Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  And I didn’t, not one bit, and it amazed me the way both Lindsay and Michael were so ready to toss it away. It was not that it was a beautiful house—it wasn’t—but it was one of the few big houses in the area that was still intact and still with the original owners. Lindsay’s great-grandfather had built it as a summer house for his Victorian family, which of course was very large and included a whole establishment of servants; and then her grandfather had installed things to suit his life-style, like a squash court and a billiard room, and had converted the stables into garages; and her father had built on another wing in what was the latest in modern comfort in the thirties; so architecturally the house was a mess. The grounds, however, were beautiful. The site was that of an early nineteenth-century Federal-type house, which the great-grandfather had torn down to rebuild to his Victorian taste; but he couldn’t ruin the grounds—the magnificent maples and oaks and elms, which were much older than the house and as huge, the line of white birches at the edge of the lake, the lake itself stretching to the wooded shore opposite, the waterfall, the many nooks and arbors with little dead fountains where Michael and I used to hide, pretending not to hear the voices calling us in for meals. But Michael no longer seemed to care about any of it himself, and made me feel bad for caring as much as I did.

  He took me for a midnight row on the lake. We always did that when we had something very special to discuss. Since it was our way to commune in silence, these discussions usually took the form of gliding on the dark water, breaking up the moonlit reflections scattered over it, one of us rowing, the other brushing aside the overhanging branches where the lake began to flow between narrow overgrown banks on its way to the river into which it finally merged. We halted under a willow and lay there, splashing the water around a bit to see if we could disturb any fish.

  Michael said “It’s a good idea.” I didn’t say anything—by which of course he knew I didn’t agree. I hated to disagree with him, and especially here on this lake where we had spent such hours of our deepest communings. Nor did I really have any right to disagree, because the very subject of these communings was that of nonattachment. We both thought to be absolutely pure you had to be absolutely nonattached, not wanting anything for yourself—not possessions, not position, not even the love of another person. Yet here was I, unable to give away something as ordinary as a house. I felt ashamed; so that when Michael, in reply to my silence, said “What’s up?” I said “No it’s okay. If you really want to.” “Well don’t you?” he said, and I knew he was frowning in the dark, stretched out on one side of the boat while I was on the other.

  There was always something dictatorial about Michael in his relation to me. He was so used to my being in complete agreement with him that when I was not, he got irritated. In the past, on the rare occasions when it had happened that I wasn’t 100 percent with him, I would just say “If you want it, I do.” It was true, but he didn’t like to hear it: because he thought agreement had to spring out of inner conviction and not out of love for another person. So it was useless to argue.

  I said “I’m surprised about Lindsay though.” Michael laughed. It was strange—normally, when you wanted something from Lindsay, she would have very good reasons why she couldn’t possibly give it. I knew what was in his mind—if Lindsay of all people was ready for it, surely I wasn’t going to fall behind. Well, I didn’t say anything, but I agreed. At least, I brought forward no objections, though my heart was full of them—my God, on this beautiful summer night, alone in a boat with him, our house visible in the distance, shining by moonlight through the dark trees: but I didn’t stick up for it, because more than anything else, more than any house, I wanted what he wanted. That was how it was between us then.

  Next morning the Rawul was having breakfast alone in the dining room; when I came down, he lifted the napkin from his lap so he could courteously rise from his chair for me. His mouth was full of Mrs. Schwamm’s terrific pancakes, and he could only gesture hospitably toward the sideboard to invite me to help myself: as if it were his house already, I thought. But in a way it was; for when could we ever have had a stately breakfast like this in the dining room, with the silver-topped dishes all polished and laid out on the sideboard? Before his arrival, we used to make do with instant coffee and frozen doughnuts, eaten while perched on a corner of the kitchen table. But the Rawul lived in style, and having a whole entourage with him, he could afford to. They might be called his comrades, his helpers, his followers, but they also functioned very effectively as his servants; so that for the first time in our generation, and even in Lindsay’s, there was a staff large enough to run the house as it was meant to be.

  I expected him to start getting at me about donating Propinquity, but he was too subtle and too well mannered for that. Also perhaps too shy—for that was also there in his character; he was a shy person who found it difficult to make conversation with people, though out of courtesy he always tried. The one topic he really had a lot to say about was his Fourth World movement—whenever that subject came up, he spoke volubly and with passionate conviction; and even if you felt dubious about the whole thing, you could have no doubt about his sincerity. There was something fanatical about him. The whole idea was fanatical; grandiose—but also grand, on a grand scale: just to think up such an idea and get it going with what was only a handful of people. But maybe that’s how big movements begin, with one person really believing and then others gathering around him till an organization is formed with more and more people joining it; because so many, and maybe everyone, wants to have something or someone to believe in.

  To begin with, as far as I knew, it was the Rawul who had this simple but forceful idea of constituting himself the savior of world civilization. He felt he had excellent credentials, for he belonged to what he claimed to be one of the oldest tribes in the world, with a whole genealogy of primeval mythical figures and historical heroes. Their breeding ground was a mountainous desert state wedged in a corner of northwest India—geographically not very promising, but the Rawul liked to refer to it as the cradle of civilization; and though their glory had long since departed—he wasn’t even entitled to be called the Rawul anymore—he felt it to be an ideal source from which to start the whole thing up again, in a different way and on a different scale. And if he regarded his little kingdom of Dhoka—in which he still had a little palace though no income apart from what he had managed to stow away in foreign bank accounts—as the physical base of the Fourth World, then he himself was the human one: combining in his own person an ancient Oriental title and tradition with a modern Western mind and education. It was strange that such a modest man as the Rawul could have such an exalted notion of himself, but it was almost a sort of selflessness in him. He didn’t want to be a world leader, but he felt he was born to be—chosen by exterior circumstances rather than any value he set upon himself.

  I was ready to concede that he had a right to our house. He was a royal person; and so I guess was the Rani, even if she wasn’t of royal origin. Neither was Crishi: but the three of them, in manner, in appearance, and in expectations, did constitute a sort of royal family with a suggestion of divine rights about them. And perhaps slowly I would have begun, or had already begun, to come around to the idea of making over our house to their movement. It did seem reasonable that such a house should be put to a purpose rather than just kept for a few people who didn’t even live in it properly. I hadn’t yet made up my mind that this particular purpose—the Fourth World—was what I would have chosen to donate it to; but since Michael had, and even Lindsay, there was no reason for me to hold back. I went to the place—behind the abandoned apple orchard—where I hid whenever I wanted to think something out, and where only Michael knew to find me; but there I overheard a scene that changed my mind again.

  It was between Crishi and one of the followers—Paul, a man older than most of the others, maybe in his thirties. He looked as if he had suffered some bad sickness from which his face and body remained harrowe
d; he may also have been very poor, for he grabbed at food in the greedy way of someone for whom it hasn’t always been there. He liked to join in on any fun that was going, but again in a rather desperate way, and when he laughed, it half sounded like crying. Actually, he looked like a person who had cried a lot to himself but now was dried up. It was his voice I heard from my hiding place—always unmistakable because of the whine in it, which had risen to a pitch. He was pleading with someone—with Crishi. Crishi’s voice too would normally have been easy to recognize but it was transformed; not so much in itself, it was still pleasant and light, but in its tone and words, which were foul. The other kept saying “But Crishi, why me, why me?” to which Crishi gave no answer but abuse so vile that I at once got up to show myself. I was enraged to hear such words spoken from one human being to another, and in our house, in my secret hiding place! I was separated from them by a clump of blackberry bushes and, just as I parted it to get through, I saw the other man cover his face with his hands and sink slowly along the trunk of a tree to the ground, sobbing “I can’t, I can’t.” “I’ll show you how you can’t, shit hole,” Crishi said and raised his foot and kicked into Paul’s shoulder, making him fall over and lie along the ground. And when he lay there, Crishi kicked him once more and walked away. At first I wanted to run after him, but instead I retreated behind the bushes and buried myself into the overgrown grass, on my stomach, my head pressed into the earth so as not to have to hear or see anything more. After a while I felt ashamed and got up to help the other man; but when I looked at him through the bushes I saw that, though still lying where he had fallen, he was quite happily watching an ant walk up and down a blade of grass, as if nothing particularly bad had happened.

  I went at once to tell Michael what I had witnessed. I described the scene in detail and even forced myself to repeat some of the words Crishi had used. Like myself, Michael detested such language—we really had a sort of physical revulsion against it, as against a dirty act; and it may be one of the reasons—among plenty of others—why we never got on well in the schools we went to or made many friends anywhere, because to most people these words don’t mean anything; they use them freely and can’t understand why we shrink from them. Michael didn’t like me to repeat them—“Yes yes all right, I get the idea,” he said when I forced them on his attention—but he wasn’t as outraged with Crishi as I thought he would be.

  “You don’t know all of it,” he said. He frowned and I think would have liked to drop the subject; but he was very fair-minded and was used to explaining and interpreting everything as carefully to me as to himself, so he went on: “You don’t know anything about Paul—what sort of a person he is. Some people have to be treated in a certain way, for their own good and everyone else’s, if it’s an organization.”

  An area around my heart grew cold to hear this from Michael. He felt it of course, and he continued: “You have no idea, Harriet, what it’s like to keep all this moving. It’s fine for the Rawul to sit under a tree and give these discourses, but to make everything go, that’s all on Crishi, and it’s not easy, I can tell you.”

  I thought that what he was saying only meant that he liked Crishi very much. But when Michael had felt that way about someone in the past, it had never clouded his judgment. On the contrary, when he liked someone, he applied the same stringent standards to them as he did to himself, and to me: sort of welcoming them to his own world. But with Crishi, it seemed to be the other way around—as if he were giving up his own standards for Crishi’s. I think he felt it too, that there was some big change in himself; and as any change in him implied a betrayal or at least a negation of what there was between us, he seemed to feel guilty. Anyway, he didn’t want to go on talking about it, and I didn’t want him to either.

  But he soon told Crishi about what I had seen, leaving him to handle my misgivings. That was the sort of situation in which Crishi must have excelled all his life—handling people, allaying suspicion, bringing them around. All his charm was geared to it. So that evening, when I was about to join the others under the tree, he stopped me; and I knew at once what he was going to say and he knew I knew and said it: “Michael wants me to explain to you.”

  “Explain what?” I said coldly.

  “Sometimes I act really nasty. I can be a swine.” But his lips twitched, and next moment he was frankly laughing. “I want to talk to you,” he said, looking into my face with amusement and lightly spanning my arm with his fingers. When he saw me glancing toward the tree, he said “You’ve heard the Rawul before and you’ll hear him again.”

  Still holding my arm, he led me away from the tree and toward the porch in front of the house. I could have resisted but to do so—to snatch my arm away—seemed childish, so I went with him and we sat in rocking chairs. I ought to explain that the porch had always been very handsome, but now the gray-and-white marble floor was polished and the white pillars newly painted; and the lawn it faced had been smoothly mown, and at this moment one of the followers was assiduously watering it to keep it emerald green. A house and grounds like ours did need a large staff, no doubt.

  “I know you don’t think too much of all that,” Crishi said, nodding toward the circle under the tree. From this distance, and in a mellow evening light, the scene was dignified and serene. They were all grouped around the Rawul as in a painting of a sage inspiring his disciples with wisdom and high ideals. “He means well, you have to admit,” Crishi said.

  I said “I do admit”—no doubt sounding very uptight, for he cried out, half laughing and half exasperated: “Oh Jesus, Harriet, you sound just like Michael!”

  Well, to me that was a big compliment, but I didn’t care for his familiarity; he even touched my knee—very very lightly, true, but he did touch it, as one laying a claim. I moved it away and he went on: “You’ve got such lovely principles, both of you, I think it’s wonderful.” I sat upright and stared straight ahead of me; my hands were folded in my lap. I knew I looked like generations of my own grandmothers, and I also felt like them.

  Crishi dropped his voice and spoke more intimately, sharing a secret with me: “But Michael’s changing, you must have noticed. He’s coming around.” When he felt me tense up—“Yes to me, but that’s the least of it. . . . To the Rawul and the Fourth World—yes, okay, I know it can sound quite ridiculous—daft,” he said, fishing out that word from somewhere in his cultural ragbag. “But don’t think it’s all phony; all neti.” When he used that word, I flinched—he could have heard it in our sense only from Michael, who had up till then used it only with me. Crishi said it quite casually, taking possession of it as easily as of our house and everyone in it. “The Rawul really is a ruler and from a dynasty older than any other in the whole world. It’s true,” he said, stretching his eyes wide open so I could see how honest they were. “He’s a direct descendant from the Moon,” he added, and his lips twitched, and he kept on looking at me, encouraging me to smile if I wanted to; and when I didn’t, he went on smiling himself—maybe at me as well as at the Rawul. But he changed his tone: “I like it that you’re skeptical, Harriet. I wish more people were, instead of being so keen to throw themselves into the action. It’s a responsibility when they do that. I don’t mean Michael, of course.”

  All the time his eyes were searching me out—as to what I was thinking, but also in another way, in a quite frankly sexual way. Only strangely it was this latter that was impersonal—it was how he instinctively looked at any girl or woman; whereas the other was much more directed at me, Harriet: what I was thinking and feeling.

  “It’s really nice having Michael with us. He has a good personality. I’m not saying the others don’t—they all do really, including Paul. Paul? You know who you saw me with yesterday? Heard me with?” He laughed ruefully, and for a moment put one hand over his eyes. Then he looked at me, biting his lip: “I have this horrible foul temper making me do things. It’s a liability to me and a shock to other people.” He sounded so contrite that I began to feel I ha
d maybe overreacted.

  If I had known him better—or, at that time, liked him better—I could have told him that it was hardly the first ugly fight I had witnessed. I had grown up with scenes between my parents—when I was very small and they were still together, and later each time they met. Now they didn’t meet anymore. Whenever I wanted to see Manton, I made a trip to the city without telling Lindsay. I did it the day after my conversation with Crishi. I wanted to tell Manton about all the new developments and also about Michael and Lindsay wanting to donate Propinquity. After another, very short marriage of his had ended, Manton had given up his place in the city and gone to live in a hotel suite. This really suited his life-style much better, and he didn’t get married again but had different girlfriends.

  The principal one at that time was Barbara. She was my age but had more in common with my father than me. They both liked the same sort of good time and were always going out somewhere to have fun. That day they were going to a premiere where everyone had to come dressed in 1920s clothes; I guess that was the period of the film. When I arrived, Manton was out and Barbara was trying on her dress, which didn’t suit her at all and she knew it. She was a big blond girl, very healthy and wholesome and beautiful, and she spilled out of the skinny little sheath into which she had tried to squeeze herself. “What’ll I do?” she asked me. She meant about the costume, but Barbara was always asking me what to do, mostly about herself and her life; she didn’t have many people to talk to, and was always glad when I showed up. With me helping her, she struggled out of her costume, and she tied a loose robe around herself, which suited her much better—physically and psychologically, because whenever she got me on my own, she liked to be entirely relaxed and talk about every kind of intimate thing. She had taken off her bra too and was naked under her robe. She got on to the usual subject, how Manton wouldn’t marry her and how she was afraid of losing him because she was so dumb. “I know I am, Harriet,” she said; her lovely big baby eyes filled with tears, and I said for the thousandth time, “You’re not.” And it was true: She wasn’t half as dumb as many people who think themselves very smart; and besides, she was really good for Manton, and I hoped he would stick with her. She truly loved him and looked up to him, the way I used to.