Island - Aldous Huxley [48]
“If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don’t take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they’re apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells.”
“Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few.”
Susila shook her head.
“No Alcatrazes here,” she said. “No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fátima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other homemade imaginary universe. And it really isn’t your fault. You’re almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behavior.”
“‘For the good that I would,’” he quoted, “‘I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.’”
“Who said that?”
“The man who invented Christianity—St. Paul.”
“You see,” she said, “the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them.”
“Except the supernatural method of having them realized by Somebody Else.”
Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.
“There is a fountain fill’d with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Are cleansed of all their stains.”
Susila had covered her ears. “It’s really obscene,” she said.
“My housemaster’s favorite hymn,” Will explained. “We used to sing it about once a week, all the time I was at school.”
“Thank goodness,” she said, “there was never any blood in Buddhism! Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. ‘If you won’t believe that you’re redeemed by my redeemer’s blood, I’ll drown you in your own.’ Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of Christianity.” Susila shuddered at the memory. “What a horror! And all because that poor ignorant man didn’t know how to implement his good intentions.”
“And most of us,” said Will, “are still in the same old boat. The evil that we would not, that we do. And how!”
Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then, with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly’s unhappiness, Molly’s death, his own gnawing sense of guilt, and then the pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool must have known she inevitably would do—turned him out of her infernal gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.
“What’s the matter?” Susila asked.
“Nothing. Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re not very good at hiding your feelings. You were thinking of something that made you unhappy.”
“You’ve got sharp eyes,” he said, and looked away.
There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated game which (as an English gentleman who was also a bohemian, also a would-be poet, also—in mere despair, because he knew he could never be a good poet—a hard-boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid, of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing. No, old friends would never do. But from this