Will clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
Considerable sums, she hinted, had been, if not directly offered, at least named and temptingly dangled.
“Nefarious,” he commented.
Nefarious, the Rani agreed, was the word. And that was why Something must be Done About It, and Done Immediately. From Bahu she had learned that Will had already written to Lord Aldehyde, and within a few days a reply would doubtless be forthcoming. But a few days were too long. Time was of the essence—not only because of what those rival companies were up to, but also (and the Rani lowered her voice mysteriously) for Other Reasons. “Now, now!” her Little Voice kept exhorting. “Now, without delay!” Lord Aldehyde must be informed by cable of what was happening (the faithful Bahu, she added parenthetically, had offered to transmit the message in code by way of the Rendang Legation in London) and along with the information must go an urgent request that he empower his Special Correspondent to take such steps—at this stage the appropriate steps would be predominantly of a financial nature—as might be necessary to secure the triumph of their Common Cause.
“So with your permission,” the voice concluded, “I’ll tell Bahu to send the cable immediately. In our joint names, Mr. Farnaby, yours and Mine. I hope, mon cher, that this will be agreeable to you.”
It wasn’t at all agreeable, but there seemed to be no excuse, seeing that he had already written that letter to Joe Aldehyde, for demurring. And so, “Yes, of course,” he cried with a show of enthusiasm belied by his long dubious pause, before the words were uttered, in search of an alternative answer. “We ought to get the reply sometime tomorrow,” he added.
“We shall get it tonight,” the Rani assured him.
“Is that possible?”
“With God” (con espressione) “all things are possible.”
“Quite,” he said, “quite. But still…”
“I go by what my Little Voice tells me. ‘Tonight,’ it’s saying. And ‘he will give Mr. Farnaby carte blanche’—carte blanche,” she repeated with gusto. “‘And Farnaby will be completely successful.’”
“I wonder?” he said doubtfully.
“You must be successful.”
“Must be?”
“Must be,” she insisted.
“Why?”
“Because it was God who inspired me to launch the Crusade of the Spirit.”
“I don’t quite get the connection.”
“Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you,” she said. Then, after a moment of silence, “But after all, why not? If Our Cause triumphs, Lord Aldehyde has promised to back the Crusade with all his resources. And since God wants the Crusade to succeed, Our Cause cannot fail to triumph.”
“Q.E.D.,” he wanted to shout, but restrained himself. It wouldn’t be polite. And anyhow this was no joking matter.
“Well, I must call Bahu,” said the Rani. “A bientôt, my dear Farnaby.” And she rang off.
Shrugging his shoulders, Will turned back to the Notes on What’s What. What else was there to do?
Dualism…Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
“I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.
There was the noise of an approaching car, then silence as the motor was turned off, then the slamming of a door and the sound of footsteps on gravel, on the steps of the veranda.
“Are you ready?” called Vijaya’s deep voice.
Will put down the Notes on What’s What, picked up his bamboo staff, and hoisting himself to his feet, walked to the front door.
“Ready and champing at the bit,” he said as he stepped out onto the veranda.
“Then let’s go.” Vijaya took his arm. “Careful of these steps,” he recommended.
Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.
“This is Leela Rao,” said Vijaya. “Our librarian, secretary, treasurer, and general keeper-in-order. Without her we’d be lost.”
She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good—and, alas, how boring!
“I was hearing of you,” Mrs. Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out onto the highway, “from my young friends, Radha and Ranga.”
“I hope,” said Will, “that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them.”
Mrs. Rao’s face brightened with pleasure. “I’m so glad you like them!”
“Ranga’s exceptionally bright,” Vijaya put in.
And so delicately balanced, Mrs. Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted—and how strongly!—to escape into the Arhat’s Nirvana or the scientists’ beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation; for Ranga, the Arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs. Rao confided, had been among her favorite pupils.
Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday school. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted settlement worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarianship, instructing the young. By the kinds of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by settlement workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs. Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.
“If you knew,” she was saying, “what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible.”
“And if one’s to believe your Old Raja,” said Will, “literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate—incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary guilt. But never mind.” He grinned ferociously. “Colonel Dipa will put everything right. After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology.”
“I’d like to laugh,” said Vijaya. “The only trouble is that you’re probably right. I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true.”
They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand-new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and breadfruit trees, the narrow street led to a central marketplace. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of Oriental rococo with a pink stucco facade and gazebos at the four corners—evidently the town hall.
Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha’s progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black-and-yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl’s gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.
“Everybody looks so healthy,” Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.
“They look healthy because they are healthy,” said Mrs. Rao.
“And happy—for a change.” He was thinking of the faces he had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo—the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. “Even the women,” he noted, glancing from face to face, “even the women look happy.”
“They don’t have ten children,” Mrs. Rao explained.
“They don’t have ten children where I come from,” said Will. “In spite of which…‘Marks of weakness marks of woe.’” He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried breadfruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. “There’s a kind of radiance,” he concluded.
“Thanks to maithuna,” said Mrs. Rao triumphantly. “Thanks to the yoga of love.” Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervor and professional pride.
They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of
