"I could see you didn't want me to say anything about it," said Will. "So of course I didn't."
"I wanted to thank you," Murugan muttered between his teeth and in a tone that would have been appropriate to "You dirty swine!"
"Don't mention it," said Will with mock politeness.
What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amused curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a statue's but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—a Hellenistic face, mobile and all too human. A vessel of incomparable beauty-but what did it contain? It was a pity, he reflected, that he hadn't asked that question a little more seriously before getting involved with his unspeakable Babs. But then Babs was a female. By the sort of heterosexual he was, the sort of rational question he was now posing was unaskable. As no doubt it would be, by anyone susceptible to boys, in regard to this bad-blooded little demigod sitting at the end of his bed.
"Didn't Dr. Robert know you'd gone to Rendang?" he asked.
"Of course he knew. Everybody knew it. I'd gone there to fetch my mother. She was staying there with some of her relations. I went over to bring her back to Pala. It was absolutely official."
"Then why didn't you want me to say that I'd met you over there?"
Murugan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at Will defiantly. "Because I didn't want them to know I'd been seeing Colonel Dipa."
Oh, so that was it! "Colonel Dipa's a remarkable man," he said aloud, fishing with sugared bait for confidences.
Surprisingly unsuspicious, the fish rose at once. Murugan's sulky face lit up with enthusiasm and there, suddenly, was Anti-nous in all the fascinating beauty of his ambiguous adolescence. "I think he's wonderful," he said, and for the first time since he had entered the room he seemed to recognize Will's existence and give him the friendliest of smiles. The Colonel's wonderful-ness had made him forget his resentment, had made it possible for him, momentarily, to love everybody-even this man to whom he owed a rankling debt of gratitude. "Look at what he's doing for Rendang!"
"He's certainly doing a great deal for Rendang," said Will noncommittally.
A cloud passed across Murugan's radiant face. "They don't think so here," he said, frowning. "They think he's awful."
"Who thinks so?"
"Practically everybody!" ;! "So they didn't want you to see him?"
With the expression of an urchin who has cocked a snook while the teacher's back is turned, Murugan grinned triumphantly. "They thought I was with my mother all the time."
Will picked up the cue at once. "Did your mother know you were seeing the Colonel?" he asked."Of course." "And had no objection?" "She was all for it."
And yet, Will felt quite sure, he hadn't been mistaken when he thought of Hadrian and Antinous. Was the woman blind? Or didn't she wish to see what was happening?
"But if she doesn't mind," he said aloud, "why should Dr. Robert and the rest of them object?" Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizing that he had ventured too far into forbidden territory, Will hastily drew a red herring across the trail. "Do they think," he asked with a laugh, "that he might convert you to a belief in military dictatorship?"
The red herring was duly followed, and the boy's face relaxed into a smile. "Not that, exactly," he answered, "but something like it. It's all so stupid," he added with a shrug of the shoulders. "Just idiotic protocol."
"Protocol?" Will was genuinely puzzled.
"Weren't you told anything about me?"
"Only what Dr. Robert said yesterday."
"You mean, about my being a student?" Murugan threw back his head and laughed.
"What's so funny about being a student?"
"Nothing-nothing at all." The boy looked away again. There was a silence. Still averted, "The reason," he said at last, "why I'm not supposed to see Colonel Dipa is that he's the head of a state and I'm the head of a state. When we meet, it's international politics."
"What do you mean?"
"I happen to be the Raja of Pala."
"TheRajaofPala?"
"Since 'fifty-four. That was when my father died."
"And your mother, I take it, is the Rani?"
"My mother is the Rani."
Make a beelinefor the palace. But here was the palace making a beeline for him. Providence, evidently, was on the side of Joe Aldehyde and working overtime.
"Were you the eldest son?" he asked.
"The only son," Murugan replied. And then, stressing his uniqueness still more emphatically, "The only child, I" he added.
"So there's no possible doubt," said Will. "My goodness! I ought to be calling you Your Majesty. Or at least Sir." The words were spoken laughingly; but it was with the most perfect seriousness and a sudden assumption of regal dignity that Murugan responded to them.
"You'll have to call me that at the end of next week," he said. "After my birthday. I shall be eighteen. That's when a Raja of Pala comes of age. Till then I'm just Murugan Mailendra. Just a student learning a little bit about everything-including plant breeding," he added contemptuously-"so that, when the time comes, I shall know what I'm doing."
"And when the time comes, what will you be doing?" Between this pretty Antinous and his portentous office there was a contrast which Will found richly comic. "How do you propose to act?" he continued on a bantering note. "Off with their heads? L'etat c'est moi?"
Seriousness and regal dignity hardened into rebuke. "Don't be stupid."
Amused, Will went through the motions of apology. "I just wanted to find out how absolute you were going to be."
"Pala is a constitutional monarchy," Murugan answered gravely.
"In other words, you're just going to be a symbolic figurehead-to reign, like the Queen of England, but not rule."
Forgetting his regal dignity, "No, no" Murugan almost screamed. "Not like the Queen of England. The Raja of Pala doesn't just reign; he rules." Too much agitated to sit still, Murugan jumped up and began to walk about the room. "He rules constitutionally; but, by God, he rules, he rules!" Murugan walked to the window and looked out. Turning back after a moment of silence, he confronted Will with a face transfigured by its new expression into an emblem, exquisitely molded and colored, of an all too familiar kind of psychological ugliness. "I'll show them who's the boss around here," he said in a phrase and tone which had obviously been borrowed from the hero of some American gangster movie. "These people think they can push me around," he went on, reciting from the dismally commonplace script, "the way they pushed my father around. But they're making a big mistake." He uttered a sinister snigger and wagged his beautiful, odious head. "A big mistake," he repeated.
The words had been spoken between clenched teeth and with scarcely moving lips; the lower jaw had been thrust out so as to look like the jaw of a comic strip criminal; the eyes glared coldly between narrowed lids. At once absurd and horrible. Antinous had become the caricature of all the tough guys in all the B-pictures from time immemorial.
"Who's been running the country during your minority?" he now asked.
"Three sets of old fogeys," Murugan answered contemptuously. "The Cabinet, the House of Representatives and then, representing me, the Raja, the Privy Council."
"Poor old fogeys!" said Will. "They'll soon be getting the shock of their lives." Entering gaily into the spirit of delinquency, he laughed aloud. "I only hope I'll still be around to see it happening."
Murugan joined in the laughter-joined in it, not as the sin-isterly mirthful Tough Guy, but with one of those sudden changes of mood and expression that would make it, Will foresaw, so hard for him to play the Tough Guy part, as the triumphant urchin of a few minutes earlier. "The shock of their lives," he repeated happily.