"And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?"
"It's not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that's being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that's being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn't think," she added, "that it's only when they're in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn't just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights-brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while the mother's doing something else. Duties as well as privileges-but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer-working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying ..." She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald's mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, "But what about you)" she went on. "I've been so busy talking about families that I haven't even asked you how you're feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last."
"Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?"
Susila smiled. "You did it to yourself," she assured him. "I merely pressed the buttons."
"Which buttons?"
"Memory buttons, imagination buttons."
"And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?"
"If you like to call it that."
"What else can one call it?"
"Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?"
"But what did happen?"
"Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn't we?"
"We certainly did," he agreed. "And yet I don't believe I even so much as looked at you."
He was looking at her now, though-looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.
"How could you look at me?" she said. "You'd gone off on your vacation."
"Or was I pushed off?"
"Pushed? No." She shook her head. "Let's say seen off, helped off." There was a moment of silence. "Did you ever," she resumed, "try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?"
Will thought of the small neighbor who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.
"Poor little darling!" Susila went on. "He means so well, he's do anxious to help."
"But the paint's on the carpet, the fingerprints are all over the walls . . ."
"So that in the end you have to get rid of him. 'Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!' "
There was a silence.
"Well?" he questioned at last.
"Don't you see?"
Will shook his head.
"What happens when you're ill, when you've been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you?"
"Who else?"
"You?" she insisted. "You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?"
"Oh, I see what you're driving at."
"At last!" she mocked.
"Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?"
"Don't ask me," she answered. "That's a question for a neuro-theologian."
"Meaning what?" he asked.
"Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology."
"And the children?"
"The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups."
"And so must be told to run along and play."
"Exactly."
"Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?" he asked.
"Standard procedure," she assured him. "In your part of the world doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws." Her voice had modulated into a chant. "About white clouds floating in the sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life . . ."
"Now, now," he protested. "None of that!"
A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.
"I know your tricks," he added, joining in the laughter.
"Tricks?" Still laughing, she shook her head. "I was just explaining how I did it."
"I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What's more, I give you leave to do it again-whenever it's necessary."
"If you like," she said more seriously, "I'll show you how to press your own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary schools. The three R's plus rudimentary SD."
"What's that?"
"Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control."
"Destiny Control?" He raised his eyebrows.
"No, no," she assured him, "we're not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable."
"And you control it by pressing your own buttons?"
"Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we'd like to happen."
"But does it happen?"
"In many cases it does."
"Simple!" There was a note of irony in his voice.
"Wonderfully simple," she agreed. "And yet, so far as I know, we're the only people who systematically teach DC to their children. You just tell them what they're supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you say. But how? You never tell them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy."
"Pure unadulterated idiocy," he agreed, remembering Mr. Crabbe, his housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings and the weekly sermons and the Com mination Service on Ash Wednesday. "Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbor's wife. Amen."
"If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don't take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they're apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have-all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells."
"Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few."
Susila shook her head.
"No Alcatrazes here," she said. "No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other home made imaginary universe. And it really isn't your fault. You're almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and your actual behavior."