Island - Aldous Huxley [152]
“Who are you?” he whispered.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then, gaily smiling, “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “I’m not the female mantis.”
He smiled back at her—smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.
“Thank Him for what?”
“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”
She smiled again. “So that cat’s out of the bag.”
“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially…” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality—it’s been your salvation. Half your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “one of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now—who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”
“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha-medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”
One slips back too easily, one slips back too often…Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.
“Karuna.”
“Attention. Attention.”
“Karuna.”
Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.
“Do you hear what they’re saying?”
It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said, and opened her eyes again.
“Why thank me? You taught me what to do.”
“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”
Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “Karuna, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never-impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.
A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”
“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”
For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to