Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Rehearsal of what?”
“Of the surgery. They ran through the procedure half a dozen times. The last rehearsal was on the morning of the operation. At six, Dr Andrew came to the Raja’s room and, after a little cheerful talk, began to make the passes. In a few minutes the patient was in deep trance. Stage by stage, Dr Andrew described what he was going to do. Touching the cheekbone near the Raja’s right eye, he said, “I begin by stretching the skin, And now, with this scalpel,” (and he drew the tip of a pencil across the cheek) “I make an incision. You feel no pain, of course — not even the slightest discomfort. And now the underlying tissues are being cut and you still feel nothing at all. You just lie there, comfortably asleep, while I dissect the cheek back to the nose. Every now and then I stop to tie a blood vessel; then I go on again. And when that part of the work is done, I’m ready to start on the tumour. It has its roots there in the antrum and it has grown upwards, under the cheekbone, into the eye socket, and downwards into the gullet. And as I cut it loose, you lie there as before, feeling nothing, perfectly comfortable, completely relaxed. And now I lift your head.” Suiting his action to the words, he lifted the Raja’s head and bent it forward on the limp neck. “I lift it and bend it so that you can get rid of the blood that’s run down into your mouth and throat. Some of the blood has got into your windpipe, and you cough a little to get rid of it; but it doesn’t wake you.” The Raja coughed once or twice, then, when Dr Andrew released his hold, dropped back on to the pillows, still fast asleep. “And you don’t choke even when I work on the lower end of the tumour in your gullet.” Dr Andrew opened the Raja’s mouth and thrust two fingers down his throat. “It’s just a question of pulling it loose, that’s all. Nothing in that to make you choke. And if you have to cough up the blood, you can do it in your sleep. Yes, in your sleep, in this deep, deep sleep.”
“That was the end of the rehearsal. Ten minutes later, after making some more passes and telling his patient to sleep still more deeply, Dr Andrew began the operation. He stretched the skin, he made the incision, he dissected the cheek, he cut the tumour away from its roots in the antrum. The Raja lay there perfectly relaxed, his pulse firm and steady at seventy-five, feeling no more pain than he had felt during the make-believe of the rehearsal. Dr Andrew worked on the throat; there was no choking. The blood flowed into the windpipe; the Raja coughed but did not awake. Four hours after the operation was over, he was still sleeping; then, punctual to the minute, he opened his eyes, smiled at Dr Andrew between his bandages and asked, in his sing-song cockney, when the operation was to start. After a feeding and a sponging, he was given some more passes and told to sleep for four more hours and to get well quickly. Dr Andrew kept it up for a full week. Sixteen hours of trance each day, eight of waking. The Raja suffered almost no pain and, in spite of the thoroughly septic conditions under which the operation had been performed and the dressings renewed, the wounds healed without suppuration. Remembering the horrors he had witnessed in the Edinburgh Infirmary, the yet more frightful horrors of the surgical wards at Madras, Dr Andrew could hardly believe his eyes. And now he was given another opportunity to prove to himself what animal magnetism could do. The Raja’s eldest daughter was in the ninth month of her first pregnancy. Impressed by what he had done for her husband, the Rani sent for Dr Andrew. He found her sitting with a frail frightened girl of sixteen, who knew just enough broken cockney to be able to tell him she was going to die — she and her baby too. Three black birds had confirmed it by flying on three successive days across her path. Dr Andrew did not try to argue with her. Instead, he asked her to lie down, then started to make the passes. Twenty minutes later the girl was in a deep trance. In his country, Dr Andrew now assured her, black birds were lucky — a presage of birth and joy. She would bear her child easily and without pain. Yes, with no more pain than her father had felt during his operation. No pain at all, he promised, no pain whatsoever.
“Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive suggestion, it all came true. When the Raja woke up for his evening meal, he found his wife sitting by his bed. ‘We have a grandson,’ she said, ‘and our daughter is well. Dr Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried to her room, to give them both your blessing.’ At the end of a month the Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers. Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the Rani was convinced of it) his daughter’s life as well, with Dr Andrew as his chief adviser.”
“So he didn’t go back to Madras?”
“Not to Madras. Not even to London. He stayed here in Pala.”
“Trying to change the Raja’s accent?”
“And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja’s kingdom.”
“Into what?”
“That was a question he couldn’t have answered. In those early days he had no plan — only a set of likes and dislikes. There were things about Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn’t like at all. Things about Europe that he detested and things he passionately approved of. Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and things that filled him with disgust. People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings and make the individual blooms more beautiful? That was the question to which, implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up to, Dr Andrew and the Raja were trying to find an answer.”
“And did they find an answer?”
“Looking back,” said Dr MacPhail, “one’s amazed by what those two men accomplished. The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist — what a strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other’s deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other’s native capacities. The Raja’s was an acute and subtle mind; but he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European ways of thinking. No less intelligent, Dr Andrew knew nothing, of course, about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy. He also knew nothing, as he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art of living. In the months that followed the operation each became the other’s pupil and the other’s teacher. And of course that was only a beginning. They were not merely private citizens concerned with their private improvement. The Raja had a million subjects and Dr Andrew was virtually his Prime Minister. Private improvement was to be the preliminary to public improvement. If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to make the best of both worlds — the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern — it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same. To make the best of both worlds — what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds — the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities. It was an enormous ambition, an ambition totally impossible of fulfilment; but at least it had the merit of spurring them on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread — with results that sometimes proved, to everybody’s astonishment, that they had not been quite such fools as they looked. They never succeeded, of course, in making the best of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying, they made the best of many more worlds than any merely prudent or sensible person would have dreamed of being able to reconcile and combine.”
“‘If the fool would persist in his folly,’” Will quoted from The Proverbs of Hell, “‘he would become wise.’”
“Precisely,” Dr Robert agreed. “And the most extravagant folly of all is the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr Andre
w were now contemplating — the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell and heaven. But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an enormous reward! Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently. Stupid fools get nowhere; it’s only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly can make them wise or produce good results. Fortunately these two fools were clever. Clever enough, for example to embark on their folly in a modest and appealing way. They began with pain relievers. The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself — and you live in a home-made hell. You become detached — and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ‘and I show you the ending of sorrow.’ Well, here was Dr Andrew with a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one kind of sorrow, namely physical pain. With the Raja himself or, for the woman, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr Andrew gave lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of teachers, mothers, invalids. Painless childbirth — and forthwith all the women of Pala were enthusiastically on the side of the innovators. Painless operations for stone and cataract and haemorrhoids — and they had won the approval of all the old and the ailing. At one stroke more than half the adult population became their allies, prejudiced in their favour, friendly in advance, or at least open-minded, towards the next reform.”
“Where did they go from pain?” Will asked.
“To agriculture and language. They got a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they set to work to give the Palanese a second language. Pala was to remain a forbidden island; for Dr Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that missionaries, planters and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated. But while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the natives must somehow be helped to get out — if not physically, at least with their minds. But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi alphabet were a prison without windows. There could be no escape for them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and could read the Latin script. Among the courtiers, the Raja’s linguistic accomplishments had already set a fashion. Ladies and gentlemen larded their conversation with scraps of cockney, and some of them had even sent to Ceylon for English-speaking tutors. What had been a mode was now transformed into a policy. English schools were set up and a staff of Bengali printers, with their presses and their founts of Caslon and Bodoni were imported from Calcutta. The first English book to be published at Shivapuram was a selection from The Arabian Nights, the second, a translation of The Diamond Sutra, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in manuscript. For those who wished to read about Sinbad and Marouf, and for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there were now two cogent reasons for learning English. That was the beginning of the long educational process that turned us at last into a bi-lingual people. We speak Palanese when we’re cooking, when we’re telling funny stories, when we’re talking about love or making it. (Incidentally, we have the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in South-East Asia.) But when it comes to business, or science, or speculative philosophy, we generally speak English. And most of us prefer to write in English. Every writer needs a literature as his frame of reference; a set of models to conform to or depart from. Pala had good painting and sculpture, splendid architecture, wonderful dancing, subtle and expressive music — but no real literature, no national poets or dramatists or story tellers. Just bards reciting Buddhist and Hindu myths; just a lot of monks preaching sermons and splitting metaphysical hairs. Adopting English as our stepmother tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and certainly the widest of presents. We gave ourselves a background, a spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being creative in a field where we had never been creative before. Thanks to the Raja and my great-grandfather, there’s an Anglo-Palanese literature — of which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light.”
“On the dim side,” she protested.
Dr MacPhail shut his eyes, and, smiling to himself, began to recite:
“Thus-Gone to Thus-Gone, I with a Buddha’s hand
Offer the unplucked flower, the frog’s soliloquy
Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared mouth
At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless
Sky that makes possible mountains and setting
moon.
This emptiness that is the womb of love,
This poetry of silence.”
He opened his eyes again. “And not only this poetry of silence,’ he said. “This science, this philosophy, this theology of silence. And now it’s high time you went to sleep.” He rose and moved towards the door. “I’ll go and get you a glass of fruit juice.”
CHAPTER NINE
PATRIOTISM IS NOT enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.’
“Attention!” shouted a far-away bird.
Will looked at his watch. Five to twelve. He closed his Notes on What’s What and picking up the bamboo alpenstock which had once belonged to Dugald MacPhail, he set out to keep his appointment with Vijaya and Dr Robert. By the short cut the main building of the Experimental Station was less than a quarter of a mile from Dr Robert’s bungalow. But the day was oppressively hot, and there were two flights of steps to be negotiated. For a convalescent with his right leg in a splint, it was a considerable journey.
Slowly, painfully, Will made his way along the winding path and up the steps. At the top of the second flight he halted to take breath and mop his forehead; then keeping close to the wall, where there was still a narrow strip of shade, he moved on towards a signboard marked LABORATORY.
The door beneath the board was ajar; he pushed it open and found himself on the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged room. There were the usual sinks and work tables, the usual glass-fronted cabinets full of bottles and equipment, the usual smells of chemicals and caged mice. For the first moment Will was under the impression that the room was untenanted, but no — almost hidden from view by a book case that projected at right angles from the wall, young Murugan was seated at a table, intently reading. As quietly as he could — for it was always amusing to take people by surprise — Will advanced into the room. The whirring of an electric fan covered the sound of his approach, and it was not until he was within a few feet of the bookcase that Murugan became aware of his presence. The boy started guiltily, shoved his book with panic haste into a leather briefcase and, reaching for another, smaller volume that lay open on the table beside the briefcase, drew it within reading range. Only then did he turn to face the intruder.
Will gave him a reassuring smile. “It’s only me.”
The look of angry defiance gave place, on the boy’s face to one of relief.
“I thought it was …” He broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“You thought it was someone who would bawl you out for not doing what you’re supposed to do — is that it?”
Murugan grinned and nodded his curly head.
“Where’s everyone else?” Will asked.
“They’re out in the fields — pruning or pollinating or something.” His tone was contemptuous.
“And so, the cats being away, the mouse duly played. What were you studying so passionately?”
With innocent disingenuousness, Murugan held up the book he was now pretending to read. “It’s called ‘Elementary Ecology,’” he said.
“So I see,” said Will. “But what I asked you was what were you reading?”
“Oh, that,” Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
“I’m interested in everything that anyon
e tries to hide, Will assured him. “Was it pornography?”
Murugan dropped his play-acting and looked genuinely offended. “Who do you take me for?”
Will was on the point of saying that he took him for an average boy, but checked himself. To Colonel Dipa’s pretty young friend, ‘average boy’ might sound like an insult or an innuendo. Instead he bowed with mock politeness. “I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” he said. “But I’m still curious,” he added in another tone. “May I?” He laid a hand on the bulging briefcase.
Murugan hesitated for a moment, then forced a laugh. “Go ahead.”
“What a tome!” Will pulled the ponderous volume out of the bag and laid it on the table. “Sears, Roebuck and Co., Spring and Summer Catalog” he read aloud.
“It’s last year’s,” said Murugan apologetically. “But I don’t suppose there’s been much change since then.”
“There,” Will assured him, “you’re mistaken. If the styles weren’t completely changed every year, there’d be no reason for buying new things before the old ones are worn out. You don’t understand the first principles of modern consumerism.” He opened at random. “‘Soft Platform Wedgies in Wide Widths.’”