Island (6 page)

“All the way, my baby,” she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm came down, slid round the boy’s slender body, pressed it, engulfed in floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. “I had one of my Impulses.” She had a way, Will noticed, of making you actually
hear
the capital letters at the beginning of the words she meant to emphasize. “My Little Voice said, ‘Go and see this Stranger at Dr. Robert’s house. Go!’ ‘Now?’ I said. ‘
Malgré la chaleur
?’ Which makes my Little Voice lose patience. ‘Woman,’ it says, ‘hold your silly tongue and do as you’re told.’ So here I am, Mr. Farnaby.” With hand outstretched and surrounded by a powerful aura of sandalwood oil, she advanced towards him.

Will bowed over the thick bejeweled fingers and mumbled something that ended in “Your Highness.”

“Bahu!” she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned surname.

Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his entrance and was introduced as
His Excellency
, Abdul Bahu, the Ambassador of Rendang: “Abdul Pierre Bahu—
car sa mère est parisienne
. But he learned his English in New York.”

He looked, Will thought as he shook the Ambassador’s hand, like Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.

“Bahu,” said the Rani, “is Colonel Dipa’s Brains Trust.”

“Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel.”

His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a parody of deference and self-abasement.

“The brains,” he went on, “are where brains ought to be—in the head. As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang’s sympathetic nervous system.”

“
Et combien sympathique!
” said the Rani. “Among other things, Mr. Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country place! Like
The Arabian Nights
! One claps one’s hands—and instantly there are six servants ready to do one’s bidding. One has a birthday—and there is a
fête nocturne
in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls; two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Harun al-Rashid, but with modern plumbing.”

“It sounds quite delightful,” said Will, remembering the villages through which he had passed in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes—the wattled huts, the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women bent double under enormous loads.

“And such taste,” the Rani went on, “such a well-stored mind and, through it all” (she lowered her voice) “such a deep and unfailing Sense of the Divine.”

Mr. Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.

Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.

“I hope you don’t feel that my visit is an intrusion,” she said
to Will. He assured her that he didn’t; but she continued to apologize. “I would have given warning,” she said, “I would have asked your permission. But my Little Voice says, ‘No—you must go now.’ Why? I cannot say. But no doubt we shall find out in due course.” She fixed him with her large, bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. “And now, first of all, how
are
you, dear Mr. Farnaby?”

“As you see, ma’am, in very good shape.”

“Truly?” The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intentness that he found embarrassing. “I can see that you’re the kind of heroically considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his deathbed.”

“You’re very flattering,” he said. “But as it happens, I am in good shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so.”

“Miraculous,” said the Rani, “was the very word I used when I heard about your escape. It
was
a miracle.”

“‘As luck would have it,’” Will quoted again from
Erewhon
, “‘Providence was on my side.’”

Mr. Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of merriment into a loud cough.

“How true!” the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly vibrated. “Providence is
always
on our side.” And when Will raised a questioning eyebrow, “I mean,” she elaborated, “in the eyes of those who Truly Understand” (capital T, capital U). “And this is true even when all things seem to conspire against us—
même dans le désastre
. You understand French, of course, Mr. Farnaby?” Will nodded. “It often comes to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese. After so many years in Switzerland,” she explained, “first at school. And again, later on, when my poor baby’s health was so precarious” (she patted Murugan’s bare arm) “and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which illustrates what I was saying
about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I’d ever learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our lives—weren’t they, darling?”

“The happiest of our lives,” the boy agreed, with what almost sounded like complete sincerity.

The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips, and with a faint smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. “So you see, my dear Farnaby,” she went on, “you see. It’s really self-evident. Nothing happens by Accident. There’s a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us.”

“Quite,” said Will politely. “Quite.”

“There was a time,” the Rani continued, “when I knew it only with my intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really…” she paused for an instant to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, “Understand.”

“Psychic as hell.” Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her. And surely that lifelong frequenter of séances should know.

“I take it, ma’am,” he said, “that you’re naturally psychic.”

“From birth,” she admitted. “But also and above all by training. Training, needless to say, in Something Else.”

“Something else?”

“In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the
sidhis
, all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously.”

“Is that so?”

“My mother,” Murugan proudly assured him, “can do the most fantastic things.”

“
N’exagérons pas, chéri
.”

“But it’s the truth,” Murugan insisted.

“A truth,” the Ambassador put in, “which I can confirm. And I confirm it,” he added, smiling at his own expense, “with a certain reluctance. As a lifelong skeptic about these things, I don’t like to see the impossible happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I’m compelled
malgré moi
to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the
most
fantastic things.”

“Well, if you like to put it that way,” said the Rani, beaming with pleasure. “But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely no importance. What’s important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes to at the end of the Path.”

“After the Fourth Initiation,” Murugan specified. “My mother…”

“Darling!” The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. “These are things one doesn’t talk about.”

“I’m sorry,” said the boy. There was a long and pregnant silence.

The Rani closed her eyes, and Mr. Bahu, letting fall his monocle, reverentially followed suit and became the image of Savonarola in silent prayer. What was going on behind that austere, that almost fleshless mask of recollectedness? Will looked and wondered.

“May I ask,” he said at last, “how you first came, ma’am, to find the Path?”

For a second or two the Rani said nothing, merely sat there with her eyes shut, smiling her Buddha smile of mysterious bliss. “Providence found it for me,” she answered at last.

“Quite, quite. But there must have been an occasion, a place, a human instrument.”

“I’ll tell you.” The lids fluttered apart and once again he found himself under the bright unswerving glare of those protuberant eyes of hers.

The place had been Lausanne; the time, the first year of her Swiss education; the chosen instrument, darling little Mme Buloz. Darling little Mme Buloz was the wife of darling old Professor Buloz, and old Professor Buloz was the man to whose charge, after careful enquiry and much anxious thought, she had been committed by her father, the late Sultan of Rendang. The Professor was sixty-seven, taught geology and was a Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret with his dinner, saying his prayers only twice a day, and being strictly monogamous, he might almost have been a Muslim. Under such guardianship a princess of Rendang would be intellectually stimulated, while remaining morally and doctrinally intact. But the Sultan had reckoned without the Professor’s wife. Mme Buloz was only forty, plump, sentimental, bubblingly enthusiastic and, though officially of her husband’s Protestant persuasion, a newly converted and intensely ardent Theosophist. In a room at the top of the tall house near the Place de la Riponne she had her Oratory, to which, whenever she could find time, she would secretly retire to do breathing exercises, practice concentration, and raise Kundalini. Strenuous disciplines! But the reward was transcendentally great. In the small hours of a hot summer night, while the darling old Professor lay rhythmically snoring two floors down, she had become aware of a Presence: the Master Koot Hoomi was with her.

The Rani made an impressive pause.

“Extraordinary,” said Mr. Bahu.

“Extraordinary,” Will dutifully echoed.

The Rani resumed her narrative. Irrepressibly happy, Mme Buloz had been unable to keep her secret. She had dropped mysterious hints, had passed from hints to confidences, from confidences to an invitation to the Oratory and a course of instruction. In a very short time Koot Hoomi was bestowing greater favors upon the novice than upon her teacher.

“And from that day to this,” she concluded, “the Master has helped me to Go Forward.”

To go forward, Will asked himself, into what? Koot Hoomi only knew. But whatever it was that she had gone forward into, he didn’t like it. There was an expression on that large florid face which he found peculiarly distasteful—an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakable self-esteem. She reminded him in a curious way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without inhibition in their money and in all that their money will buy in the way of influence and power. And here—albeit clothed in white muslin, mystic, wonderful—was another of Joe Aldehyde’s breed: a female tycoon who had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily rubbing her hands over the exploit.

“Here’s one example of what He’s done for me,” the Rani went on. “Eight years ago—to be exact, on the twenty-third of November, 1952—the Master came to me in my morning Meditation. Came in Person, came in Glory. ‘A great Crusade is to be launched,’ He said, ‘a World Movement to save Humanity from self-destruction. And you, my child, are the Appointed Instrument.’ ‘Me? A World Movement? But that’s absurd,’ I said. ‘I’ve never made a speech in my whole life. I’ve never written a word for publication. I’ve never been a leader or an organizer.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ He said (and He gave one of these indescribably beautiful smiles of His), ‘nevertheless it is you who will launch this Crusade—the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit. You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The dogs bark; the Caravan passes. From tiny, laughable beginnings the Crusade of the Spirit is destined to become a Mighty Force. A force for Good, a force that will ultimately Save the World.’ And with that He left me. Left me stunned, bewildered, scared out of
my wits. But there was nothing for it; I had to obey. I
did
obey. And what happened? I made speeches, and He gave me eloquence. I accepted the burden of leadership and, because He was walking invisibly at my side, people followed me. I asked for help, and the money came pouring in. So here I am.” She threw out her thick hands in a gesture of self-depreciation, she smiled a mystic smile.
A poor thing
, she seemed to be saying,
but not my own—my Master’s, Koot Hoomi’s
. “Here I am,” she repeated.

“Here, praise God,” said Mr. Bahu devoutly, “you are.”

After a decent interval Will asked the Rani if she had always kept up the practices so providentially learned in Mme Buloz’s Oratory.

“Always,” she answered. “I could no more do without Meditation than I could do without Food.”

“Wasn’t it rather difficult after you were married? I mean, before you went back to Switzerland. There must have been so many tiresome official duties.”

“Not to mention all the
un
official ones,” said the Rani in a tone that implied whole volumes of unfavorable comment upon her late husband’s character,
Weltanschauung
and sexual habits. She opened her mouth to elaborate on the theme, then closed it again and looked at Murugan. “Darling,” she called.

Murugan, who was absorbedly polishing the nails of his left hand upon the open palm of his right, looked up with a guilty start. “Yes, Mother?”

Ignoring the nails and his evident inattention to what she had been saying, the Rani gave him a seducing smile. “Be an angel,” she said, “and go and fetch the car. My Little Voice doesn’t say anything about
walking
back to the bungalow. It’s only a few hundred yards,” she explained to Will. “But in this heat, and at my age…”

Her words called for some kind of flattering rebuttal. But if it was too hot to walk, it was also too hot, Will felt, to put forth the very considerable amount of energy required for a convincing
show of bogus sincerity. Fortunately a professional diplomat, a practiced courtier was on hand to make up for the uncouth journalist’s deficiencies. Mr. Bahu uttered a peal of lighthearted laughter, then apologized for his merriment.