Facial Justice (15 page)

Chapter Twenty

"PATIENTS and Delinquents and My Dear People." A long pause followed, increasing every second in intensity and significance, for the Dictator's hearers to take in this novel salutation. Joab's head drooped; the messenger lifted his; Jael's veil seemed suddenly to become opaque, even her eyes disappeared behind it. "My dear people," the Voice at length repeated, in tones blurred by emotion, "a very strange phenomenon has happened during these last hours which I feel may have puzzled and disturbed you. I will explain it." Another pause. "As you well know, my concern for you is sleepless and it has been occurring to me, my dear ones, that of late you have not been altogether happy under my guardianship. There have been signs of what I can only call unrest. In the place below, from which I rescued you, such signs would have been visited with condign punishment; none of those guilty would have lived to tell the tale, they would have perished from a hundred forms of lingering torture. I need not remind you of this; it is all written in the Book, and what is more, only a mile or two below us, it is still going on. I need not have reminded you, but even with you, my precious people, memories are sometimes short, and in a time of prosperity it is easy to forget the hard times that went before. Some of you are old enough to remember how hard those times were: I do not intend to dwell on them. But the younger members of our beloved community only know of them by hearsay and it is chiefly to them I speak. "Patients and Delinquents, you are all dear to my heart, and the thought that you might be suffering in spirit has filled me with the deepest grief. Repressive measures are abhorrent to me, recalling as they do the world from which we have escaped; my plans for your welfare have taken many forms, but never that one. As you know, our Constitution is based on equality, equality of the most deep-seated and all-embracing order. But it is a flexible, not a rigid, equality, inspired by a compromise between what I want for you and what you want for yourselves; it is not imposed, it is, in the good sense of the word, voluntary, the expression, through my Edicts, of your own Free Will. What that will is, it has always been my study to find out and gratify; what I have done for you, the modifications and transformations in your social life over these many (to me) happy years of our association, have been done by you yourselves through me. This is a fact, patients and delinquents, that you once realized, and a fact that you are now in danger of forgetting. "Patients and Delinquents, whose welfare is in my charge, I decided to put you to the test. I wanted to discover whether your sense of free will, without which no community, or member of a community, can lead a healthy and useful life--whether it still existed. That was to be my first discovery. And the second was, if, as I hoped and prayed, it still existed, that you were still free to exercise it. And my third discovery was to be, supposing you still had free will and the desire to exercise it, whether you realized, my dear, dear fellow creatures, that it was to me you owed the power to express your individual longings. Did you realize that my provisions for you are the form your free will takes? "So my first two inquiries were soon answered, and in the way I hoped they would be! You had free will and the desire to exercise it. And the third was answered, too, but not in the way I hoped. They were interpreted--these outbreaks, these manifestations of free will--as a protest against the regime, against me, in fact. It was put about, and strangely enough, believed, that those posters had been put up by persons hostile to our administration, by persons who wished us ill, by persons who hoped to overthrow our Government. Free will, yes; but free will that consisted in opposition to ourselves. "Patients and Delinquents, it was I who devised the slogan 'Bet on yourselves,' I who designed the posters, I, or rather my agents, who put them in position. The whole idea was mine, and without me could not have taken place. I staged the revolt, which some have thought was a revolt against me. But it was really, as you must now all see, a demonstration for me, a vote of confidence in me. I wanted you to exercise free will and you exercised it, not against me, but for me. "But I am not infallible, my beloved people, any more than you are; and when I called on you to show your free will, to act for yourselves, to bet on yourselves, I did not, I confess, anticipate the form your longing to express yourselves would take. I had visions of actions of ideal beauty--I myself hardly knew what they would be, but actions far transcending in meaning and interest the communal enjoyments that I have devised for you. Those enjoyments, how tame and insipid they were--singing, dancing, love-making, games, sports, concerts, cinemas, work, your daily avocations--they were all--may I say it?--meant to be compromises between the harsh regime of the Lower State from which I rescued you and the anarchy I feared for you. They were repressive, that I freely admit; they were meant to repress those elements in you which refuse to live in harmony. Some, indeed, enthusiasts for the regime, have denied that they were repressive, have seen in them outlets, safety valves, through which the elements that will not live together in harmony could harmlessly escape. It is not for me to say if they were right. But I sensed the growing unrest among you, an unrest which some would call divine; so I permitted the Country Expeditions, and then, when ardent spirits wished for more intense sensations, I allowed them to be dangerous. Oh, how my heart bled for you, my precious people, when after the expedition to Ely the hospitals were filled to overflowing. There are still among you cripples whom all the skill of our doctors could not heal; there are, alas, gaps in your ranks, the dead, who cannot be replaced. "After Ely, I made another Edict. Of the six coaches three, not one, were to meet with an accident. This, I thought, will certainly deter them: no one will take the coaches. But you know what happened. Every seat was booked; many would-be passengers could not find a place; a cheering crowd, larger than the one that assembled before Ely, watched the coaches start on their disastrous journey. They waited hours and were still there when the six coaches returned intact, with all their passengers safe and sound. I now confess to you, my dear ones, that I had seen to that; it was a pious fraud, an innocent deception on my part, meant to save you from yourselves. And what was the result? Deep disappointment; you all felt cheated of your blood bath; no risk, no ride, you said; and when the next expedition was due to start, without the promise of an accident, not a single patient and delinquent took a ticket; the coaches and the Square were empty but for the drivers and conductors, who did a Dawdle Dance to pass the time; and the service had to be discontinued for lack of patrons. "Yet I knew I had done right; for, made as you are, your natures need that stimulus. Once it did not; once the thought of what you had suffered in the Lower State made you as clay in my hands. Anything, anything, to avoid a recurrence of those conditions when torture and mass executions were the rule--as they still are, my precious ones, in the place that you have left. But your memories of it have grown dim; some have forgotten, some, whom we have cherished with difficulty into life, have never known them. You have come to take the present for granted, and yes, you are tired of it, tired of the harmony it has been my study to bring about in youyou seek stronger incentives. Of this I have grown increasingly aware; and I said to myself, why treat my beloved subjects as if they were children? As if they did not know their own minds? As if they did not know what was good for them? And why, why above all, did I think that what they would want, if left to themselves, if left to their own devices, would be some form of activity that would fill the hospitals and the coffins? Why have I been so cynical? I asked myself, and my face, the face you will never see, burned with secret shame. Why had I directed you into that most destructive of all inventions, the motor car, thinking it was that you wanted, the lure of danger, the excitement of bloodshed, the heady smell of death? Oh, what agonies of remorse I went through, when I thought how I had misunderstood and misdirected you! Of course, I told myself, my darling people wanted no such thing; left to themselves they will at once pass into another state of being, a state of bliss which even I cannot conceive, in which all my ambitions for you will be realized in a way my poor finite brain could never picture. The Golden Age, my dear ones, the door to which can be opened by each one of you with a special, private key. Not my key, not a master key common to all, such as now you use for your houses, but the latch key which in olden days every householder kept for locking up his goods. So each should have his paradise, her paradise, to be enjoyed by him or her alone, and inaccessible to the others. And yet not inimical to the others--oh no! Side by side, touching but not colliding, each cell enshrining a perfect individuality, that owed nothing to and took nothing from the rest. A hive of private paradises, fashioned not by working together, or playing together, or talking together, or thinking together, not created by any communal activity--perish the thought! But coming insensibly, miraculously into being by the simplest of all expedients: the exercise of free will, all your free wills, all operating on their own, without reference to others, guided by that inner light, that infallible sense of the right direction, that, as is well known, we each of us possess. "And I, dear Patients and most dear Delinquents, what part should I play in this paradise? These paradises, rather, since the term is individual, not collective? What room would there be in them for me? None; for as the poet says: Two paradises 'twere in one--To live in Paradise alone.' So I should give up, resign, abdicate; you would hear this voice no more, and I should in the quaint old phrase retire into private life, a private paradise like, and yet quite unlike--since each is individual and distinct--your own. "And now I must let you into a secret, my dear fellow angels. I have been called every name, I know, from tyrant downward. It has been my duty to find out these things, and my Intelligence Service teUs me that two hundred and seventy-one bad names for me are now in common usage. Formerly, I believe, there were far fewer, for (and now I will let you into another secret) my pride as a potentate was hurt to know you spoke so hardly of me. I even took measures of repression: as you will remember, there were edicts, there were fines, there were threats (never carried out) of Permanent Sackcloth for offenders. But then I asked myself, why curtail their liberty? What harm does it do me, whom they have never seen and never will see, if they speak of me with disrespect? So I gave orders that your freedom of speech should be encouraged, not discouraged, and believe me, I have had many a good laugh from some of the names you have invented for me. "But, my beloved people, I wander from the point. What I meant to say was this. You, or some of you, picture me as a remote official, hardheaded and hardhearted, with only one thought behind all I do--how to cling to power. That, you say, those of you who are historians, is the way Dictators have always acted; they cling to power until another power is born strong enough to unseat them. If you only knew how untrue that is of me! If you only knew how much I should like to resign, abdicate, vanish (if what is unseen can vanish) into one of those private paradises which each of you, my precious subjects, is preparing for himself or for herself. "I know better than to use this as a threat; for would not every one of you, my dear ones, call my bluff and take me at my word? I can imagine how heartily sick of me you must be, for I know how heartily sick I sometimes, but not always, am of you. It is for your sakes I stay on, exercising this power which you did not give me and therefore cannot take from me. None of you know how I got it or by what means I keep it. Do you suppose it is fun for me to watch over your interests and your welfare, when I get nothing out of it but the knowledge that without me you would be far, far worse off than you are now? "So at least I thought, Patients and Delinquents, if I may still call you by those sweet old names, until yesterday. But yesterday, I thought, perhaps I do them wrong to believe that my unsleeping vigilance is an advantage to them; perhaps they would be better and happier without me. And it also occurred to me, perhaps I should be happier and better without them, a private person, exercising my free will for myself and not for them. No more responsibility! No more wondering whether the morning will bring a two-hundred-and-seventy-second opprobrious epithet to mark your disapproval of me (I am told that more than two-thirds of these, 198 to be exact, have been invented by women, once called the gentler sex). Do not imagine that because I am a Dictator my skin is too thick to be penetrated by these barbs. No, each one of them rankles; you may think of me sitting here, wherever that is, with tears pouring down my face. So I thought, I cannot cure their restlessness, and perhaps I am wrong to think that their natural inclination is toward violence. Perhaps it was a mistake to send the coaches to Ely; and it was I, not you, who plunged you into a blood bath. Let them have their heads, I told myself. Let them do what they like, without any prompting from me. I shall see actions that will astonish me, and bring to the New State a beauty of living you could have never dreamed of. I shall wither away; but they will go on, exploring the dimension of height which I have forbidden them, enriching their consciousness with experiences of beauty and completeness quite beyond my ken. "So I put up the posters, begging, entreating, almost ordering you to bet on yourselves, to give the rein to your own instincts for your welfare. And what happened? Patients and Delinquents, a terrible thing happened--terrible that is, in my eyes. For blood has been shed in quantities quite unknown to our New State; the streets have run with it. What happened after Ely was like a cut finger by comparison. The hospitals are overcrowded; new hospitals are being improvised, but even so the wounded, the dying, and the dead are still lying in the streets untended, for we have no organization capable of coping with them. The whole town of Cambridge, dear Patients and Delinquents, has become a shambles. Yes, and other cities, too,