"Mor-ral r-restr-raint," the little nurse repeated, rolling her r's in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. "Mor-ral r-restr-raint! Incidentally," she added, "Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja's sixteen-year-old niece."
"And that," said Ranga, "was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control."
"And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?"
"Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Bud dhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphys ical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six chil dren five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about maithunn and, being a true man of science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction."
"With what results?"
"Enthusiastic approval."
"That's the way everybody feels about it," said Radha.
"Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some feel that way, others don't. Dr. Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education-free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love."
"Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?"
"It wasn't really so difficult. Maithuna was orthodox. People weren't being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning something esoteric."
"And don't forget the most important point of all," the little nurse chimed in. "For women-all women, and I don't care what you say about sweeping generalizations-the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed." There was a brief silence. "And now," she resumed in another, brisker tone, "it's high time we left you to your siesta."
"Before you go," said Will, "I'd like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I'm alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives."
Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert's study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.
" Veni, vidi," Will scrawled. "I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this basis? If you cable Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing."
"There," he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. "May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow's plane?"
"Without fail," the boy promised.
Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn't do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were accustomed. Or couldn't they?
From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. "No reading now," she wagged her finger at him. "Go to sleep."
"I never sleep during the day," Will assured her, with a certain perverse satisfaction.
7
He could never go to sleep during the day; but when he looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What's What, and resumed his interrupted reading:
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth:
Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact-sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S. M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:
Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday's
Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;
Somewhere between
Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;
Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.
"Like gentians," Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English butterflies; thought of the dark-blue sky and the sunshine and the huge shining mountains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestle's milk chocolate. "Not even real chocolate," he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. "Milk chocolate." After which there had been an ironic comment on the water color his mother was painting- so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and conscientious care. "The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestle rejected." And now it was his turn. "Instead of just mooning about with your mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example." And diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hard-boiled eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a detestable mail! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian-Will glanced again at the last line of the poem-"blue, unpossessed and open."