"Floating," the voice softly insisted. "Floating like a white bird on the water. Floating on a great river of life-a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it flows irresistibly.
"Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappi-ness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And it's into that peace that you're floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it's sleeping. And I'm floating with it." She was speaking for the stranger. She was speaking on another level for herself. "Effortlessly floating. Not having to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it's going-and knowing all the time that where it's going is where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace. Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation."
Involuntarily, unconsciously, Will Farnaby gave a deep sigh. How silent the world had become! Silent with a deep crystalline silence, even though the parrots were still busy out there beyond the shutters, even though the voice still chanted here beside him! Silence and emptiness and through the silence and the emptiness flowed the river, sleeping and irresistible.
Susila looked down at the face on the pillow. It seemed suddenly very young, childlike in its perfect serenity. The frowning lines across the forehead had disappeared. The lips that had been so tightly closed in pain were parted now, and the breath came slowly, softly, almost imperceptibly. She remembered suddenly the words that had come into her mind as she looked down, one moonlit night, at the transfigured innocence of Dugald's face: "She giveth her beloved sleep." "Sleep," she said aloud. "Sleep."
The silence seemed to become more absolute, the emptiness more enormous.
"Asleep on the sleeping river," the voice was saying. "And above the river, in the pale sky, there are huge white clouds. And as you look at them, you begin to float up towards them. Yes, you begin to float up towards them, and the river now is a river in the air, an invisible river that carries you on, carries you up, higher and higher."
Upwards, upwards through the silent emptiness. The image was the thing, the words became the experience.
"Out of the hot plain," the voice went on, "effortlessly, into the freshness of the mountains."
Yes, there was the Jungfrau, dazzlingly white against the blue. There was Monte Rosa . . . "How fresh the air feels as you breathe it. Fresh, pure, charged with life!"
He breathed deeply and the new life flowed into him. And now a little wind came blowing across the snowfields, cool against his skin, deliciously cool. And, as though echoing his thoughts, as though describing his experience, the voice said, "Coolness. Coolness and sleep. Through coolness into more life. Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness, into living peace."
Half an hour later Susila re-entered the sitting room.
"Well?" her father-in-law questioned. "Any success?"
She nodded.
"I talked to him about a place in England," she said. "He went off more quickly than I'd expected. After that I gave him some suggestions about his temperature ..."
"And the knee, I hope."
"Of course."
"Direct suggestions?"
"No, indirect. They're always better. I got him to be conscious of his body image. Then I made him imagine it much bigger than in everyday reality-and the knee much smaller. A miserable little thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing. There can't be any doubt as to who's going to win." She looked at the clock on the wall. "Goodness, I must hurry. Otherwise I'll be late for my class at school."
5
The sun was just rising as Dr. Robert entered his wife's room at the hospital. An orange glow, and against it the jagged silhouette of the mountains. Then suddenly a dazzling sickle of incandescence between two peaks. The sickle became a half circle and the first long shadows, the first shafts of golden light crossed the garden outside the window. And when one looked up again at the mountains there was the whole unbearable glory of the risen sun.
Dr. Robert sat down by the bed, took his wife's hand and kissed it. She smiled at him, then turned again towards the window.
"How quickly the earth turns!" she whispered, and then after a silence, "One of these mornings," she added, "it'll be my last sunrise."
Through the confused chorus of bird cries and insect noises, a mynah was chanting, "Karuna. Karuna . . ."
"Karuna," Lakshmi repeated. "Compassion . . ."
"Karuna. Karuna," the oboe voice of Buddha insisted from the garden.
"I shan't be needing it much longer," she went on. "But what about you? Poor Robert, what about you?"
"Somehow or other one finds the necessary strength," he said.
"But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of armor, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else? Remember how I used to come and pull your hair and make you pay attention? Who's going to do that when I'm gone?"
A nurse came in with a glass of sugared water. Dr. Robert slid a hand under his wife's shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. The nurse held the glass to her lips. Lakshmi drank a little water, swallowed with difficulty, then drank again and yet once more. Turning from the proffered glass, she looked up at Dr. Robert. The wasted face was illumined by a strangely incongruous twinkle of pure mischief.
" 'I the Trinity illustrate,' " the faint voice hoarsely quoted, " 'sipping watered orange pulp; in three sips the Arian frustrate' . . ." She broke off. "What a ridiculous thing to be remembering. But then I always was pretty ridiculous, wasn't I?"
Dr. Robert did his best to smile back at her. "Pretty ridiculous," he agreed.
"You used to say I was like a flea. Here one moment and then, hop! somewhere else, miles away. No wonder you could never educate me!"
"But you educated me all right," he assured her. "If it hadn't been for you coming in and pulling my hair and making me look at the world and helping me to understand it, what would I be today? A pedant in blinkers-in spite of all my training. But luckily I had the sense to ask you to marry me, and luckily you had the folly to say yes and then the wisdom and intelligence to make a good job of me. After thirty-seven years of adult education I'm almost human."
"But I'm still a flea." She shook her head. "And yet I did try. I tried very hard. I don't know if you ever realized it, Robert: I was always on tiptoes, always straining up towards the place where you were doing your work and your thinking and your reading. On tiptoes, trying to reach it, trying to get up there beside you. Goodness, how tiring it was! What an endless series of efforts! And all of them quite useless. Because I was just a dumb flea hopping about down here among the people and the flowers and the cats and dogs. Your kind of highbrow world was a place I could never climb up to, much less find my way in. When this thing happened" (she raised her hand again to her absent breast) "I didn't have to try any more. No more school, no more homework. I had a permanent excuse."
There was a long silence.
"What about taking another sip?" said the nurse at last.
"Yes, you ought to drink some more," Dr. Robert agreed.
"And ruin the Trinity?" Lakshmi gave him another of her smiles. Through the mask of age and mortal sickness Dr. Robert suddenly saw the laughing girl with whom, half a lifetime ago, and yet only yesterday, he had fallen in love.
An hour later Dr. Robert was back in his bungalow.
"You're going to be all alone this morning," he announced, after changing the dressing on Will Farnaby's knee. "I have to drive down to Shivapuram for a meeting of the Privy Council. One of our student nurses will come in around twelve to give you your injection and get you something to eat. And in the afternoon, as soon as she's finished her work at the school, Susila will be dropping in again. And now I must be going." Dr. Robert rose and laid his hand for a moment on Will's arm. "Till this evening." Halfway to the door he halted and turned back. "I almost forgot to give you this." From one of the side pockets of his sagging jacket he pulled out a small green booklet. "It's the Old Raja's Notes on What's What, and on What It Might be Reasonable to Do about What's What."