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  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

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  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 intent-ness 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 of those who Truly Understand" (capital T, capital U). "And this is true even when all things seem to conspire against us—meme dans le desastre. You understand French, of course, Mr. Farnaby?" Will nodded. "It often comes to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese. After so many years in Switzerland," she explained, "first at school. And again, later on, when my poor baby's health was so precarious" (she patted Murugan's bare arm) "and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which illustrates what I was saying

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  about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I'd ever learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our lives— weren't they, darling?"

  "The happiest of our lives," the boy agreed, with what almost sounded like complete sincerity.

  The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips, and with a faint smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. "So you see, my dear Farnaby," she went on, "you see. It's really self-evident. Nothing happens by Accident. There's a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us."

  "Quite," said Will politely. "Quite."

  "There was a time," the Rani continued, "when I knew it only with my intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really ..." she paused for an instant to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, "Understand."

  "Psychic as hell." Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her. And surely that lifelong frequenter of seances should know.

  "I take it, ma'am," he said, "that you're naturally psychic."

  "From birth," she admitted. "But also and above all by training. Training, needless to say, in Something Else."

  "Something else?"

  "In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the sidhis, all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously."

  "Is that so?"

  "My mother," Murugan proudly assured him, "can do the most fantastic things."

  "N'exagerons pas, cheri."

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  "But it's the truth," Murugan insisted.

  "A truth," the Ambassador put in, "which I can confirm. And I confirm it," he added, smiling at his own expense, "with a certain reluctance. As a lifelong skeptic about these things, I don't like to see the impossible happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I'm compelled malgre moi to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the most fantastic things."

  "Well, if you like to put it that way," said the Rani, beaming with pleasure. "But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely no importance. What's important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes to at the end of the Path."

  "After the Fourth Initiation," Murugan specified. "My mother ..."

  "Darling!" The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. "These are things one doesn't talk about."

  "I'm sorry," said the boy. There was a long and pregnant silence.

  The Rani closed her eyes, and Mr. Bahu, letting fall his monocle, reverentially followed suit and became the image of Savonarola in silent prayer. What was going on behind that austere, that almost fleshless mask of recollectedness? Will looked and wondered.

  "May I ask," he said at last, "how you first came, ma'am, to find the Path?"

  For a second or two the Rani said nothing, merely sat there with her eyes shut, smiling her Buddha smile of mysterious bliss. "Providence found it for me," she answered at last.

  "Quite, quite. But there must have been an occasion, a place, a human instrument."

  "I'll tell you." The lids fluttered apart and once again he found himself under the bright unswerving glare of those protu-! berant eyes of hers.

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  The place had been Lausanne; the time, the first year of her Swiss education; the chosen instrument, darling little Mme Buloz. Darling little Mme Buloz was the wife of darling old Professor Buloz, and old Professor Buloz was the man to whose charge, after careful enquiry and much anxious thought, she had been committed by her father, the late Sultan of Rendang. The Professor was sixty-seven, taught geology and was a Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret with his dinner, saying his prayers only twice a day, and being strictly monogamous, he might almost have been a Muslim. Under such guardianship a princess of Rendang would be intellectually stimulated, while remaining morally and doctrinally intact. But the Sultan had reckoned without the Professor's wife. Mme Buloz was only forty, plump, sentimental, bubblingly enthusiastic and, though officially of her husband's Protestant persuasion, a newly converted and intensely ardent Theosophist. In a room at the top of the tall house near the Place de la Riponne she had her Oratory, to which, whenever she could find time, she would secretly retire to do breathing exercises, practice concentration, and raise Kundalini. Strenuous disciplines! But the reward was transcendentally great. In the small hours of a hot summer night, while the darling old Professor lay rhythmically snoring two floors down, she had become aware of a Presence: the Master Koot Hoomi was with her.

  The Rani made an impressive pause. "Extraordinary," said Mr. Bahu. "Extraordinary," Will dutifully echoed. The Rani resumed her narrative. Irrepressibly happy, Mme Buloz had been unable to keep her secret. She had dropped mysterious hints, had passed from hints to confidences, from confidences to an invitation to the Oratory and a course of instruction. In a very short time Koot Hoomi was bestowing greater favors upon the novice than upon her teacher.

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  "And from that day to this," she concluded, "the Master has helped me to Go Forward."

  To go forward, Will asked himself, into what? Koot Hoomi only knew. But whatever it was that she had gone forward into, he didn't like it. There was an expression on that large florid face which he found peculiarly distasteful—an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakable self-esteem. She reminded him in a curious way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was one of those happy tycoons who feel n
o qualms, but rejoice without inhibition in their money and in all that their money will buy in the way of influence and power. And here—albeit clothed in white muslin, mystic, wonderful—was another of Joe Aldehyde's breed: a female tycoon who had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily rubbing her hands over the exploit.

  "Here's one example of what He's done for me," the Rani went on. "Eight years ago—to be exact, on the twenty-third of November, 1952—the Master came to me in my morning Meditation. Came in Person, came in Glory. 'A great Crusade is to be launched,' He said, 'a World Movement to save Humanity from self-destruction. And you, my child, are the Appointed Instrument.' 'Me? A World Movement? But that's absurd,' I said. 'I've never made a speech in my whole life. I've never written a word for publication. I've never been a leader or an organizer.' 'Nevertheless,' He said (and He gave one of these indescribably beautiful smiles of His), 'nevertheless it is you who will launch this Crusade—the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit. You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The dogs bark; the Caravan passes. From tiny, laughable beginnings the Crusade of the Spirit is destined to become a Mighty Force. A force for Good, a force that will ultimately Save the World.' And with that He left me. Left me stunned, bewildered, scared out of

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  my wits. But there was nothing for it; I had to obey. I did obey. And what happened? I made speeches, and He gave me eloquence. I accepted the burden of leadership and, because He was walking invisibly at my side, people followed me. I asked for help, and the money came pouring in. So here I am." She threw out her thick hands in a gesture of self-depreciation, she smiled a mystic smile. A poor thing, she seemed to be saying, but not my own—my Master's, Koot Hoomi's. "Here I am," she repeated. "Here, praise God," said Mr. Bahu devoutly, "you are." After a decent interval Will asked the Rani if she had always kept up the practices so providentially learned in Mme Buloz's Oratory.

  "Always," she answered. "I could no more do without Meditation than I could do without Food."

  "Wasn't it rather difficult after you were married? I mean, before you went back to Switzerland. There must have been so many tiresome official duties."

  "Not to mention all the unofficial ones," said the Rani in a tone that implied whole volumes of unfavorable comment upon her late husband's character, Weltanschauung and sexual habits. She opened her mouth to elaborate on the theme, then closed it again and looked at Murugan. "Darling," she called.

  Murugan, who was absorbedly polishing the nails of his left hand upon the open palm of his right, looked up with a guilty start. "Yes, Mother?"

  Ignoring the nails and his evident inattention to what she had been saying, the Rani gave him a seducing smile. "Be an angel," she said, "and go and fetch the car. My Little Voice doesn't say anything about walking back to the bungalow. It's only a few hundred yards," she explained to Will. "But in this heat, and at my age . . ."

  Her words called for some kind of flattering rebuttal. But if it was too hot to walk, it was also too hot, Will felt, to put forth the very considerable amount of energy required for a convincing

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  show of bogus sincerity. Fortunately a professional diplomat, a practiced courtier was on hand to make up for the uncouth journalist's deficiencies. Mr. Bahu uttered a peal of lighthearted laughter, then apologized for his merriment.

  "But it was really too funny! 'At my age,' " he repeated, and laughed again. "Murugan is not quite eighteen, and I happen to know how old—how very young—the Princess of Rendang was when she married the Raja of Pala."

  Murugan, meanwhile, had obediently risen and was kissing his mother's hand.

  "Now we can talk more freely," said the Rani when he had left the room. And freely—her face, her tone, her bulging eyes, her whole quivering frame registering the most intense disapproval— she now let fly. De mortuis. . . She wouldn't say anything about her husband except that he was a typical Palanese, a true representative of his country. For the sad truth was that Pala's smooth bright skin concealed the most horrible rottenness.

  "When I think what they tried to do to my Baby, two years ago, when I was on my world tour for the Crusade of the Spirit." With a jingling of bracelets she lifted her hands in horror. "It was an agony for me to be parted from him for so long; but the Master had sent me on a Mission, and my Little Voice told me that it wouldn't be right for me to take my Baby with me. He'd lived abroad for so long. It was high time for him to get to know the country he was to rule. So I decided to leave him here. The Privy Council appointed a committee of guardianship. Two women with growing boys of their own and two men—one of whom, I regret to say" (more in sorrow than in anger), "was Dr. Robert MacPhail. Well, to cut a long story short, no sooner was I safely out of the country than those precious guardians, to whom I'd entrusted my Baby, my Only Son, set to work systematically— systematically, Mr. Farnaby—to undermine my influence. They tried to destroy the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values which I had so laboriously built up over the years."

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  Somewhat maliciously (for of course he knew what the woman was talking about), Will expressed his astonishment. The whole edifice of moral and spiritual values? And yet nobody could have been kinder than Dr. Robert and the others, no Good Samaritans were ever more simply and effectively charitable.

  "I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue."

  "Of course not," Will agreed, and he listed all the qualities that the Rani seemed most conspicuously to lack. "There's also sincerity. Not to mention truthfulness, humility, selflessness . . ."

  "You're forgetting Purity," said the Rani severely. "Purity is fundamental, Purity is the sine qua, non."

  "But here in Pala, I gather, they don't think so."

  "They most certainly do not," said the Rani. And she went on to tell him how her poor Baby had been deliberately exposed to impurity, even actively encouraged to indulge in it with one of those precocious, promiscuous girls of whom, in Pala, there were only too many. And when they found that he wasn't the sort of boy who would seduce a girl (for she had brought him up to think of Woman as essentially Holy), they had encouraged the girl to do her best to seduce him.

  Had she, Will wondered, succeeded? Or had Antinoiis already been girlproofed by little friends of his own age or, still more effectively, by some older, more experienced and authoritative pederast, some Swiss precursor of Colonel Dipa?

  "But that wasn't the worst." The Rani lowered her voice to a horrified stage whisper. "One of the mothers on the committee of guardianship—one of the mothers, mind you—advised him to take a course of lessons."

  "What sort of lessons?"

  "In what they euphemistically call Love." She wrinkled up her nose as though she had smelt raw sewage. "Lessons, if you please," and disgust turned into indignation, "from some Older Woman."

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  "Heavens!" cried the Ambassador.

  "Heavens!" Will dutifully echoed. Those older women, he could see, were competitors much more dangerous, in the Rani's eyes, than even the most precociously promiscuous of girls. A mature instructress in love would be a rival mother, enjoying the monstrously unfair advantage of being free to go the limits of incest.

  "They teach ..." The Rani hesitated. "They teach Special Techniques."

  "What sort of techniques?" Will enquired. But she couldn't bring herself to go into the repulsive particulars. And anyhow it wasn't necessary, for Murugan (bless his heart!) had refused to listen to them. Lessons in immorality from someone old enough to be his mother—the very idea of it had made him sick. No wonder. He had been brought up to reverence the Ideal of Purity. "Brahmacharya, if you know what that means."

  "Quite," said Will.

  "And this is another reason why his illness was such a blessing in disguise, such a real godsend. I don't think I could have brought him up that wa
y in Pala. There are too many bad influences here. Forces working against Purity, against the Family, even against Mother Love."

  Will pricked up his ears. "Did they even reform mothers?" She nodded. "You just can't imagine how far things have gone here. But Koot Hoomi knew what kind of dangers we would have to run in Pala. So what happens? My Baby falls ill, and the doctors order us to Switzerland. Out of harm's way."

  "How was it," Will asked, "that Koot Hoomi let you go off on your Crusade? Didn't he foresee what would happen to Murugan as soon as your back was turned?"

  "He foresaw everything," said the Rani. "The temptations, the resistance, the massed assault by all the Powers of Evil and then, at the very last moment, the rescue. For a long time," she

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  explained, "Murugan didn't tell me what was happening. But after three months the assaults of the Powers of Evil were too much for him. He dropped hints; but I was too completely absorbed in my Master's business to be able to take them. Finally he wrote me a letter in which it was all spelled out—in detail. I canceled my last four lectures in Brazil and flew home as fast as the jets would carry me. A week later we were back in Switzerland. Just my Baby and I—alone with the Master."

  She closed her eyes, and an expression of gloating ecstasy appeared upon her face. Will looked away in distaste. This self-canonized world-savior, this clutching and devouring mother— had she ever, for a single moment, seen herself as others saw her? Did she have any idea of what she had done, what she was still doing, to her poor silly little son? To the first question the answer was certainly no. About the second one could only speculate. Perhaps she honestly didn't know what she had made of the boy. But perhaps, on the other hand, she did know. Knew and preferred what was happening with the Colonel to what might happen if the boy's education were taken in hand by a woman. The woman might supplant her; the Colonel, she knew, would not.

  "Murugan told me that he intended to reform these so-called reforms."

  "I can only pray," said the Rani in a tone that reminded Will of his grandfather, the Archdeacon, "that he'll be given the Strength and Wisdom to do it."