Island - Aldous Huxley [21]
Will remembered that still unfinished factory in the suburbs of Rendang-Lobo.
“What’s that?” he had asked Colonel Dipa as they flashed past it in the white Mercedes.
“Insecticides,” the Colonel had answered. And showing his gleaming white teeth in a genial smile, “We shall soon be exporting the stuff all over Southeast Asia.”
At the time, of course, he had thought that the Colonel merely meant what he said. But now…Will shrugged his mental shoulders. Colonels will be colonels and boys, even boys like Murugan, will be gun-loving boys. There would always be plenty of jobs for special correspondents on the trail of death.
“So you’ll strengthen Pala’s army?” Will said aloud.
“Strengthen it? No—I’ll create it. Pala doesn’t have an army.”
“None at all?”
“Absolutely nothing. They’re all pacifists.” The p was an explosion of disgust, the s’s hissed contemptuously. “I shall have to start from scratch.”
“And you’ll militarize as you industrialize, is that it?”
“Exactly.”
Will laughed. “Back to the Assyrians! You’ll go down in history as a true revolutionary.”
“That’s what I hope,” said Murugan. “Because that’s what my policy is going to be—Continuing Revolution.”
“Very good!” Will applauded.
“I’ll just be continuing the revolution that was started more than a hundred years ago by Dr. Robert’s great-grandfather when he came to Pala and helped my great-great-grandfather to put through the first reforms. Some of the things they did were really wonderful. Not all of them, mind you,” he qualified; and with the absurd solemnity of a schoolboy playing Polonius in an end-of-term performance of Hamlet he shook his curly head in grave, judicial disapproval. “But at least they did something. Whereas nowadays we’re governed by a set of do-nothing conservatives. Conservatively primitive—they won’t lift a finger to bring in modern improvements. And conservatively radical—they refuse to change any of the old bad revolutionary ideas that ought to be changed. They won’t reform the reforms. And I tell you, some of those so-called reforms are absolutely disgusting.”
“Meaning, I take it, that they have something to do with sex?”
Murugan nodded and turned away his face. To his astonishment, Will saw that he was blushing.
“Give me an example,” he demanded.
But Murugan could not bring himself to be explicit.
“Ask Dr. Robert,” he said, “ask Vijaya. They think that sort of thing is simply wonderful. In fact they all do. That’s one of the reasons why nobody wants to change. They’d like everything to go on as it is, in the same old disgusting way, forever and ever.”
“Forever and ever,” a rich contralto voice teasingly repeated.
“Mother!” Murugan sprang to his feet.
Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed (rather incongruously, he thought; for that kind of face and build usually went with mauve and magenta and electric blue) in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jeweled hand pressed against the doorjamb, in the pose of the great actress, the acknowledged diva, pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of her adorers on the other side of the footlights. In the background, waiting patiently for his cue, stood a tall man in a dove-gray Dacron suit whom Murugan, peering past the massive embodiment of maternity that almost filled the doorway, now greeted as Mr. Bahu.
Still in the wings, Mr. Bahu bowed without speaking.
Murugan turned again to his mother. “Did you walk here?” he asked. His tone expressed incredulity and an admiring solicitude. Walking here—how unthinkable! But if she had walked, what heroism! “All the way?”
“All the way, my baby,” she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm came down, slid round the boy’s slender body, pressed it, engulfed in floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. “I had