Dr. Robert laughed. "You might have asked for an interview."
"Well, I didn't. Nor from the Queen Mother."
"Did the Rani come too?"
"At the command of her Little Voice. And, sure enough, the Little Voice sent her to the right address. My boss, Joe Aldehyde, is one of her dearest friends."
"Did she tell you that she's trying to bring your boss here, to exploit our oil?"
"She did indeed."
"We turned down his latest offer less than a month ago. Did you know that?"
Will was relieved to be able to answer quite truthfully that he didn't. Neither Joe Aldehyde nor the Rani had told him of this most recent rebuff. "My job," he went on, a little less truthfully, "is in the wood-pulp department, not in petroleum." There was a silence. "What's my status here?" he asked at last. "Undesirable alien?"
"Well, fortunately you're not an armament salesman."
"Nor a missionary," said Susila.
"Nor an oilman-though on that count you might be guilty by association."
"Nor even, so far as we know, a uranium prospector."
"Those," Dr. Robert concluded, "are the Alpha Plus undesirables. As a journalist you rank as a Beta. Not the kind of person we should ever dream of inviting to Pala. But also not the kind who, having managed to get here, requires to be summarily deported."
"I'd like to stay here for as long as it's legally possible," said Will.
"May I ask why?"
Will hesitated. As Joe Aldehyde's secret agent and a reporter with a hopeless passion for literature, he had to stay long enough to negotiate with Bahu and earn his year of freedom. But there were other, more avowable reasons. "If you don't object to personal remarks," he said, "I'll tell you."
"Fire away," said Dr. Robert.
"The fact is that, the more I see of you people the better I like you. I want to find out more about you. And in the process," he added, glancing at Susila, "I might find out some interesting things about myself. How long shall I be allowed to stay?"
"Normally we'd turn you out as soon as you're fit to travel. But if you're seriously interested in Pala, above all if you're seriously interested in yourself-well, we might stretch a point. Or shouldn't we stretch that point? What do you say, Susila? After all, he does work for Lord Aldehyde."
Will was on the point of protesting again that his job was in the wood-pulp department; but the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. The seconds passed. Dr. Robert repeated his question.
"Yes," Susila said at last, "we'd be taking a certain risk. But personally . . . personally I'd be ready to take it. Am I right?" she turned to Will.
"Well, I think you can trust me. At least I hope you can." He laughed, trying to make a joke of it; but to his annoyance and embarrassment, he felt himself blushing. Blushing for what? he demanded resentfully of his conscience. If anybody was being double-crossed, it was Standard of California. And once Dipa had moved in, what difference would it make who got the concession? Which would you rather be eaten by-a wolf or a tiger? So far as the lamb is concerned, it hardly seems to matter. Joe would be no worse than his competitors. All the same, he wished he hadn't been in such a hurry to send off that letter. And why, why couldn't that dreadful woman have left him in peace?
Through the sheet he felt a hand on his undamaged knee. Dr. Robert was smiling down at him.
"You can have a month here," he said. "I'll take full responsibility for you. And we'll do our best to show you everything."
"I'm very grateful to you."
"When in doubt," said Dr. Robert, "always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young man." Turning to Susila, "Let's see," he said, "how old were you when the Old Raja died?"
"Just eight."
"So you remember him pretty well."
Susila laughed. "Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk about himself. 'Quote "I" (unquote) like sugar in my tea.' What a darling man."
"And what a great one!"
Dr. MacPhail got up and, crossing to the bookcase that stood between the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album, much the worse for tropical weather and fish insects. "There's a picture of him somewhere," he said as he turned over the pages. "Here we are."
Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in spectacles and a loincloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.
"What is he doing?" he asked.
"Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter," the doctor answered. "It was a habit my poor father could never break him of."
"Did your father disapprove of phalluses?"
"No, wo," said Dr. MacPhail. "My father was all for them. It was the symbol that he disapproved of."
"Why the symbol?"
"Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container."
"And the Raja had a weakness for containers?"
"Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He'd always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old."
"I see," said Will Farnaby.
"Buttering the family lingam-it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it's supposed to stand for. And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea-what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my father. He'd drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he'd actually been the milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn't bear to give up. And, I don't have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up.
But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He'd amended Goethe-Alles vergdnglkhe ist nicht ein Gleich-nis. His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum and pure experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting-he'd have liked to abolish them all."
"Where would the arts have come in?" Will questioned.
"They wouldn't have come in at all," Dr. MacPhail answered. "And that was my father's blindest spot-poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he didn't. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science-that was something he simply couldn't understand. Let's find his picture."
Dr. MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.
"What a Scotsman!" Will commented.
"And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese."
"One doesn't see a trace of them."
"Whereas his grandfather, who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput."
Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side-whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top hat.
"Your great-grandfather?"
"The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr. Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap."