Читать книгу Three Continents - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 13

THE Rawul wanted to meet our grandparents—that is, our paternal ones, from Manton’s side (our grandparents from Lindsay’s side were dead—that was how we owned Propinquity and the rest of their property). I couldn’t see the point of it myself, but he seemed to think it was important; he wanted to make influential contacts wherever he could. Actually, Grandfather wasn’t all that influential anymore, for he had retired several years ago. He was also too preoccupied with his own affairs to have time to spare for anything else. By his affairs I mean the book he was writing about his public career; his moves between his house in town and his place on the Island, with all the books and papers he needed to take, and the clothes and makeup Sonya needed; and Sonya herself. She was his wife now—our grandmother had died several years earlier—but they had been together long before that, and whenever he was sent on a new posting, she used to take a place nearby. In the end she moved right into the residence and they became a ménage à trois, which was useful after Grandmother got sick and needed someone to look after her. By that time Sonya was really like her sister, although they couldn’t have been more different—Grandmother was New England, and Sonya some sort of Russian refugee. Sonya was much, much more effusive than Grandmother, and she adored children and had never had any of her own, so Michael and I benefited from that all through these years.

When the Rawul wanted to make contact with Grandfather, Michael and I decided that the best way was through Sonya. Although he had been a diplomat for so many years, there had always been something skeptical and aloof about Grandfather, which made it difficult to approach him; and after his heart attack, it became even more difficult, as though he had withdrawn a little farther from the world. Sonya was the opposite—she must have been in her late sixties by this time (no one knew how old she was), but she was still open to every kind of new enthusiasm, and when we phoned and told her about the Rawul, she gave a gasp and said she must meet him. I went with him to the city; I drove the car and he sat in the back so he could spread out and study his papers.

The meeting was an immediate success. Meetings with Sonya always were; she was so eager to be won over that she ran forward most of the way herself: literally, for although their manservant opened the door, Sonya herself came tripping up as fast as she could to welcome us. She was tiny, and the very high heels and high golden hairdo she wore didn’t help—she had to stretch up with all her might to get as far as kissing my cheek. Actually, she liked to kiss right on the mouth—it was some Russian custom, I think—but I had long since learned to turn my face aside at the right moment. She had a sumptuous tea ready, with every kind of pastry and cake she must have run out herself to select at Greenberg’s, and she wore one of her flowered silk tea gowns that opened deep, deep down into a cleft. Grandfather was summoned from his study, and under her excited fluttering—she appeared actually to be skipping around them—he and the Rawul shook hands and looked each other steadily in the eye like two statesmen. I suppose there was a sort of historic ambience about their meeting—or would have been, if it hadn’t happened to take place in Sonya’s drawing room. I say Sonya’s, for although the house had been given to Grandfather’s parents on their wedding in 1898, after her marriage to Grandfather Sonya had managed to make it her own. The original sofas and cabinets and tables and bookcases were still there, but Sonya had overlaid them with her own taste and possessions: with fringed shawls, with rose-and-gold upholstery, and a whole heap of treasures dating from her traveling days around Europe and the Near and Far East and her forays into Madison Avenue antique shops—but all of them, wherever they had come from, marked by a preponderance of gilt and shell-pink ornamentation.

It was an incongruous setting for Grandfather, but he didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he loved it—no doubt because he loved her so much and was so proud and pleased with her; and all the time she talked and fluttered and fussed around, he watched her with a smile and look you wouldn’t think someone like Grandfather could have had for anyone. Without her, I don’t suppose he would have had much time for the Rawul and his movement and his inspirational style of speaking. However, he sat there listening patiently, one long leg stretched stiffly out in front of him, and he even took the trouble to nod from time to time as though he were listening, which he probably wasn’t but was waiting for the polite moment to return to his study. Sonya was beside herself—everything the Rawul said struck chords in her, and she even claimed that, if she had been clever enough, she would have thought of something like it herself. She said she had always had this intuition—not that she was an intellectual person or educated or anything, but she had traveled and seen a great deal, many many civilizations old and young, and it seemed to her that something like the Rawul’s Fourth World was what humanity needed. “Oh wonderful, wonderful, marvelous!” she exclaimed often, clasping her small wrinkled hands with all her rings and squeezing Grandfather’s arm to make him respond too. But he only sat there and smiled a little bit at her enthusiasm—except once, when he leaned forward keenly and made the Rawul repeat something he had just said.

This was about Lindsay, Michael, and me donating Propinquity. I was surprised myself to hear the Rawul refer to it so naturally, almost casually. There had been no reference to it for some time, which had been a relief to me, making me hope that the question had been shelved and with it the need for me to decide. But now I learned it had been decided—anyway, the Rawul seemed to think so. And when Grandfather heard that, he turned to me and asked “Is that what you’re doing, Harriet?”

Grandfather’s eyes were the same as Manton’s and Michael’s: far-seeing seafarer’s eyes—though we don’t come from seafaring stock at all but from Irish Protestant landowners whose younger sons usually became clergymen or went to India, except for our ancestor, who had come to the American colonies.

I hesitated while Grandfather waited, and the Rawul, smiling politely, also waited for me to confirm his statement. Fortunately Sonya rushed in with “And they say the young are not idealists! Darling, give Sonya a kiss!” She held out her cheek to me and I had to go over and kiss it. I tried to get away with brushing that creamed, rouged, and powdered surface with my lips, but she caught my face between her hands and firmly planted her mouth on mine, which made even Grandfather smile, along with the Rawul.

Sonya and Grandfather usually went to the house on the Island just before the Fourth, but this year they had had to postpone their visit because Grandfather’s heart trouble had started up again. Now he said he was feeling perfectly well and was eager to get to the Island, where he loved to be. Only Sonya could have persuaded him to break their journey and pay us a visit at Propinquity; after meeting the Rawul, she could hardly wait to see the rest of the movement. Their reception was organized on a grand scale. The Rawul and Rani, with Crishi just a little way behind them, stood in welcome on the front porch and led them ceremonially into the drawing room. Here refreshments were served while everyone sat stiffly on chairs—the Rawul and Grandfather on the principal chairs on either side of the fireplace, both of them bolt upright as for an official portrait. It was not unlike a state visit, with no conversation at all except for a few platitudes delivered into the glacial silence. Even Sonya knew to keep quiet. The Rawul and Grandfather, both of them born to state visits, easily assumed the formal dignity expected of them.

When it was over, we all reverted to our usual selves—this was something that had always surprised me during Grandfather’s embassy days: how quickly everyone became normal again after going through some pompous official ceremony. Sonya tripped excitedly around the house, like one returning to a childhood home, although she hadn’t even visited us here all that often. She really was very sentimental. But it wasn’t put on; she did feel that way and had tears in her eyes as she hugged everyone—Lindsay, Jean, Mrs. Schwamm—and kissed them on the mouth. Michael was her very special favorite—she claimed that she understood him completely—and she greeted him in what was for her a restrained manner, confining herself to standing on tiptoe and kissing his chin.

She saw at once that Crishi was someone very special too. She stood in front of him, looked up at him, and exhaled a sigh of recognition; perhaps they had met in some previous birth. Sonya was a believer in reincarnation and often came across people she had been close to in other centuries. She held his hand and turned it over a few times and nodded; I don’t know whether she was admiring the shape or reading his palm. He took her in his stride, not putting himself out to charm her but just being his usual self. It was the Rawul who made the greatest effort to impress our guests. An hour or two before the usual evening session, he retired to his room, and when he emerged, it was as if he had charged himself with some new and powerful voltage. He had changed into his native dress and looked imposing in a long shiny tunic with jeweled buttons. And what he said that evening was more impressive, poignant, and more personal than his usual address, as if he had thought and felt it all out again from the beginning.

Once again he told us how his family, descending from the moon and passing through a series of semidivine incarnations, had established their earthly kingdom as far as the Caspian Sea on the one hand, and on the other into the Gangetic plains. His own ancestors, after surging as conquerors over Persia, had been driven back into Rajputana, winning and losing various kingdoms until finally cornered in a northwestern fastness of stony desert. Here they had built their fortress on a rock and defended themselves against all invaders so successfully that they were still there today—the oldest surviving kingdom in the world. They were no longer kings except in lineage; modern democracy had caught up with them. He was glad, the Rawul assured us, even proud: To be part of the modern world meant more to him than all his ancient titles and privileges. However, he could not escape from or deny his own lineage—that he was a descendant of a royal line so long that it reached back beyond antiquity to divinity: yes, to a time when the gods still walked on this earth, or rather, when there was not yet any division between this world and another, higher one. It was a thought that had haunted him as a child—especially when he climbed to the roof of the old palace built on a rock, where he truly felt nearer to heaven than to earth. Such a child would have different thoughts from other children: A different light would shine in his eyes—and here he invited us to look into his eyes. Sonya, who was sitting right by him, did so and exclaimed at the way the Rawul’s light-colored eyes contrasted with his Indian complexion. It came from looking up so much as a child into the sky, he explained, smiling, half-deprecating, inviting us to treat it as a joke if we wanted to. Grandfather said “Hm,” but there was no other comment, only a silence that I believe was rapt.

Whatever it was he had absorbed into himself up there in the rocky kingdom of the desert did not leave him when he was sent away to school in England: to Harrow, where his father and grandfather had gone before him. Remote and dreamy, he did not prosper in studies, sport, or any other activity. But already his vision was forming, strengthened now by his study of history and civilizations. He came to a conscious realization of everything that lay behind him and was in him: and it was at that time, as a schoolboy in cold damp Middlesex, that he came truly to understand his ancient lineage, his own place in the story of Man, and with it, the responsibility that place conferred on him. Technically, he was no longer a king; there were no more kings; the world today didn’t want kings. What then did it want? the Rawul asked us (Grandfather said “Hm” again). It wanted, the Rawul told him and us, men who were prepared to be kings in spirit: not to conquer and rule kingdoms but, extracting what was best in each, to merge them into one great all-embracing kingdom of this world. This was his dream, he said. This was what had brought him to our shores, here into the heart of America: He looked around at all of us—Lindsay, Jean, Mrs. Schwamm, Michael and me, Sonya and Grandfather—in the hope that we would share his dream and help to bring it to fulfillment. He would not deny that he stood before us as a man with a mission, imposed on him by his birth and kingdom. And if he himself was small and wanting—and he said he was, though he didn’t look it at all, tall and plump, shining in silk and jewels—he invited us not to regard him as a person but as a world spirit seeking to express itself; and to look not at but beyond him, not at what he alone but what all of us together could achieve—and here he waved his hand at where the two flags hung side by side over the lake, and everyone looked up at them except Grandfather, who said “Hm” again.

Grandfather was sitting a little apart from the rest of us. We were as usual down on the grass, some cross-legged, some with our knees drawn up, facing the Rawul, who sat on a chair to address us. As a special courtesy to Grandfather and Sonya, two more chairs had been placed at the outskirts of our circle opposite the Rawul. Grandfather made no fuss about occupying his, but Sonya wouldn’t dream of it—she at once placed herself in the front of our group and even managed to get into a cross-legged position. Seated thus, her hands folded in her lap, she looked up at the Rawul, ready and eager to be inspired. Grandfather, although directly facing the Rawul and on the same level with him, did not look at, but away from him, across the lake; only sometimes he shot him a quick glance from under his brows, before at once resuming his faraway gaze over the water. The Rawul appeared to be addressing him more than anyone else, but I wasn’t at all sure that Grandfather was listening—except for the times he said “Hm,” though that too might have been at his own thoughts; he often did that, commenting to himself in his own mind.

Afterward he asked to speak to Michael and me. He came up to Michael’s room. It was strange to see him there—I mean, I was used to seeing Grandfather at some great carved desk under the American eagle, not having to perch on the edge of Michael’s narrow bed; but there was no chair, only the bare floor where Michael and I sat side by side listening to him. He asked us were we sure about donating Propinquity. Michael said yes at once, but added that I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I felt a bit—I don’t know, weak or mean-spirited, in the face of his absolute certainty. But it was always like that: Michael strong and certain and looking straight ahead, while I vacillated and saw all sorts of obstacles right and left preventing me from making up my mind. And when Grandfather turned to me, to ask what held me back, there was nothing definite I could say; and Michael spoke up for me, that I still needed time to think. When Grandfather asked him was he sure that he had thought enough, he said of course; and when Grandfather persisted, he became impatient and asked had Grandfather ever known him not to be absolutely certain, and Grandfather had to admit that no, he had not. Then there was a silence between them—not a hostile one, but because Grandfather respected Michael too much to attempt to argue with him. It had been like that ever since Michael was little. Even at that time he had been very definite and decisive in everything he thought and did, and Grandfather treated him as though he were absolutely equal in experience and authority with him. Grandfather loved him very, very much and was proud of him: perhaps also in reaction to Manton, of whom he wasn’t proud at all, and I’m afraid he didn’t love or even like him either; it was a great relief to him to have a grandson as different from his son as Michael was from Manton.

Grandfather asked me, “If Michael is so sure, why aren’t you?”

“I told you,” Michael put in, more impatiently. “Harriet’s still thinking it out.”

Grandfather smiled a bit. He always liked it when Michael was assertive with him; he liked it in general that Michael had an assertive character. He turned to me again: “Even your mother it seems has thought it out.” We didn’t have to comment on that. We were aware he was speaking ironically, or even cynically. Everyone knew that Lindsay never thought, let alone thought out, but did what she wanted from moment to moment, the same way as Manton. Whenever I heard Grandfather speak about our parents to Sonya—he never mentioned them to anyone else—it was always as “Those two fools,” and he could pack an awful lot of expression into it; if we were nearby, Sonya would say warningly, “Les enfants, darling.”

But now Grandfather didn’t want to speak about Lindsay and her motives, or even about Michael’s and mine. He launched off into a sort of soliloquy of his own, sitting there on Michael’s bed and the two of us looking up at him as if listening to some ancient mariner’s tale. Grandfather was in appearance not unlike an ancient mariner, with his big weathered bulk and his white brows beetling over his keen seafarer’s eyes. He had a deep, slow voice that he never had to raise much, people always being prepared to listen to him attentively. His accent and speech were educated, upper class, but running underneath the surface was an American sort of burr that got stronger as he got older and was redolent of the locality of his childhood. This is more or less what he said, and it was so unusual for him to speak to us at such length, and so intimately, that I can still remember it almost word for word after these many years. There was a special-occasion feeling among the three of us. I had never before felt so strongly how he was our grandfather, transmitting to us his own experience and what he had himself received from those who had gone before us:

“You could say it’s none of my business what you do with your inheritance from your mother’s side of the family. It’s for you to dispose of as you think fit. But I’ve been thinking lately about inheritance in general and what it means; what it entails. I’m aware that nowadays young people, people like you, Michael and Harriet, prefer to travel light. You prefer to be rid of those properties, privileges, and responsibilities that we were taught to take good care of. Well I’m not saying we’re right and you’re wrong; no I’m not saying that; I’m only trying to tell you how it was when I was your age and my father might be talking to me like I’m talking to you now. As you know, my father was in the government, as was his father before him. Public service was expected in our family. That goes right back to the first Wishwell to come to this country. Born an Irish soldier, he turned himself into an American farmer to till this land for his American family—he married first Augusta Linfield and after her demise her elder sister Miss Louisa; and when it came time to fight the British army, he went right back to being a soldier again. Well, when they hanged him for a rebel, it was up to Louisa Wishwell to raise her own and her sister’s children, fourteen of them altogether. Nine of them survived and spread all over the country, some as farmers, some as traders, and lawyers, and a preacher too; every kind of trade and profession. I guess we’ve got family all over, some rich and educated, some plain and poor. Our own branch of Wishwells—and we’re the only ones to pronounce it Witchell—goes back to Henry, who returned to Concord in the 1830s after an unsuccessful spell of growing oranges in Louisiana. He started his own newspaper, The Fighter, and went to jail three times for his radical activities; and once he had to be hidden away by the marshal from an antiabolitionist mob. His sisters and his daughters were not far behind him—we’ve always had strong women in our family, Harriet, ready to stand up first for the slaves and then what they called the other slaves, that is, their own sex. I don’t need to remind you of Harriet Wishwell, the first female president of the Anti-Slavery League, or of Maria Wishwell Knox, the author of Let Us Be Sea-Captains! I still remember that other great reformer and suffragette, my great-aunt Harriet Wishwell, who lived up to the age of ninety-eight. It was about her Commodore Dewey said he would rather face the entire Spanish navy than one Harriet Wishwell. These matrons brought up their sons the way the Romans did, and there was never any question in our family of not serving the country in which we had the good fortune to be born. My grandfather, Michael, born 1849, enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts, pretending he was sixteen when he was thirteen, lost a foot at Appomattox, graduated from Harvard College in 1870, set up as a lawyer, made money, bought land, went to Congress, lost an election, made more money, went to the Senate and became secretary of the interior under Teddy Roosevelt. My father, your great-grandfather—more or less the same career except he fought not in the Civil but the Spanish-American war, and in the navy not the army, bought not farmland but urban property and, for himself and his family, the place on the Island. That brings us up to me, and you know all about that.”

He was silent for a while, maybe to let Michael and me recollect what we knew about him. We knew him partly as our grandfather and partly as a public figure, and in both aspects he was a sort of monument to us. We also had some sense of his earlier years, from photographs we had seen—as a very handsome Harvard undergraduate; as a bridegroom outside Trinity Church with his tall fair bride and surrounded by his own and Grandmother’s family, who looked just like them, bred from the same stock; as a young congressman in Washington; in Paris on his first international assignment; windblown on the Island, in white ducks and yachting cap, having lost an election; with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park; being entertained by Nehru in New Delhi as a member of the Peace Commission.

Then Grandfather challenged Michael: “Just tell me why you want to give the house.”

I can’t think of two people more different from each other than Grandfather and Michael: physically for one thing, Grandfather with his great hulking figure, and Michael slight and slender; and also in their ideas. And yet they did have something in common-—if only the way they both spoke very slowly, so that you knew whatever they said came out of their own deep, careful thinking. Manton was more like Grandfather in appearance, but somehow he had less of Grandfather’s air or ambience than Michael. All three of them had the same seafarer’s eyes—except that Michael’s seemed not to be looking outward over limitless oceans but inward, to whatever oceans lay there.

Grandfather and I waited respectfully for Michael to get his thoughts together; and when he had done so, this is what he finally came out with: “I guess I’m impressed with the whole thing; the whole idea: making a new world based on everything that is best in previous worlds. It sounds suspect when you say it straight out like that, but you have to think of everything that’s behind it. All the civilizations, all the ideals. And the Rawul and everyone with him, they really believe the way no one else I’ve ever met does; and as you both know, I’ve spent my time looking around for something I can believe in, and commit myself to it. That’s not so easy nowadays, not so straightforward and plain cut as when you tell us about the earlier Wishwells. Or maybe it wasn’t that straightforward for them either—how do we know they didn’t have the same kind of seeking and inquiring to do before they committed themselves? I’m sure they were serious people who didn’t just jump in anywhere; but once they did, they were ready to give everything-—a foot at Appomattox, or whatever. So in face of all that, the house doesn’t seem such a very big deal, does it.” He reflected awhile and we knew he had more to say, and we waited. “Let me put it another way,” he said. “When Grandmother used to take me to church sometimes, she gave me a silver dollar for when they came around with the collection. She’d watch me like a hawk to make sure I threw it in, and even then I hung on to it till she had to pinch my arm a bit. I didn’t see any sense in throwing that dollar; I knew there were a lot better things I could do with it. But I can’t think of anything better I can do with this house than throw it in for the Rawul, and no one has to pinch my arm to make me because I’m ready and willing and glad to do it.”

Grandfather waited to hear if there was any more coming, and when there wasn’t, he said “And that’s all?”

“That’s all,” Michael said, without stopping to think this time.

“You’re sure that’s all?”

Michael was sure. Grandfather nodded and appeared satisfied; he believed him. But I’m not sure that I did, as totally and absolutely as I usually believed Michael. Of course I knew him to be completely altruistic and idealistic—but in the present case, weren’t there also his feelings for Crishi? I’m not saying they were responsible for his decision, but hadn’t they contributed at least something to it? If I had asked him outright, he would have denied it; though not the feelings themselves—he was quite frank and open about those. For me, the fact that he had them, was weakened by them, was not so much a flaw—Michael had no flaws for me—but a mystery in him; as were Grandfather’s feelings for Sonya, which were so different from the rest of him. Perhaps Grandfather was thinking about that very same thing, for he remained sitting on the side of Michael’s bed with the same sort of soft smile around his hard mouth that he had when he spoke to or of Sonya; and he said in the ruminative way people have when they are speaking to themselves as much as to anyone else: “We all like to think we’re in charge of our decisions, but who knows what else there is, what moods and weathers we have that make us do what we do and be what we are: yes, even two Wishwell men like you and me, Michael,” He smiled down at us in the same sweet, loving way he had with Sonya, enfolding us. I don’t think he could really see us because the room was in shadow, certainly down on the floor where we were, though we could still see his face lit by the twilight coming through Michael’s uncurtained windows.

Grandfather also spoke to Lindsay about the house, and this was unfortunate because it upset both of them. It says a lot for Grandfather’s sense of duty that he opened the topic with her at all, went out of his way to do so, for usually they avoided speaking to each other beyond the most common and banal generalities, and not even those, if possible. Only to see Lindsay irritated Grandfather, and he couldn’t stand to hear her deliver her opinions in her little-girl voice. But he always controlled himself and said nothing either to her or about her, except maybe privately in a sardonic aside to Sonya; but Lindsay of course voiced her opinion of him for anyone to hear. After their interview about the house, I saw Grandfather walk away in grim silence, while she, gasping for breath, uttered indignant half-sentences such as “Can you imagine” and “This is really” and “I must say.” She didn’t like him for himself, and she detested him for being Manton’s father; and nothing could have confirmed her resolution to give away Propinquity more than his suggestion that she should have second thoughts about it. She was so upset that Jean could do nothing for her and had to appeal to Sonya; Lindsay’s feelings for—or rather against—Manton’s family did not include Sonya, whom she liked. She felt that Sonya understood her, and Sonya said she did—“I understand you, darling, completely,” she said, even when Lindsay was what she herself called “just out of my mind,” after her interview with Grandfather.

The way Sonya excused or explained Grandfather to Lindsay was to say “But darling what do you expect—he’s a Taurus.” Sonya herself was a Capricorn, which made her highly idealistic and open to new ideas. She was certainly open to the Rawul and his movement—she ran around the house stirred up and excited, talking to everyone, including the followers, whom the rest of us ignored. She felt that it was the beginning of a new era in our personal history as well as that of mankind; and she and Else Schwamm spent many hours down in the kitchen poring over their tarot cards, of which both were skilled exponents. Sometimes they were joined by the Rani, and when the three of them were huddled together over the kitchen table, it was as if some mysterious rite were taking place in the bowels of the house that would spread an influence over all our lives.

Around this time there were some unpleasant incidents involving the Rawul’s followers and some young people of the neighborhood. Although the grounds and the lake were private property, the local boys had always taken it for granted that they could come to fish there in the summer and skate in the winter and for occasional picnics and parties. If they left too many beer cans littered about, Jean would get after them and make a fuss, ending in nothing more than they would have to come help sweep the leaves or cut the grass. But after the Rawul’s followers took charge of the maintenance of the house and grounds, they were stricter about trespassing and put up POSTED signs all over the place. The local boys did not feel these applied to them and kept right on coming in, and this led to arguments between them and the followers. The followers were sort of schooled in patience and self-control; but the boys were some of them quite rough, and certainly weren’t going to be pushed around, they said, by a bunch of weirdos. They kept right on coming as before, fishing and drinking beer. But one evening two of the followers came out to draw their attention to the POSTED signs; and when the boys laughed at them, they returned with some more followers, so that the boys, greatly outnumbered, had to pack up and leave. A few hours later they returned, with reinforcements; they brought pizzas and six-packs and started a party down by the barns. It was late by then, and many people had gone to sleep but woke up again with all the noise.

Michael and I had been swimming by the waterfall with Crishi. I ought to say that we did this every night and we stayed there many hours before slowly trailing back to the house; sometimes we lay down in a field for a while and looked up at the moon. When we came back that night, we were surprised to see the lights on in the house and everyone woken up, with the boys having their party. By that time Jean had emerged in her robe and slippers and was reading what she called the riot act to them; but they just invited her to join them, and one of them put his arms around her and made her dance with him. She pretended to be angry but couldn’t help laughing; it was all quite good-natured, and some people in the house had stuck their heads out the windows and were enjoying what was going on.

Michael and I stayed down in the grounds to watch, and though we joined Jean in making some feeble protests to the boys, we didn’t mean to spoil their fun. Crishi, however, had gone straight up to the house, and it wasn’t long before he came out again with all the male followers behind him like an army. And like an army they converged on the boys, and what followed was unexpected and shocking. The boys didn’t have a chance against the followers, who used what looked like some very sophisticated techniques on them. It happened so fast—one moment everyone had been laughing and kidding around and there was music playing, and next thing there were these horrible thuds and cries of pain and the grim-faced followers stomping around on the cassette players, the pizzas, and the beer cans. In no time it was over; the boys had been pushed into their cars and the followers were cleaning up the mess on the grass. Everyone went back in the house and soon the lights were out again, and I guess we were all supposed to be asleep and not thinking about what had happened.

But we did think about it—I did, and Michael did, and Michael must have talked about it to Crishi, because by the time I came to talk to Michael, which was the next morning, he had already come right around to Crishi’s point of view and explained it to me. I tried to protest—I said I didn’t think the boys had actually been doing anything so bad—but Michael said it had been a challenge, which had to be faced and dealt with. Well maybe, I said—but dealt with in that way? Then Michael said that action has no degree, and either you do something or you don’t do it.

The Rawul was more accommodating—he had to be because he had to deal with Grandfather. I came in on them at breakfast in the dining room next morning: The Rawul had as usual heaped his plate from all the silver-covered dishes on the sideboard, while Grandfather, at the opposite end of the table, was only stirring a spoon around his cup of tea. Whenever the two of them were together, they gave the impression of two potentates conferring on matters of high state; and like two such potentates, they usually didn’t have to say anything because everything had been said by others at preliminary discussions, and all that was required of them was to be there face to face. But this time that was not so; for while Grandfather did sit there stirring in silence, the Rawul was talking quite volubly, as one out to convince, and justify.

If someone else had been saying what he was, I might not have accepted it. But it was the Rawul talking, whom I knew to be kind and a gentleman; a kind gentleman. He spoke in his old-fashioned upper-class accent, stopping every now and again to take another mouthful of scrambled eggs with kidneys; and his voice was soft and so were the graceful gestures he made with his plump hands, one of them holding a fork. And he was utterly and absolutely sincere, as was obvious from the vibrations that came into his voice, and the passionate way he shut his eyes when he spoke of what was most precious to him: his plan for a new world, a Fourth World, where all that was best in the other three would come to fruition. That sounds abstract and unreal, but it wasn’t like that at all when he said it, because it came so deeply out of him, out of the Rawul in his English suit, eating his breakfast. It was, as he said, his world view, which he was in the process of putting into action with whatever means were available to him. These were not extensive, he admitted; indeed, to the casual eye they might appear extremely, even ludicrously, limited: just himself and the Rani and Crishi, and a handful of followers. But, he asked Grandfather, wasn’t that the way every great world movement had started off—whether it was religious or, in keeping with our times, secular and political, a drive by men not toward God but toward other men, toward humanity? He balled his fist against his heart, as if the weight of feeling there was heavy and hurting—his feeling for the humanity he wished to redeem and lead into the paradise of his Fourth World. Grandfather kept right on stirring his tea to cool it; his silence was disconcerting, as was the way he stared at the painting over the Rawul’s head—a portrait of Lindsay’s grandfather, who had made his money in the dry-goods business but here looked more like a Renaissance prince. The Rawul faltered a bit, and then he had to come down from the lofty height to which he had risen to a lower level, to discuss the boys who had been thrown off the property. And in view of what had gone before, it did seem petty that this incident had had to be mentioned, let alone justified; and it was magnanimous of the Rawul to see the boys’ point of view the way he did. He said he knew they meant no harm, that they thought they were only having a party, but that in fact and unbeknown to themselves, they were doing real harm: for they were challenging and thereby obstructing the work of his followers, the global regeneration that had been set in motion, and no one said the Rawul—and here he did look less like a kind gentleman and more like a world leader—no one would ever be allowed to do that.

After the night of the boys’ invasion, security measures were introduced, and though there was no actual boundary wall, a very definite demarcation line was drawn around Propinquity. Trees along the lake and on the outskirts of the property had red PATROLLED and POSTED signs stuck to them; gaps in the hedges were carefully closed with new plantings; one of the two entrances to the main driveway was barricaded completely; and at the other a sort of checkpoint was set up where two followers monitored all entrances and exits. Even Mrs. Pickles, when she arrived to work next morning, had to be cleared; she muttered darkly as she pushed her vacuum cleaner to and fro and packed up and left early, without having her cup of coffee with Else Schwamm. The same dark mood was shown by the deliverymen who came on their usual rounds that day, and the heating people who were checking our oil supply. They brought news of general indignation in the neighborhood, for it seemed some of the boys had been quite badly hurt and their parents were making a complaint to the police. The Rawul and his party carried on smilingly with their daily routine; only Crishi was busier than ever that day, talking a lot on the phone in his easy, persuasive manner and from time to time roaring off in the convertible he drove to make visits in the neighborhood. I don’t know whether it was as a result of his activity, but neither parents nor police appeared at the house on that day or the next; and on the third day there was a beer-and-tacos party at which parents and police mingled in a relaxed way with the people in the house. By that third day Mrs. Pickles too had got over her bad feelings, even though by then there was not only a checkpoint but a walkie-talkie system by which the followers at the gate called up for clearance to the house. That morning over her coffee with Mrs. Schwamm, Mrs. Pickles expressed her appreciation of the general discipline and order that were now so apparent in our household; and she confided that, speaking for herself and a few others she could mention, and these did not exclude some parents, what had happened to the boys was not altogether undeserved, and maybe it was about time they learned that they couldn’t do as they pleased with everyone.

Was I the only one who remained uneasy? What made it worse was that I couldn’t talk about it to Michael—couldn’t admit to having such feelings because he himself completely approved of what had been done. I couldn’t understand it—Michael had always been so much against every kind of outer order and discipline that he couldn’t ever stay in a school. He would accept nothing except what came from inside himself; no discipline except self-discipline. Of that he had much more than anyone else I had ever known. Even as a child he used to impose days of fasting on himself, also days of silence and other austerities he knew of; he told no one except me. He would have been the last person to wear any kind of uniform, but he had laid aside his kurta, steel bangle, and earring and dressed like the followers in blue shirt and navy jeans. Crishi issued orders to him the same as he did to everyone else, and Michael followed them. He and Crishi were very close—they worked together during the day, supervising the followers on the Xerox machines and teleprinter, and every evening the two of them went to the waterfall. They always expected me to join them, but after the incident with the boys, I no longer wanted to. They didn’t press me but went off by themselves while I stayed back, feeling miserable and waiting for them to return. It was very late when they did, and I watched them from my window, walking across the lawn with their towels and wet hair—dreamy and happy, which was the way we always felt when we had swum and afterward lay in the field under the moon. Next morning again I couldn’t bring myself to join them, and again they went off by themselves and I felt more miserable than ever. The third night too—this was after the beer-and-tacos party—I had intended to stay behind; but when Crishi said to me, quite casually, over his shoulder almost as he was about to go off with Michael, “Coming, Harriet?” I went to get my towel and hurried after them.

During these days, after his breakfast with the Rawul, Grandfather stayed the entire time in his bedroom. When I went to see him there, I found him propped up in the great four-poster in which our other grandfather had died. Sonya sat beside him on a chair, very wifely and domesticated, with some embroidery in her lap; she smiled at me and said “This big bear isn’t feeling so good today.”

“Nonsense,” said Grandfather; and “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“If you’re better,” Sonya said.

“There’s nothing wrong with me at all.” But he did look sick; his head was laid back against the pillows, as one who is very, very tired. He appeared immensely aged, and grand, with his large head and the tufts of white hair showing where the top button of his pajamas was undone. His hands lay like sculpture on the covering sheet. Sonya laid her own little warm plump hand on one of them and said “Stubborn as a mule, as always”; she looked at me and tried to smile again, but her eyes were scared.

And next day, in spite of her protests, they did leave. Their car, packed with books and luggage, drove up to the porch, and everyone came out to watch their departure. It did not have the stateliness of their arrival, although the Rawul and Rani were both in attendance. In fact, it appeared rather scrambled, as though they were getting away in a hurry; people had to be sent back in the house several times for things Sonya had forgotten to pack. She was crying, and I don’t know whether it was because she thought Grandfather wasn’t well enough to leave, or because she was sorry to part from her friends new and old. She embraced everyone with the same fervor—that is, all of us as well as the Rawul and Rani and whatever followers were within reach. Grandfather stood a little to one side, as though it were nothing to do with him. I thought he still didn’t look well, almost frail in spite of his heavy build; it seemed to me that his clothes had grown too large for him, but perhaps this had been so for a long time and I hadn’t noticed it before. The Rawul tried to make a little farewell speech, but with Grandfather remaining grim and withdrawn, it died, and the Rawul was left standing there, smiling and patting one of his hands on the other. While Sonya was still kissing and embracing, Grandfather went down the steps of the porch and settled in the back of the car. He beckoned to me from there, and when I came to the car window, he asked “Where’s Michael?”

It was embarrassing, but I had to tell him Michael wasn’t there. He had driven with Crishi to the printers to collect a new set of Fourth World literature. If he had known that Grandfather was leaving that morning, he might have postponed his errand; but, as I said, Grandfather left in a hurry—wanting to get to the Island, or just wanting to get away.

“Tell him—” Grandfather began to say to me, and then stopped. His eyes swept up the porch steps, where the Rawul stood smiling with the Rani beside him and some followers behind them. Whatever it was Grandfather had wanted me to tell Michael, he changed his mind and said instead, “Why don’t you come to the Island, both of you; come and be with us. I want to see you,” he added and stopped looking grim for the first time that morning. He had his hand on the car window and I took it and held it in mine. He smiled at that, and seemed completely to forget about the Rawul and his party standing there. “See that you come now,” he said. “Bring Michael; and soon.” I said “I’ll tell him.” “Not just tell him: make him. Make him come home.” I couldn’t say anything to that; I couldn’t promise. I didn’t think Michael would want to go to the Island and I didn’t think I myself wanted to either. I too felt that we had work to do here, that we had begun to undertake something.

But Grandfather didn’t want to know about this. He withdrew his hand from mine and called to Sonya. Before they drove off, he said again, “I want to see you there soon”—but he seemed to have lost interest in me almost as much as in the others standing on the porch. I guess he was just looking forward to being on the Island and doing his work there, writing his book to sum up all his life and what he had done in it.