about. I mean, it’s all over and done with. And that made him laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. And then the mynah bird laughed.”
“Very good,” said her grandfather approvingly. “And now,” he added, turning back to Will Farnaby, “after the psychological first aid, let’s see what can be done for poor old Brother Ass. I’m Dr. Robert MacPhail, by the way. Who are you?”
“His name’s Will,” said Mary Sarojini before the young man could answer. “And his other name is Far-something.”
“Farnaby, to be precise. William Asquith Farnaby. My father, as you might guess, was an ardent Liberal. Even when he was drunk. Especially when he was drunk.” He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.
“Didn’t you like your father?” Mary Sarojini asked with concern.
“Not as much as I might have,” Will answered.
“What he means,” Dr. MacPhail explained to the child, “is that he hated his father. A lot of them do,” he added parenthetically.
Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his black bag.
“One of our ex-imperialists, I assume,” he said over his shoulder to the young man.
“Born in Bloomsbury,” Will confirmed.
“Upper class,” the doctor diagnosed, “but not a member of the military or county subspecies.”
“Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn’t too busy being an alcoholic. My mother, incredible as it may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon. An archdeacon,” he repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father’s taste for brandy.
Dr. MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention once more to the straps.
“When you laugh like that,” he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, “your face becomes curiously ugly.”
Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of facetiousness. “It’s always ugly,” he said.
“On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it’s rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?”
“I’m a journalist,” Will explained. “Our Special Correspondent, paid to travel about the world and report on the current horrors. What other kind of noise do you expect me to make? Coo-coo? Blah-blah? Marx-Marx?” He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. “I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.”
“Pretty,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Very pretty. But now let’s get down to business.” Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will’s injured knee.
Will Farnaby looked up at him and wondered, as he looked, how much of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese. About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there
