Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

and civilizations. He came to a conscious realization of everything that lay behind him and was in him: and it was at that time, as a schoolboy in cold damp Middlesex, that he came truly to understand his ancient lineage, his own place in the story of Man, and with it, the responsibility that place conferred on him. Technically, he was no longer a king; there were no more kings; the world today didn’t want kings. What then did it want? the Rawul asked us (Grandfather said “Hm” again). It wanted, the Rawul told him and us, men who were prepared to be kings in spirit: not to conquer and rule kingdoms but, extracting what was best in each, to merge them into one great all-embracing kingdom of this world. This was his dream, he said. This was what had brought him to our shores, here into the heart of America: He looked around at all of us—Lindsay, Jean, Mrs. Schwamm, Michael and me, Sonya and Grandfather—in the hope that we would share his dream and help to bring it to fulfillment. He would not deny that he stood before us as a man with a mission, imposed on him by his birth and kingdom. And if he himself was small and wanting—and he said he was, though he didn’t look it at all, tall and plump, shining in silk and jewels—he invited us not to regard him as a person but as a world spirit seeking to express itself; and to look not at but beyond him, not at what he alone but what all of us together could achieve—and here he waved his hand at where the two flags hung side by side over the lake, and everyone looked up at them except Grandfather, who said “Hm” again.

      Grandfather was sitting a little apart from the rest of us. We were as usual down on the grass, some cross-legged, some with our knees drawn up, facing the Rawul, who sat on a chair to address us. As a special courtesy to Grandfather and Sonya, two more chairs had been placed at the outskirts of our circle opposite the Rawul. Grandfather made no fuss about occupying his, but Sonya wouldn’t dream of it—she at once placed herself in the front of our group and even managed to get into a cross-legged position. Seated thus, her hands folded in her lap, she looked up at the Rawul, ready and eager to be inspired. Grandfather, although directly facing the Rawul and on the same level with him, did not look at, but away from him, across the lake; only sometimes he shot him a quick glance from under his brows, before at once resuming his faraway gaze over the water. The Rawul appeared to be addressing him more than anyone else, but I wasn’t at all sure that Grandfather was listening—except for the times he said “Hm,” though that too might have been at his own thoughts; he often did that, commenting to himself in his own mind.

      Afterward he asked to speak to Michael and me. He came up to Michael’s room. It was strange to see him there—I mean, I was used to seeing Grandfather at some great carved desk under the American eagle, not having to perch on the edge of Michael’s narrow bed; but there was no chair, only the bare floor where Michael and I sat side by side listening to him. He asked us were we sure about donating Propinquity. Michael said yes at once, but added that I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I felt a bit—I don’t know, weak or mean-spirited, in the face of his absolute certainty. But it was always like that: Michael strong and certain and looking straight ahead, while I vacillated and saw all sorts of obstacles right and left preventing me from making up my mind. And when Grandfather turned to me, to ask what held me back, there was nothing definite I could say; and Michael spoke up for me, that I still needed time to think. When Grandfather asked him was he sure that he had thought enough, he said of course; and when Grandfather persisted, he became impatient and asked had Grandfather ever known him not to be absolutely certain, and Grandfather had to admit that no, he had not. Then there was a silence between them—not a hostile one, but because Grandfather respected Michael too much to attempt to argue with him. It had been like that ever since Michael was little. Even at that time he had been very definite and decisive in everything he thought and did, and Grandfather treated him as though he were absolutely equal in experience and authority with him. Grandfather loved him very, very much and was proud of him: perhaps also in reaction to Manton, of whom he wasn’t proud at all, and I’m afraid he didn’t love or even like him either; it was a great relief to him to have a grandson as different from his son as Michael was from Manton.

      Grandfather asked me, “If Michael is so sure, why aren’t you?”

      “I told you,” Michael put in, more impatiently. “Harriet’s still thinking it out.”

      Grandfather smiled a bit. He always liked it when Michael was assertive with him; he liked it in general that Michael had an assertive character. He turned to me again: “Even your mother it seems has thought it out.” We didn’t have to comment on that. We were aware he was speaking ironically, or even cynically. Everyone knew that Lindsay never thought, let alone thought out, but did what she wanted from moment to moment, the same way as Manton. Whenever I heard Grandfather speak about our parents to Sonya—he never mentioned them to anyone else—it was always as “Those two fools,” and he could pack an awful lot of expression into it; if we were nearby, Sonya would say warningly, “Les enfants, darling.”

      But now Grandfather didn’t want to speak about Lindsay and her motives, or even about Michael’s and mine. He launched off into a sort of soliloquy of his own, sitting there on Michael’s bed and the two of us looking up at him as if listening to some ancient mariner’s tale. Grandfather was in appearance not unlike an ancient mariner, with his big weathered bulk and his white brows beetling over his keen seafarer’s eyes. He had a deep, slow voice that he never had to raise much, people always being prepared to listen to him attentively. His accent and speech were educated, upper class, but running underneath the surface was an American sort of burr that got stronger as he got older and was redolent of the locality of his childhood. This is more or less what he said, and it was so unusual for him to speak to us at such length, and so intimately, that I can still remember it almost word for word after these many years. There was a special-occasion feeling among the three of us. I had never before felt so strongly how he was our grandfather, transmitting to us his own experience and what he had himself received from those who had gone before us:

      “You could say it’s none of my business what you do with your inheritance from your mother’s side of the family. It’s for you to dispose of as you think fit. But I’ve been thinking lately about inheritance in general and what it means; what it entails. I’m aware that nowadays young people, people like you, Michael and Harriet, prefer to travel light. You prefer to be rid of those properties, privileges, and responsibilities that we were taught to take good care of. Well I’m not saying we’re right and you’re wrong; no I’m not saying that; I’m only trying to tell you how it was when I was your age and my father might be talking to me like I’m talking to you now. As you know, my father was in the government, as was his father before him. Public service was expected in our family. That goes right back to the first Wishwell to come to this country. Born an Irish soldier, he turned himself into an American farmer to till this land for his American family—he married first Augusta Linfield and after her demise her elder sister Miss Louisa; and when it came time to fight the British army, he went right back to being a soldier again. Well, when they hanged him for a rebel, it was up to Louisa Wishwell to raise her own and her sister’s children, fourteen of them altogether. Nine of them survived and spread all over the country, some as farmers, some as traders, and lawyers, and a preacher too; every kind of trade and profession. I guess we’ve got family all over, some rich and educated, some plain and poor. Our own branch of Wishwells—and we’re the only ones to pronounce it Witchell—goes back to Henry, who returned to Concord in the 1830s after an unsuccessful spell of growing oranges in Louisiana. He started his own newspaper, The Fighter, and went to jail three times for his radical activities; and once he had to be hidden away by the marshal from an antiabolitionist mob. His sisters and his daughters were not far behind him—we’ve always had strong women in our family, Harriet, ready to stand up first for the slaves and then what they called the other slaves, that is, their own sex. I don’t need to remind you of Harriet Wishwell, the first female president of the Anti-Slavery League, or of Maria Wishwell Knox, the author of Let Us Be Sea-Captains! I still remember that other great reformer and suffragette, my great-aunt Harriet Wishwell, who lived up to the age of ninety-eight. It was about her Commodore Dewey said he would rather face the entire Spanish navy than one Harriet Wishwell. These matrons brought up their sons the way the Romans did, and there was never any question in our family of not serving the country in which we had the good fortune to be born. My grandfather, Michael, born 1849, enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts, pretending