Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot, or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.”
“Agreed,” said Dr MacPhail. “But mightn’t there be a third possibility? Mightn’t there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?”
“Somebody, for a change, completely sane,” said Susila.
“Yes, for a change,” Dr MacPhail repeated. “For a blessed change. And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn’t ruin. By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete. Which only shows,” Dr Robert added parenthetically, “how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are. Freudism and Behaviourism — poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very simply. They ignore them. They blandly pretend that the facts aren’t there. Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really exists, or even to explain it theoretically. Look at what happened, for example, in this particular case. Andrew’s brothers and sisters were either tamed by their conditioning, or destroyed. Andrew was neither destroyed nor tamed. Why? Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped turning at a lucky number. He had a more resilient constitution than the others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different temperament. His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest of their unfortunate brood. Andrew came through with flying colours, almost without a scar.”
“In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?”
“That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of medical studies at Edinburgh. He was only a boy — just over seventeen. (They started young in those days.) In the dissecting room the boy found himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which his fellow students kept up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers. Listening at first with horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance. But nothing happened. The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then, of the clap. Fear gave place in Andrew’s mind to a wonderful sense of relief and deliverance. Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his own. His first utterance of a four-letter word — what a liberation, what a genuinely religious experience! And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read Tom Jones, he read Hume’s Essay on Miracles, he read the infidel Gibbon. Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he read La Mettrie, he read Dr Cabanis. Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. How simple it all was, how luminously obvious! With all the fervour of a convert at a revival meeting, he decided for atheism. In the circumstances it was only to be expected. You can’t stomach St Augustine any more, you can’t go on repeating the Athanasian rigmarole. So you pull the plug and send them down the drain. What bliss! But not for very long. Something, you discover, is missing. The experimental baby was flushed out with the theological dirt and soapsuds. But nature abhors a vacuum. Bliss gives place to a chronic discomfort, and now you’re afflicted, generation after generation, by a succession of Wesleys, Puseys, Moodies and Billies — Sunday and Graham — all working like beavers to pump the theology back out of the cesspool. They hope, of course, to recover the baby. But they never succeed. All that a revivalist can do is to siphon up a little of the dirty water. Which, in due course, has to be thrown out again. And so on, indefinitely. It’s really too boring and, as Dr Andrew came at last to realize, wholly unnecessary. Meanwhile here he was, in the first flush of his new-found freedom. Excited, exultant — but quietly excited, exultant behind that appearance of grave and courteous detachment which he habitually presented to the world.”
“What about his father?” Will asked. “Did they have a battle?”
“No battle. Andrew didn’t like battles. He was the sort of man who always goes his own way, but doesn’t advertise the fact, doesn’t argue with people who prefer another road. The old man was never given the opportunity of putting on his Jeremiah act. Andrew kept his mouth shut about Hume and La Mettrie, and went through the traditional motions. But when his training was finished, he just didn’t come home. Instead, he went to London and signed up, as surgeon and naturalist on HMS Melampus, bound for the South Seas with orders to chart, survey, collect specimens and protect Protestant missionaries and British interests. The cruise of the Melampus lasted for a full three years. They called at Tahiti, they spent two months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group. After Perth, the islands seemed like Eden — but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking. It was paradise, but it wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do. They sailed on. They visited Fiji and the Carolines and the Solomons. They charted the northern coast of New Guinea and, in Borneo, a party went ashore, trapped a pregnant orang-utan and climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu. Then followed a week at Pannoy, a fortnight in the Mergui Archipelago. After which they headed West to the Andamans and from the Andamans to the mainland of India. While ashore, my great-grandfather was thrown from his horse and broke his right leg. The captain of the Melampus found another surgeon and sailed for home. Two months later, as good as new, Andrew was practising medicine at Madras. Doctors were scarce in those days and sickness fearfully common. The young man began to prosper. But life among the merchants and officials of the Presidency was oppressively boring. It was an exile, but an exile without any of the compensations of exile, an exile without adventure or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical equivalent of Swansea or Huddersfield. But still he resisted the temptation to book a passage on the next home-bound ship. If he stuck it out for five years, he would have enough money to buy a good practice in Edinburgh — no, in London, in the West End. The future beckoned, rosy and golden. There would be a wife, preferably with auburn hair and a modest competence. There would be four or five children — happy, unwhipped and atheistic. And his practice would grow, his patients would be drawn from circles ever more exalted. Wealth, reputation, dignity, even a knighthood. Sir Andrew MacPhail stepping out of his brougham in Belgrave Square. The great Sir Andrew, physician to the Queen. Summoned to St Petersburg to operate on the Grand Duke, to the Tuileries, to the Vatican, to the Sublime Porte. Delightful phantasies! But the facts, as it turned out, were to be far more interesting. One fine morning a brown-skinned stranger called at the surgery. In halting English he gave an account of himself. He was from Pala and had been commanded by His Highness, the Raja, to seek out and bring back with him a skilful surgeon from the West. The rewards would be princely. Princely, he insisted. There and then Dr Andrew accepted the invitation. Partly, of course, for the money; but mostly because he was bored, because he needed a change, needed a taste of adventure. A trip to the Forbidden Island — the lure was irresistible.”
“And remember,” Susila interjected, “in those days Pala was much more forbidden than it is now.”
“So you can imagine how eagerly young Dr Andrew jumped at the opportunity now offered by the Raja’s ambassador. Ten days later his ship dropped anchor off the north coast of the forbidden island. With his medicine chest, his bag of instruments and a small tin trunk containing his clothes and a few indispensable books, he was rowed in an outrigger canoe through the pounding surf, carried in a palanquin through the streets of Shivapuram and set down in the inner courtyard of the royal palace. His royal patient was eagerly awaiting him. Without being given time to shave or change his clothes, Dr Andrew was ushered into the presence — the pitiable presence of a small brown ma
n in his early forties, terribly emaciated under his rich brocades, his face so swollen and distorted as to be barely human, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. Dr Andrew examined him. From the maxillary antrum, where it had its roots, a tumour had spread in all directions. It had filled the nose, it had pushed up into the socket of the right eye, it had half-blocked the throat. Breathing had become difficult, swallowing acutely painful and sleep an impossibility — for whenever he dropped off, the patient would choke and wake up frantically struggling for air. Without radical surgery, it was obvious, the Raja would be dead within a couple of months. With radical surgery, much sooner. Those were the good old days, remember — the good old days of septic operations without benefit of chloroform. Even in the most favourable circumstances surgery was fatal to one patient out of four. Where conditions were less propitious, the odds declined — fifty-fifty, thirty to seventy, zero to a hundred. In the present case the prognosis could hardly have been worse. The patient was already weak and the operation would be long, difficult and excruciatingly painful. There was a good chance that he would die on the operating table and a virtual certainty that, if he survived, it would only be to die a few days later of blood poisoning. But if he should die, Dr Andrew now reflected, what would be the fate of the alien surgeon who had killed a king? And, during the operation, who would hold the royal patient down while he writhed under the knife? Which of his servants or courtiers would have the strength of mind to disobey, when the master screamed in agony or positively commanded them to let him go?
Perhaps the wisest thing would be to say, here and now, that the case was hopeless, that he could do nothing, and ask to be sent back to Madras forthwith. Then he looked again at the sick man. Through the grotesque mask of his poor deformed face the Raja was looking at him intently — looking with the eyes of a condemned criminal begging the judge for mercy. Touched by the appeal, Dr Andrew gave him a smile of encouragement and all at once, as he patted the thin hand, he had an idea. It was absurd, crack-brained, thoroughly discreditable; but all the same, all the same …
Five years before, he suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism. Elliotson had had the effrontery to talk of painless operations performed on patients in the mesmeric trance
The man was either a gullible fool or an unscrupulous knave. The so-called evidence for such nonsense was manifestly worthless. It was all sheer humbug, quackery, downright fraud — and so on for six columns of righteous indignation. At the time — for he was still full of La Mettrie and Hume and Cabanis — Dr Andrew had read the article with a glow of orthodox approval. After which he had forgotten about the very existence of animal magnetism. Now, at the Raja’s bedside, it all came back to him — the mad Professor, the magnetic passes, the amputations without pain, the low death-rate and rapid recoveries. Perhaps, after all, there might be something in it. He was deep in these thoughts, when, breaking a long silence, the sick man spoke to him. From a young sailor who had deserted his ship at Rendang-Lobo and somehow made his way across the strait, the Raja had learned to speak English with remarkable fluency, but also, in faithful imitation of his teacher, with a strong cockney accent. That cockney accent,” Dr MacPhail repeated with a little laugh. “It turns up again and again in my great-grandfather’s memoirs. There was something, to him, inexpressibly improper about a king who spoke like Sam Weller. And in this case the impropriety was more than merely social. Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also of deep religious experience and spiritual insight. That such a man should express himself in cockney was something that an Early Victorian Scotsman who had read The Pickwick Papers could never get over. Nor, in spite of all my great-grandfather’s tactful coaching, could the Raja ever get over his impure diphthongs and dropped aitches. But all that was in the future. At their first tragic meeting, that shocking, lower-class accent seemed strangely touching. Laying the palms of his hands together in a gesture of supplication, the sick man whispered, “‘Elp me, Dr MacPhile, ‘elp me.”
The appeal was decisive. Without any further hesitation, Dr Andrew took the Raja’s thin hands between his own and began to speak in the most confident tone about a wonderful new treatment recently discovered in Europe and employed as yet by only a handful of the most eminent physicians. Then, turning to the attendants who had been hovering all this time in the background, he ordered them out of the room. They did not understand the words; but his tone and accompanying gestures were unmistakably clear. They bowed and withdrew. Dr Andrew took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and started to make those famous magnetic passes, about which he had read with so much sceptical amusement in The Lancet. From the crown of the head, over the face and down the trunk to the epigastrium, again and again until the patient falls into a trance— ‘or until’ (he remembered the derisive comments of the anonymous writer of the article) ‘until the presiding charlatan shall choose to say that his dupe is now under the magnetic influence.’ Quackery, humbug and fraud. But all the same, all the same … He worked away in silence. Twenty passes, fifty passes. The sick man sighed and closed his eyes. Sixty, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty. The heat was stifling, Dr Andrew’s shirt was drenched with sweat, and his arms ached. Grimly he repeated the same absurd gesture. A hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy-five, two hundred. It was all fraud and humbug; but all the same he was determined to make this poor devil go to sleep, even if it took him the whole day to do it. “You are going to sleep,” he said aloud as he made the two hundred and eleventh pass. “You are going to sleep.” The sick man seemed to sink more deeply into his pillows, and suddenly Dr Andrew caught the sound of a rattling wheeze. “This time,” he added quickly, “you are not going to choke. There’s plenty of room for the air to pass, and you’re not going to choke.” The Raja’s breathing grew quiet. Dr Andrew made a few more passes, then decided that it would be safe to take a rest. He mopped his face, then rose, stretched his arms and took a couple of turns up and down the room. Sitting down again by the bed, he took one of the Raja’s stick-like wrists and felt for the pulse. An hour before it had been running at almost a hundred; now the rate had fallen to seventy. He raised the arm; the hand hung limp like a dead man’s. He let go, and the arm dropped by its own weight and lay, inert and unmoving, where it had fallen. “Your Highness,” he said, and again, more loudly, “Your Highness.” There was no answer. It was all quackery, humbug and fraud, but all the same it worked, it obviously worked.”
A large, brightly coloured mantis fluttered down on to the rail at the foot of the bed, folded its pink and white wings, raised its small flat head and stretched out its incredibly muscular front legs in the attitude of prayer. Dr MacPhail pulled out a magnifying glass and bent forward to examine it.
“Gongylus gongyloides,” he pronounced. “It dresses itself up to look like a flower. When unwary flies and moths come sailing in to sip the nectar, it sips them. And if it’s a female, she eats her lovers.” He put the glass away and leaned back in his chair. “What one likes most about the universe,” he said to Will Farnaby, “is its wild improbability. Gongylus gongyloides, Homo sapiens, my great-grandfather’s introduction to Pala and hypnosis — what could be more unlikely?”
“Nothing,” said Will. “Except perhaps my introduction to Pala and hypnosis, Pala via a shipwreck and a precipice; hypnosis by way of a soliloquy about an English cathedral.”
Susila laughed. “Fortunately I didn’t have to make all those passes over you. In this climate! I really admire Dr Andrew. It sometimes takes three hours to anaesthetize a person with the passes.”
“But in the end he succeeded?”
“Triumphantly.”
“And did he actually perform the operation?”
“Yes, he actually performed t
he operation,” said Dr MacPhail. “But not immediately. There had to be a long preparation. Dr Andrew began by telling his patient that henceforward he would be able to swallow without pain. Then, for the next three weeks, he fed him up. And between meals he put him into trance and kept him asleep until it was time for another feeding. It’s wonderful what your body will do for you if you only give it a chance. The Raja gained twelve pounds and felt like a new man. A new man full of new hope and confidence. He knew he was going to come through his ordeal. And so, incidentally, did Dr Andrew. In the process of fortifying the Raja’s faith, he had fortified his own. It was not a blind faith. The operation, he felt quite certain, was going to be successful. But this unshakable confidence did not prevent him from doing everything that might contribute to its success. Very early in the proceedings he started to work on the trance. The trance, he kept telling his patient, was becoming deeper every day, and on the day of the operation it would be much deeper than it had ever been before. It would also last longer. ‘You’ll sleep,’ he assured the Raja, ‘for four full hours after the operation’s over; and when you awake, you won’t feel the slightest pain.’ Dr Andrew made these affirmations with a mixture of total scepticism and complete confidence. Reason and past experience assured him that all this was impossible. But in the present context past experience had proved to be irrelevant. The impossible had already happened, several times. There was no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. The important thing was to say that it would happen — so he said it, again and again. All this was good; but better still was Dr Andrew’s invention of the rehearsal.”