Island - Aldous Huxley [22]
Will bowed over the thick bejeweled fingers and mumbled something that ended in “Your Highness.”
“Bahu!” she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned surname.
Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his entrance and was introduced as His Excellency, Abdul Bahu, the Ambassador of Rendang: “Abdul Pierre Bahu—car sa mère est parisienne. But he learned his English in New York.”
He looked, Will thought as he shook the Ambassador’s hand, like Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.
“Bahu,” said the Rani, “is Colonel Dipa’s Brains Trust.”
“Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel.”
His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a parody of deference and self-abasement.
“The brains,” he went on, “are where brains ought to be—in the head. As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang’s sympathetic nervous system.”
“Et combien sympathique!” said the Rani. “Among other things, Mr. Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country place! Like The Arabian Nights! One claps one’s hands—and instantly there are six servants ready to do one’s bidding. One has a birthday—and there is a fête nocturne in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls; two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Harun al-Rashid, but with modern plumbing.”
“It sounds quite delightful,” said Will, remembering the villages through which he had passed in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes—the wattled huts, the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women bent double under enormous loads.
“And such taste,” the Rani went on, “such a well-stored mind and, through it all” (she lowered her voice) “such a deep and unfailing Sense of the Divine.”
Mr. Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.
Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.
“I hope you don’t feel that my visit is an intrusion,” she said to Will. He assured her that he didn’t; but she continued to apologize. “I would have given warning,” she said, “I would have asked your permission. But my Little Voice says, ‘No—you must go now.’ Why? I cannot say. But no doubt we shall find out in due course.” She fixed him with her large, bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. “And now, first of all, how are you, dear Mr. Farnaby?”
“As you see, ma’am, in very good shape.”
“Truly?” The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intentness that he found embarrassing. “I can see that you’re the kind of heroically considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his deathbed.”
“You’re very flattering,” he said. “But as it happens, I am in good shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so.”
“Miraculous,” said the Rani, “was the very word I used when I heard about your escape. It was a miracle.”
“‘As luck would have it,’” Will quoted again from Erewhon, “‘Providence was on my side.’”
Mr. Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of merriment into a loud cough.
“How true!” the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly vibrated. “Providence is always on our side.” And when Will raised a questioning eyebrow, “I mean,” she elaborated, “in the eyes