Island - Aldous Huxley [70]
“Remarkable!” said Will. Then, curiously, “Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?” he asked.
Murugan shook his head. “Colonel Dipa gave it to me.”
“Colonel Dipa?” What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinoüs! He looked again at the picture of the motorbike, then back at Murugan’s glowing face. Light dawned; the Colonel’s purpose revealed itself. The serpent tempted me, and I did eat. The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark-naked. The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.
“You ought,” Will said aloud, “to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them—gratis, of course, like contraceptives—to all your subjects.”
“What for?”
“To whet their appetite for possessions. Then they’ll start clamoring for Progress—oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians.”
Murugan frowned and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work.”
“You mean, they wouldn’t be tempted? Not even by Sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras? But that’s incredible!”
“It may be incredible,” said Murugan bitterly, “but it’s a fact. They’re just not interested.”
“Not even the young ones?”
“I’d say especially the young ones.”
Will Farnaby pricked up his ears. This lack of interest was profoundly interesting. “Can you guess why?” he asked.
“I don’t guess,” the boy answered. “I know.” And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance. “To begin with, they’re much too busy with…” He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis. “With sex.”
“But everybody’s busy with sex. Which doesn’t keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters.”
“Sex is different here,” Murugan insisted.
“Because of the yoga of love?” Will asked, remembering the little nurse’s rapturous face.
The boy nodded. “They’ve got something that makes them think they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else.”
“What a blessed state!”
“There’s nothing blessed about it,” Murugan snapped. “It’s just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.”
“Dope?” Will repeated in some astonishment. Dope in a place where Susila had said there were no addicts? “What kind of dope?”
“It’s made out of toadstools. Toadstools!” He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani’s vibrant tone of outraged spirituality.
“Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?”
“No, these are yellow. People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station. Scientifically cultivated dope. Pretty, isn’t it?”
A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor. Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies. In a trice Elementary Ecology had taken the place of Sears, Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table. A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labor in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room. Behind him came Dr. Robert. With the air of a model student, interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked up from his book.