Island - Aldous Huxley [136]
“Are you tired?” Mary Sarojini enquired solicitously.
“A little.”
He turned and, leaning on his staff, looked down at the marketplace. In the light of the arc lamps the town hall glowed pink, like a monumental serving of raspberry sherbet. On the temple spire he could see, frieze above frieze, the exuberant chaos of Indic sculpture—elephants and Bodhisattvas, demons, supernatural girls with breasts and enormous bottoms, capering Shivas, rows of past and future Buddhas in quiet ecstasy. Below, in the space between sherbet and mythology, seethed the crowd, and somewhere in that crowd was a sulky face and a pair of white satin pajamas. Should he go back? It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do. But an inner voice—not little, like the Rani’s, but stentorian—shouted, “Squalid! Squalid!” Conscience? No. Morality? Heaven forbid! But supererogatory squalor, ugliness and vulgarity beyond the call of duty—these were things which, as a man of taste, one simply couldn’t be a party to.
“Well, shall we go on?” he said to Mary Sarojini.
They entered the lobby of the hospital. The nurse at the desk had a message for them from Susila. Mary Sarojini was to go directly to Mrs. Rao’s, where she and Tom Krishna would spend the night. Mr. Farnaby was to be asked to come at once to Room 34.
“This way,” said the nurse, and held open a swing door.
Will stepped forward. The conditioned reflex of politeness clicked automatically into action. “Thank you,” he said, and smiled. But it was with a dull, sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that he went hobbling towards the apprehended future.
“The last door on the left,” said the nurse. But now she had to get back to her desk in the lobby. “So I’ll leave you to go on alone,” she added as the door closed behind her.
Alone, he repeated to himself, alone—and the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous. This long corridor with its green-painted walls was the very same corridor along which, a year ago, he had walked to the little room where Molly lay dying. The nightmare was recurrent. Foredoomed and conscious, he moved on towards its horrible consummation. Death, yet another vision of death.
Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…He knocked and waited, listening to the beating of his heart. The door opened and he found himself face to face with little Radha.
“Susila was expecting you,” she whispered.
Will followed her into the room. Rounding a screen, he caught a glimpse of Susila’s profile silhouetted against a lamp, of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of clawlike hands. Once again the Essential Horror. With a shudder he turned away. Radha motioned him to a chair near the open window. He sat down and closed his eyes—closed them physically against the present, but, by that very act, opened them inwardly upon that hateful past of which the present had reminded him. He was there in that other room, with Aunt Mary. Or rather with the person who had once been Aunt Mary, but was now this hardly recognizable somebody else—somebody who had never so much as heard of the charity and courage which had been the very essence of Aunt Mary’s being; somebody who was filled with an indiscriminate hatred for all who came near her, loathing them, whoever they might be, simply because they didn’t have cancer, because they weren’t in pain, had not been sentenced to die before their time. And along with this malignant envy of other people’s health and happiness had gone a bitterly querulous self-pity, an abject despair.
“Why to me? Why should this thing have happened to me?”
He could hear the shrill complaining voice, could see that tearstained and distorted face. The only person he had ever really loved or wholeheartedly admired. And yet, in her degradation, he had caught himself despising her—despising, positively hating.
To escape from the past, he reopened his eyes. Radha, he saw, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged and upright, in the