Читать книгу Three Continents - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 11

THEN one day Lindsay decided to donate Propinquity. She announced this quite casually and in public, in the course of the Rawul’s evening talk under the tree. He had been mentioning the various centers of the movement that had already been established. Besides the one in his own kingdom—the cradle of the movement as well as, so we were often told, of civilization—there were centers in Sussex, England, at Fontainebleau outside Paris, on a baronial estate in Holland, and one on Columbus Avenue in New York. And suddenly Lindsay said “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have one here?” I’m sure she spoke without premeditation—she never did premediate anything, I don’t think she was capable of it. With her it was always “wouldn’t it be fun to—” and it might be anything like a trip to the city or to fly to a party in Dallas. I suspect that it was her approach to her love affairs, when she first decided to sleep with someone (“wouldn’t it be fun to—?”). And it always came out in a bright, little-girl voice, and then, if her suggestion wasn’t immediately taken up with enthusiasm, her face would fall and she urged “But why not?” That was what happened this time too. When her impulsive offer of the house was received in silence—and it was a very heavy silence—she looked from face to face and said “But why not?” in a hurt voice.

No one answered, for differing reasons. The Rawul had flushed with pleasure; but as he was a modest and reticent man, he must have felt it to be indelicate to rush forward and accept such a handsome gift. The Rani played with her bracelets; there was an aloof little smile on her face, and what I noticed most was the way she was refusing to meet anyone’s glance. Crishi too was silent, but his eyes flashed like a person who unexpectedly gets something that he wants. He looked around the circle at Michael, and at me. I saw that Michael met his glance; and when Lindsay asked for the third time “But why not?” Michael answered her, “Yes why not.” And then everyone was looking at me, in their different ways.

From that time on they got to work on me, again in their different ways. Jean started it, maybe because she was the one who felt the strongest. That night she stood waiting for me outside Lindsay’s bedroom door; “Come in here,” she said. Lindsay was lying with her head buried in the pillows, the way she did when anyone involved her in an argument, not wanting to hear or see anything. Jean said “You’re not going to go along with this nonsense, are you, Harriet?” I said “I don’t want to.” “No I should say not,” Jean said grimly. She looked at Lindsay’s slender form on the bed. “Turn around,” she said. Lindsay didn’t stir. I could see that Jean was tempted to grab hold of her and make her turn around. I had witnessed physical fights between them before and had not liked them; so I really wanted to get out. But Jean looked at me with her pathetic dog eyes: “Try and talk some sense into your mother, if you can, Harriet.”

Then Lindsay tossed around to face us: “That’s all I ever hear from you, Jean. Sense. Good sense. Common sense. I despise common sense.”

“Listen to her,” Jean said to me. “Now we are too mundane for her. She wants to get onto a higher plane: a world movement, no less.”

“You’ve been as involved as the rest of us,” Lindsay said.

“Involved with who?”

“With who: That’s all you can ever think of. Everything with you is personal; as if nothing exists beyond your own little ego. You can’t—rise.”

She made a vague movement with her hand, indicating some lofty height to rise to. It made me laugh—the idea of Lindsay rising. Jean laughed too. Lindsay spoke to both of us in a genuinely hurt voice: “I thought we were all agreed that it was something extraordinary. And isn’t it about time that there was a Fourth World—that all these different elements got together—I mean us here, with all our—materialism,” she said, gesturing at her crowded dressing table, “and they with their—”

“Oh yes,” Jean said. “They’re very spiritual. Especially her; that Rani. With all her spiritual jewelry.”

“It’s absolutely no use talking to you, Jean Potts. I’m not going to say another word.”

There was something so appealing in the way she clamped her pretty lips together that Jean couldn’t resist sitting beside her on the edge of the bed. Lindsay went on pouting—but flirtatiously now, in the reproachful little-girl way that she knew would get her anything she wanted from Jean; and Jean, her voice gruff with tenderness, said “I know I’m a bore.”

“You’re not a bore—but you are so stubborn and contrary. You make me so mad. I want us to do everything together, as a couple, and how can we when you say no to me all the time.”

Jean brought Lindsay’s hand up to her lips and turned it over and kissed her palm. By this time neither of them cared about me, whether I wanted to donate our house to the Rawul’s movement or not.

And I didn’t, not one bit, and it amazed me the way both Lindsay and Michael were so ready to toss it away. It was not that it was a beautiful house—it wasn’t—but it was one of the few big houses in the area that was still intact and still with the original owners. Lindsay’s great-grandfather had built it as a summer house for his Victorian family, which of course was very large and included a whole establishment of servants; and then her grandfather had installed things to suit his life-style, like a squash court and a billiard room, and had converted the stables into garages; and her father had built on another wing in what was the latest in modern comfort in the thirties; so architecturally the house was a mess. The grounds, however, were beautiful. The site was that of an early nineteenth-century Federal-type house, which the great-grandfather had torn down to rebuild to his Victorian taste; but he couldn’t ruin the grounds—the magnificent maples and oaks and elms, which were much older than the house and as huge, the line of white birches at the edge of the lake, the lake itself stretching to the wooded shore opposite, the waterfall, the many nooks and arbors with little dead fountains where Michael and I used to hide, pretending not to hear the voices calling us in for meals. But Michael no longer seemed to care about any of it himself, and made me feel bad for caring as much as I did.

He took me for a midnight row on the lake. We always did that when we had something very special to discuss. Since it was our way to commune in silence, these discussions usually took the form of gliding on the dark water, breaking up the moonlit reflections scattered over it, one of us rowing, the other brushing aside the overhanging branches where the lake began to flow between narrow overgrown banks on its way to the river into which it finally merged. We halted under a willow and lay there, splashing the water around a bit to see if we could disturb any fish.

Michael said “It’s a good idea.” I didn’t say anything—by which of course he knew I didn’t agree. I hated to disagree with him, and especially here on this lake where we had spent such hours of our deepest communings. Nor did I really have any right to disagree, because the very subject of these communings was that of nonattachment. We both thought to be absolutely pure you had to be absolutely nonattached, not wanting anything for yourself—not possessions, not position, not even the love of another person. Yet here was I, unable to give away something as ordinary as a house. I felt ashamed; so that when Michael, in reply to my silence, said “What’s up?” I said “No it’s okay. If you really want to.” “Well don’t you?” he said, and I knew he was frowning in the dark, stretched out on one side of the boat while I was on the other.

There was always something dictatorial about Michael in his relation to me. He was so used to my being in complete agreement with him that when I was not, he got irritated. In the past, on the rare occasions when it had happened that I wasn’t 100 percent with him, I would just say “If you want it, I do.” It was true, but he didn’t like to hear it: because he thought agreement had to spring out of inner conviction and not out of love for another person. So it was useless to argue.

I said “I’m surprised about Lindsay though.” Michael laughed. It was strange—normally, when you wanted something from Lindsay, she would have very good reasons why she couldn’t possibly give it. I knew what was in his mind—if Lindsay of all people was ready for it, surely I wasn’t going to fall behind. Well, I didn’t say anything, but I agreed. At least, I brought forward no objections, though my heart was full of them—my God, on this beautiful summer night, alone in a boat with him, our house visible in the distance, shining by moonlight through the dark trees: but I didn’t stick up for it, because more than anything else, more than any house, I wanted what he wanted. That was how it was between us then.

Next morning the Rawul was having breakfast alone in the dining room; when I came down, he lifted the napkin from his lap so he could courteously rise from his chair for me. His mouth was full of Mrs. Schwamm’s terrific pancakes, and he could only gesture hospitably toward the sideboard to invite me to help myself: as if it were his house already, I thought. But in a way it was; for when could we ever have had a stately breakfast like this in the dining room, with the silver-topped dishes all polished and laid out on the sideboard? Before his arrival, we used to make do with instant coffee and frozen doughnuts, eaten while perched on a corner of the kitchen table. But the Rawul lived in style, and having a whole entourage with him, he could afford to. They might be called his comrades, his helpers, his followers, but they also functioned very effectively as his servants; so that for the first time in our generation, and even in Lindsay’s, there was a staff large enough to run the house as it was meant to be.

I expected him to start getting at me about donating Propinquity, but he was too subtle and too well mannered for that. Also perhaps too shy—for that was also there in his character; he was a shy person who found it difficult to make conversation with people, though out of courtesy he always tried. The one topic he really had a lot to say about was his Fourth World movement—whenever that subject came up, he spoke volubly and with passionate conviction; and even if you felt dubious about the whole thing, you could have no doubt about his sincerity. There was something fanatical about him. The whole idea was fanatical; grandiose—but also grand, on a grand scale: just to think up such an idea and get it going with what was only a handful of people. But maybe that’s how big movements begin, with one person really believing and then others gathering around him till an organization is formed with more and more people joining it; because so many, and maybe everyone, wants to have something or someone to believe in.

To begin with, as far as I knew, it was the Rawul who had this simple but forceful idea of constituting himself the savior of world civilization. He felt he had excellent credentials, for he belonged to what he claimed to be one of the oldest tribes in the world, with a whole genealogy of primeval mythical figures and historical heroes. Their breeding ground was a mountainous desert state wedged in a corner of northwest India—geographically not very promising, but the Rawul liked to refer to it as the cradle of civilization; and though their glory had long since departed—he wasn’t even entitled to be called the Rawul anymore—he felt it to be an ideal source from which to start the whole thing up again, in a different way and on a different scale. And if he regarded his little kingdom of Dhoka—in which he still had a little palace though no income apart from what he had managed to stow away in foreign bank accounts—as the physical base of the Fourth World, then he himself was the human one: combining in his own person an ancient Oriental title and tradition with a modern Western mind and education. It was strange that such a modest man as the Rawul could have such an exalted notion of himself, but it was almost a sort of selflessness in him. He didn’t want to be a world leader, but he felt he was born to be—chosen by exterior circumstances rather than any value he set upon himself.

I was ready to concede that he had a right to our house. He was a royal person; and so I guess was the Rani, even if she wasn’t of royal origin. Neither was Crishi: but the three of them, in manner, in appearance, and in expectations, did constitute a sort of royal family with a suggestion of divine rights about them. And perhaps slowly I would have begun, or had already begun, to come around to the idea of making over our house to their movement. It did seem reasonable that such a house should be put to a purpose rather than just kept for a few people who didn’t even live in it properly. I hadn’t yet made up my mind that this particular purpose—the Fourth World—was what I would have chosen to donate it to; but since Michael had, and even Lindsay, there was no reason for me to hold back. I went to the place—behind the abandoned apple orchard—where I hid whenever I wanted to think something out, and where only Michael knew to find me; but there I overheard a scene that changed my mind again.

It was between Crishi and one of the followers—Paul, a man older than most of the others, maybe in his thirties. He looked as if he had suffered some bad sickness from which his face and body remained harrowed; he may also have been very poor, for he grabbed at food in the greedy way of someone for whom it hasn’t always been there. He liked to join in on any fun that was going, but again in a rather desperate way, and when he laughed, it half sounded like crying. Actually, he looked like a person who had cried a lot to himself but now was dried up. It was his voice I heard from my hiding place—always unmistakable because of the whine in it, which had risen to a pitch. He was pleading with someone—with Crishi. Crishi’s voice too would normally have been easy to recognize but it was transformed; not so much in itself, it was still pleasant and light, but in its tone and words, which were foul. The other kept saying “But Crishi, why me, why me?” to which Crishi gave no answer but abuse so vile that I at once got up to show myself. I was enraged to hear such words spoken from one human being to another, and in our house, in my secret hiding place! I was separated from them by a clump of blackberry bushes and, just as I parted it to get through, I saw the other man cover his face with his hands and sink slowly along the trunk of a tree to the ground, sobbing “I can’t, I can’t.” “I’ll show you how you can’t, shit hole,” Crishi said and raised his foot and kicked into Paul’s shoulder, making him fall over and lie along the ground. And when he lay there, Crishi kicked him once more and walked away. At first I wanted to run after him, but instead I retreated behind the bushes and buried myself into the overgrown grass, on my stomach, my head pressed into the earth so as not to have to hear or see anything more. After a while I felt ashamed and got up to help the other man; but when I looked at him through the bushes I saw that, though still lying where he had fallen, he was quite happily watching an ant walk up and down a blade of grass, as if nothing particularly bad had happened.

I went at once to tell Michael what I had witnessed. I described the scene in detail and even forced myself to repeat some of the words Crishi had used. Like myself, Michael detested such language—we really had a sort of physical revulsion against it, as against a dirty act; and it may be one of the reasons—among plenty of others—why we never got on well in the schools we went to or made many friends anywhere, because to most people these words don’t mean anything; they use them freely and can’t understand why we shrink from them. Michael didn’t like me to repeat them—“Yes yes all right, I get the idea,” he said when I forced them on his attention—but he wasn’t as outraged with Crishi as I thought he would be.

“You don’t know all of it,” he said. He frowned and I think would have liked to drop the subject; but he was very fair-minded and was used to explaining and interpreting everything as carefully to me as to himself, so he went on: “You don’t know anything about Paul—what sort of a person he is. Some people have to be treated in a certain way, for their own good and everyone else’s, if it’s an organization.”

An area around my heart grew cold to hear this from Michael. He felt it of course, and he continued: “You have no idea, Harriet, what it’s like to keep all this moving. It’s fine for the Rawul to sit under a tree and give these discourses, but to make everything go, that’s all on Crishi, and it’s not easy, I can tell you.”

I thought that what he was saying only meant that he liked Crishi very much. But when Michael had felt that way about someone in the past, it had never clouded his judgment. On the contrary, when he liked someone, he applied the same stringent standards to them as he did to himself, and to me: sort of welcoming them to his own world. But with Crishi, it seemed to be the other way around—as if he were giving up his own standards for Crishi’s. I think he felt it too, that there was some big change in himself; and as any change in him implied a betrayal or at least a negation of what there was between us, he seemed to feel guilty. Anyway, he didn’t want to go on talking about it, and I didn’t want him to either.

But he soon told Crishi about what I had seen, leaving him to handle my misgivings. That was the sort of situation in which Crishi must have excelled all his life—handling people, allaying suspicion, bringing them around. All his charm was geared to it. So that evening, when I was about to join the others under the tree, he stopped me; and I knew at once what he was going to say and he knew I knew and said it: “Michael wants me to explain to you.”

“Explain what?” I said coldly.

“Sometimes I act really nasty. I can be a swine.” But his lips twitched, and next moment he was frankly laughing. “I want to talk to you,” he said, looking into my face with amusement and lightly spanning my arm with his fingers. When he saw me glancing toward the tree, he said “You’ve heard the Rawul before and you’ll hear him again.”

Still holding my arm, he led me away from the tree and toward the porch in front of the house. I could have resisted but to do so—to snatch my arm away—seemed childish, so I went with him and we sat in rocking chairs. I ought to explain that the porch had always been very handsome, but now the gray-and-white marble floor was polished and the white pillars newly painted; and the lawn it faced had been smoothly mown, and at this moment one of the followers was assiduously watering it to keep it emerald green. A house and grounds like ours did need a large staff, no doubt.

“I know you don’t think too much of all that,” Crishi said, nodding toward the circle under the tree. From this distance, and in a mellow evening light, the scene was dignified and serene. They were all grouped around the Rawul as in a painting of a sage inspiring his disciples with wisdom and high ideals. “He means well, you have to admit,” Crishi said.

I said “I do admit”—no doubt sounding very uptight, for he cried out, half laughing and half exasperated: “Oh Jesus, Harriet, you sound just like Michael!”

Well, to me that was a big compliment, but I didn’t care for his familiarity; he even touched my knee—very very lightly, true, but he did touch it, as one laying a claim. I moved it away and he went on: “You’ve got such lovely principles, both of you, I think it’s wonderful.” I sat upright and stared straight ahead of me; my hands were folded in my lap. I knew I looked like generations of my own grandmothers, and I also felt like them.

Crishi dropped his voice and spoke more intimately, sharing a secret with me: “But Michael’s changing, you must have noticed. He’s coming around.” When he felt me tense up—“Yes to me, but that’s the least of it. . . . To the Rawul and the Fourth World—yes, okay, I know it can sound quite ridiculous—daft,” he said, fishing out that word from somewhere in his cultural ragbag. “But don’t think it’s all phony; all neti.” When he used that word, I flinched—he could have heard it in our sense only from Michael, who had up till then used it only with me. Crishi said it quite casually, taking possession of it as easily as of our house and everyone in it. “The Rawul really is a ruler and from a dynasty older than any other in the whole world. It’s true,” he said, stretching his eyes wide open so I could see how honest they were. “He’s a direct descendant from the Moon,” he added, and his lips twitched, and he kept on looking at me, encouraging me to smile if I wanted to; and when I didn’t, he went on smiling himself—maybe at me as well as at the Rawul. But he changed his tone: “I like it that you’re skeptical, Harriet. I wish more people were, instead of being so keen to throw themselves into the action. It’s a responsibility when they do that. I don’t mean Michael, of course.”

All the time his eyes were searching me out—as to what I was thinking, but also in another way, in a quite frankly sexual way. Only strangely it was this latter that was impersonal—it was how he instinctively looked at any girl or woman; whereas the other was much more directed at me, Harriet: what I was thinking and feeling.

“It’s really nice having Michael with us. He has a good personality. I’m not saying the others don’t—they all do really, including Paul. Paul? You know who you saw me with yesterday? Heard me with?” He laughed ruefully, and for a moment put one hand over his eyes. Then he looked at me, biting his lip: “I have this horrible foul temper making me do things. It’s a liability to me and a shock to other people.” He sounded so contrite that I began to feel I had maybe overreacted.

If I had known him better—or, at that time, liked him better—I could have told him that it was hardly the first ugly fight I had witnessed. I had grown up with scenes between my parents—when I was very small and they were still together, and later each time they met. Now they didn’t meet anymore. Whenever I wanted to see Manton, I made a trip to the city without telling Lindsay. I did it the day after my conversation with Crishi. I wanted to tell Manton about all the new developments and also about Michael and Lindsay wanting to donate Propinquity. After another, very short marriage of his had ended, Manton had given up his place in the city and gone to live in a hotel suite. This really suited his life-style much better, and he didn’t get married again but had different girlfriends.

The principal one at that time was Barbara. She was my age but had more in common with my father than me. They both liked the same sort of good time and were always going out somewhere to have fun. That day they were going to a premiere where everyone had to come dressed in 1920s clothes; I guess that was the period of the film. When I arrived, Manton was out and Barbara was trying on her dress, which didn’t suit her at all and she knew it. She was a big blond girl, very healthy and wholesome and beautiful, and she spilled out of the skinny little sheath into which she had tried to squeeze herself. “What’ll I do?” she asked me. She meant about the costume, but Barbara was always asking me what to do, mostly about herself and her life; she didn’t have many people to talk to, and was always glad when I showed up. With me helping her, she struggled out of her costume, and she tied a loose robe around herself, which suited her much better—physically and psychologically, because whenever she got me on my own, she liked to be entirely relaxed and talk about every kind of intimate thing. She had taken off her bra too and was naked under her robe. She got on to the usual subject, how Manton wouldn’t marry her and how she was afraid of losing him because she was so dumb. “I know I am, Harriet,” she said; her lovely big baby eyes filled with tears, and I said for the thousandth time, “You’re not.” And it was true: She wasn’t half as dumb as many people who think themselves very smart; and besides, she was really good for Manton, and I hoped he would stick with her. She truly loved him and looked up to him, the way I used to.

When Manton came back, she got all nervous because of not being ready. But with me there, he took no notice of her; instead he went into his father-daughter act he liked to think we had. And I suppose we did have it—we were certainly fond of each other, but it was not in a parent-and-child way. Or if it was, it was the other way around and he was the child, though I can’t say I ever really saw myself as his parent—I guess his girlfriends like Barbara filled that role, even if they didn’t know it but thought they were looking up to him. That was what Manton needed from women, to be mothered and to be admired, the way he had got used to from his own mother and, even more, from Sonya, his stepmother.

“Harriet, let me look at you!” He always said that and always went into the traditional Daddy-looking-over-daughter routine, holding me at arm’s length to beam at me with pride and pleasure. At the same time he was looking me over quite sharply. Of course he was desperate about the way I dressed—or rather, didn’t dress—and the most he could hope for was that my skin hadn’t broken out, or some other thing that might not do him credit. For a daughter was not exempt from the function of his other women of doing him credit: Manton would not have kept company with a frump. He sighed as usually on letting me go and said “Why don’t you let Barbara take you to some of her places, it’s the one thing she knows about.” When he turned his attention toward her, she at once began to babble the way she did when she was nervous—how she was just getting ready, wouldn’t be a second, that she and I got talking and she absolutely forgot the time, which was unforgivably stupid of her. The more she went on the more irritated he got, of course, and then she got more nervous, positively jumpy and crazy, and they were back in their vicious circle.

I felt sorry for her and mad at him. I knew how he could be: If you showed the least weakness or nervousness he would take advantage of it (I guess that made him a natural bully, though there was another side to him). But I hadn’t come there to listen in on their difficult relationship. I wanted to tell him about Lindsay and Propinquity—to ask his advice maybe, or just to have someone close with whom to talk about it. And as soon as Barbara had gone to squeeze herself back in her outfit, I did tell him. He was outraged. He couldn’t believe his ears. He knew Lindsay was crazy but this beat everything. Not that he cared a damn about the house—in fact, he hated it, for being ugly-—but the idea of giving it away, giving away his children’s heritage, and on such a whim and for such a cause: He was speechless, he said. I must say, his reaction seemed to me very sane and natural; I felt justified, confirmed in my own common sense while everyone else appeared to have taken leave of theirs. When Manton was angry, his color rose high and his eyes glittered cold and blue. He looked what he was perhaps meant to be: a soldier, colonizer, man of action—quite magnificent really, and formidable. At that moment poor Barbara came in, in her ridiculous little short frock, and all his manly anger turned on her: “Do you really seriously believe,” he said, very slowly and drawling like an Englishman, “that I would be seen out dead with you in that ludicrous getup?” I could see her plump knees knocking together as she hastened to agree with him that she looked terrible. “Go and take it off,” he interrupted her. “We’re not going.” She pleaded for a bit, then burst into tears—not for herself but for him, for spoiling his evening. And in fact this would have been considered unforgivable, if he hadn’t already changed his own plans; but he had—my news had stirred him up, and he decided that he would drive me back to the country to see what was going on. Barbara was allowed to come and sat in the back, talking away happily.

Here was a further complication in the house, and to explain it, I should say something of Manton’s relation to the rest of us. There is no need to talk about Manton and Lindsay: the less said there the better. And Manton and Michael—there was not much to be said there either, except that Manton was not cut out to be anyone’s father and especially not Michael’s. Over the years they had learned to tolerate each other, which they did mainly by never seeing each other. Then there was Manton and Mrs. Schwamm—he was simply delighted to hear she was back, not only because she was such a terrific cook but because they had this thing about adoring one another. Manton was the type to make himself tremendously popular with any domestic staff, and they were always eager to do something extra for him; and that was how it was with him and Mrs. Schwamm—whom he alone was allowed to call Else, or even Elsie. Finally, Manton and Jean—well, that was better than one would have thought possible, considering how he was this very sexy man whose women had to be women, and she was what she was. But I think they were useful to each other. Jean kept Lindsay completely out of his hair, while he had put Lindsay off men forever—so Lindsay herself said, and in fact, on the very rare occasions when he was around, Lindsay simply clung to Jean, as for protection against him.

So Manton entered this arena—only to be thrown at once because everything had changed beyond his recognition. I had tried to tell him something about the Rawul and his party, but it wasn’t possible to get across the fact of their influence: of how they had taken complete possession of the house and everyone in it. And Manton himself was at once drawn into the new dispensation. It happened just as soon as he saw the Rani and was bowled over by her. She was used to that—people being bowled over by her—and knew exactly how to handle him. She wasn’t flirtatious as much as friendly; that is, she held him at a distance by giving him her respectful attention; but she was this phenomenally beautiful woman, so that while she puffed him up with her respect, she brought him down with her aloofness. I wasn’t sure why she took even that much trouble with him; she didn’t with anybody else. Maybe she thought he could be useful in getting me to donate the house; and of course Manton was a very handsome and attractive man, always had been—I mean, it was what he was, it was the essence of his personality.

Barbara’s reaction to the scene was unexpected. She was upset about Manton and the Rani, but that wasn’t all of it: She hated everything else too—I would never have thought that sweet, soft Barbara could hate anything or anyone, but my God she did. It was awful for her when Manton decided he had to stay; he told her to go back to New York and pack some of his clothes and bring them up, and when she began to fuss, he said “Well you can bring yours too”; but that was the only concession he would make. When she tried to argue, he said “I’ve never heard such selfish nonsense”—pointing out that he had been called to help decide whether his son and daughter should give up their house, and how generous it was of him to allow her to be in on this family affair. She found she had no choice—if she wanted to stay with him, that is, and she did; but she was horribly upset, both before driving to the city to get their clothes and after she came back. I found her in tears in her bedroom—she had to sleep separately from Manton because he got onto this high horse of how it wasn’t proper for her to share his bed in his wife’s house and with his children present. I felt sorry for her, and also that it was mostly my fault that they were here—they had been all right in New York, living in their hotel and going to costume balls.

Michael came in on me while I was with Barbara in her room. This was constantly happening all over the house, people looking for each other in each other’s rooms, everyone with something important, and usually intimate, to say. Barbara was lying on the bed crying, and I was sitting beside her. This room suited her well—it was as fluffy and fair as she was, with ruffled curtains and flouncy chair covers and an ivory carpet with pink roses on it. Barbara was never very articulate, and besides crying couldn’t really explain herself. When Michael and I tried to comfort her, she said “It’s not only Manton and her.” Here she burst into a new flood of tears; she cried like a child and her face went puffy like a child’s. “It’s all of it,” she said, when she could speak again. “All of them. You don’t know,” she said. Michael and I looked at each other across her. If Barbara implied she knew something that he and I didn’t, it must be true because usually she was very self-deprecating. Barbara’s background and experience were quite different from what one might have expected: Looking at her, knowing her, one would think she came from some nice family in Connecticut, but in fact her mother was a movie star and Barbara had spent her early years in Hollywood and on film sets in places like Morocco or Rome. And now what she tried to explain to Michael and me was that the atmosphere in the house—I suppose she meant the way everyone was so intensely involved with everyone else—was like it used to be around her mother and her associates when they were all locked up with each other on location. And just as she had got this out, there was a brief and very authoritarian knock on the door, which opened immediately afterward—I didn’t have to turn around; I could tell by the shock passing through Michael that it was Crishi. “Oh there you are,” said Crishi, enfolding the three of us in his smile.

An instant change came over Barbara. She had been lying there in a heap, making no attempt to hide her tears, but now she shot up on her bed and sat very upright, arranging her dress to cover her thighs and knees. She held her head high, and though her cheeks were still wet and swollen, she put a prim, distant, disapproving look on her face, like a matron with an uninvited, undesired guest. I was amazed—I didn’t think she could be like that; I had never seen her with anyone she disliked. Crishi felt it immediately, and he moderated his smile and said he hoped he wasn’t in the way, or anything? He looked from one to the other and especially warmly at Barbara, who became more prim. Then Crishi raised one slender finger at Michael, meaning one moment, very politely, but also meaning come here, now. And Michael went at once; without one glance at me or Barbara, he obeyed as he would a master’s call. When they had gone, Barbara said “He’s the worst, Harriet. No,” she said as though I had contradicted her, “he’s a bad person.” I didn’t think he was a bad person, on the contrary; but I guess I still didn’t feel strongly enough one way or the other to stick up for him with Barbara.

I must have wiped out the incident with Paul; or allowed myself to put a different interpretation on it—at any rate, I no longer held it against Crishi. I hadn’t seen Paul around for some time, and assumed he was gone wherever it was Crishi wanted to send him. I didn’t ask about him; it wasn’t important enough. And they were always coming and going, all the followers—there were so many of them and so many different missions they had to fulfill and different centers to liaison with. I was used to seeing them tramping up and down the stairs, but it was a shock to Manton. In his day, if there was a crowd in the house, it was one that had come for a dance or a party. “What are they—hippies?” he asked me, hippies being the latest thing he had heard of. But Manton was adaptable, and it took him no time to get used to them—or rather, fail to notice them, the way he never had difficulty ignoring people he didn’t need. As in a restaurant, he would make a point of being terribly friendly with the waiter who served him and the maître d’ who gave him a good table, but everyone else might as well be plants and stones. It would be untrue to say he was a snob because it had nothing to do with class, only with whether a person impinged on his life or not. So he would brush past the “hippies” on the stairs, genuinely not seeing them; and would sit for hours with Else Schwamm in the kitchen, telling her how he was falling in love with the Rani, and what should he do about it; and she, without for one second interrupting the kneading and rolling of her pastry, face red, arms pumping, would give him the benefit of her life’s experience, the two of them convinced that it was the most important topic in the world.

The rest of us knew better. I say “us,” including myself, for I was now in a position where I wanted to believe—that is, believe with Michael that it was all for some high purpose, and not with Barbara that it was a fraud. I knew Michael wouldn’t have been taken in by a fraud. He had spent too much time—all his life practically, and mine—examining truth and faith and every other fundamental principle. He wouldn’t compromise any of that on account of his own feelings—for Crishi, that is. He had been in love before, and whereas it may have made him suspend his quest for a while, it had never led him away from it. And it couldn’t be so now, when he felt more strongly than I had ever seen him do before. I believed in him, which was how I was ready to believe in everything else.

It was being made clear to me that we were very fortunate to have been chosen as one of the spearheads of the movement. The Rawul’s followers felt it strongly—that they were pioneers, leaders of a mission, apostles or whatever; and this was brought home to me one day in a quarrel I had with one of the girls over the use of a bathroom. The bathroom was mine—anyway, the one adjoining my room—and while I had accepted the fact that the Rawul and his party had more or less taken over everywhere else, I continued to think of this one room and bathroom as exclusively my own. But once when I tried to go in, I found the door locked. I wasn’t pleased but I had lived enough in dorms to take it philosophically and just wait. Whoever was inside didn’t come out and didn’t come out, till finally I banged on the door and yelled a bit. A yell came back—it was one of the girls and she was very rude, so I banged some more and was very rude to her, and we had this shouting match through the door. When she came out at last, she was livid; she was holding a book, which she must have been reading in there. She waved it in my face—it was the Dhammapada, and I understood that it was very bad to disturb anyone in the reading of that. I calmed down and said that there were plenty of bathrooms in the house without her having to come in here to use mine. As soon as I uttered the word mine, I realized I had made a mistake. I had played into her hands and she could take off from there, about possessiveness and ego and all the rest of it. It so happened I agreed with her, though under the circumstances I couldn’t say so; and anyway, she didn’t give me a chance to—she just went on and on. She was a very thin, pale girl, who looked as if she were suffering from amoebic dysentery; but if she was physically debilitated, mentally she was very fierce—that is, in her convictions. She asked me did I have any idea what it meant that this house had been chosen, and we with it? In case I didn’t, she explained that, whatever we might have been before, we now had to live up to the responsibility of our position. By the time she finished, she seemed to have mellowed toward me and to be really on my side; she even pressed my arm to show me she knew how difficult it was to live up to something greater than oneself.