The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [28]
Celebration; and within it a great placidity. Once, longing for the world, I had wished to say goodbye to the island for good. Now, at a picnic on the hot sand of a beach reticulated with succulent-looking green vines on which grew purple flowers, or at a barbecue around an illuminated swimming-pool, it was possible without fear or longing or the feeling of being denied the world to draw out from one of our group her adolescent secret of cycle rides along a dirt road to the red hills outside her town, in a state west of the Mississippi, to see the sun set; to get from another a picture, in grey and white, of snow and Germans in Prague; and from yet another an English Midland landscape at dusk, a walk among moon daisies on the bank of a stream, an endless summer walk beside water, into a night scene, with swans; these, on the island, becoming pictures of a world now totally comprehended, of which I had ceased to feel I could form part and from which we had all managed to withdraw. I loved to contemplate this fragmented world that we had put together again; and I did so with the feeling of my own imminent extinction. I belonged to a small community which in this part of the world was doomed. We were an intermediate race, the genes passive, capable of disappearing in two generations into any of the three races of men, with perhaps only a shape of eye or flexibility of slender wrist to speak of our intrusion. My mother’s sanctions were a pretence, no doubt; but they were also an act of piety towards the past, towards ancient unknown wanderings in another continent. It was a piety I shared. But what release to be the last of one’s line! Consider this as an underlying mood, occasionally coming to the surface in an alcoholic haze when, the music from bands or record-players grown distant, I considered our group as though for the first time, and Sandra and myself within it. It was a mood never examined beyond this point, never revealed. It was the mood of my placidity, the mood of my new life of activity. Within me, with that very placidity, with that departure from London and that total acceptance of a new, ready-made way of life, I felt that I had changed. I recognized that the change was involuntary, so that at last my ‘character’ became not what others took it to be but something personal and ordained. This placidity, at the heart of celebration, I felt to be my strength; I visualized it as existing within a walled, impregnable field. I lived neutrally; activity was real, but it was all on the surface; I felt I would never allow myself to be damaged again.
They would say later that I ‘worked hard and played hard’. These phrases that tabulate! I had no profession and no job. I needed money. I studied my resources and looked around for a way. On an island where, apart from the professions and agriculture, money could be made only through commission agencies, I must have appeared a little too coldly adventurous. But at least the School cannot say that the years I spent in it were wasted. A small part of the Bella Bella money had come to me; within five years that part had outgrown the whole. I was one of those who foresaw the postwar spread of cities, the destruction of the open spaces between settlements; and on Isabella I was the first. I cannot claim much credit. What I did was obvious, considering my resources. I had inherited a 120-acre block of wasteland just outside the city. It was part of a blighted citrus plantation which had been allowed to go derelict during the depression; had been sold to a racing man who had tried unsuccessfully to breed racehorses on it; and had then been bought