Island - Aldous Huxley [153]
“Negative crowing and parroted antiwisdom,” she said. “That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”
“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.
“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”
There was a spurt of movement at their feet.
Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”
She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist, acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush—a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and overarching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.
“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.
“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”
He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.
“I can’t help it,” he apologized.
He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.
“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A memory bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”
“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”
Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.
“What on earth is that?” she wondered.
“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.
Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”
From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.
In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.
Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.
“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking…remain calm…welcome your friends from across the Strait…”
Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”
“And he’s with Dipa’s soldiers.”
“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life…” And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values…genuine spirituality…oil.”
“Look,” said Susila, “look! They’re turning into the compound.”
Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.