Three Continents Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 theovergrown 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.
    â€œYou 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 uphis 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.”
    â€œExplain what?” I said coldly.
    â€œSometimes 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