Facial Justice (18 page)

hoots and hisses broke out, and Cassius turned away as though blinded. But I clapped madly, overcome by the sense of our common humanity revealed to me by his incompetence, I could not sit, I had to stand, and I shouted, 'You are all wrong, you are hopelessly wrong! Cassius has done us all the greatest service. Cassius is you, he is us! He has fulfilled the will of the Dictator, who wants us to be all alike!' But I doubt if anyone heard me; or if they did, they only thought I was adding my bit to the vituperation that they were heaping on the pianist." Chapter Twenty-four JAEL laid down her pen, it was after three o'clock, but she hadn't noticed how the time was passing. The typewritten sheets had mounted up; later she would have to correct them, perhaps rewrite the whole thing, perhaps destroy it. But no. She saw how weak it was, how it fell short of what she had imagined. In theory, of course, that was right. It must not be a masterpiece. To be consistent with its own thesis it must be mediocre, or very bad indeed. Jael pushed these logical objections irritably out of her mind. It must be something that would get across--a low enough ideal anyhow--it must fulfill its purpose, which was, of course, to hoist the Dictator on his own petard, to push his ideas to a _reductio ad absurdum__. If you are going to be an _agent provocateur__, you must try to be a good one. How this question of standards kept cropping up! Good! Good! It ought not to be good; it ought to be no better than the stupidest members of the audience could write, supposing they were inspired by her grievance against the Dictator, and wished him overthrown. It wouldn't do that, of course. But it might start a doubt in people's minds, and make them wonder just how silly he had hoodwinked them into being. She didn't think that anyone would doubt its genuineness. Much sillier articles than hers had found their way into print--and besides, and besides, such is the hypnotic power of creative effort, she had actually believed in some of it when she wrote it. Conditioning, no doubt: there were moments, still, in which she felt the tug of popular opinion, the compulsion to think other people's thoughts. Yes, it would get by; if only it could do more than that! It was Dr. Wainewright who had given her the idea of writing the article. "If you are fond of music," he said, when they went back to his rooms after the concert, "why don't you write something about the performance we've just heard? It would do you good, take your mind off--occupational therapy, you know." "But how should I get it published?" Jael asked. "I know an editor," said Dr. Wainewright, "a chap who was a patient of mine. I helped to pull him through a long illness. He'll publish it, anything you write," he said, fondling her knee, "if I ask him to." "Supposing I make mistakes in grammar?" "I'm not sure that there are any rules now," said Dr. Wainewright, drawing his chair closer to hers. "Didn't you read that correspondence in the _Daily Leveler__--all about 'who' and 'whom,' and the tyranny of the Objective Case? Lots of people thought that the cases should be standardized--it wasn't fair for a word to be governed by a verb, or even a preposition. Words can only be free if they're equal, and how can they be equal if they're governed by other words?" "I'd never thought of that," said Jael. "They want to standardize the language," Dr. Wainewright said, "so that no one shall be better at writing than anybody else. Only quite simple words will be allowed, because it's so embarrassing for other people not to know them. But it won't be altogether easy, because the simplified language will have to be learned. We can't have people writing just as they like. Or talking either." "Who started all this?" asked Jael. "The Dictator?" "Not to my knowledge. Somebody wrote to the paper." "I could try," said Jael, doubtfully. "There are some things I should like to say. But I don't want to make a fool of myself." "What does it matter if you do? The world is full of fools--you'd only be joining the majority. Now if you set yourself up to be an expert, you might find yourself in trouble." "All right," said Jael, "I'll have a shot." "Are you grateful to me?" asked Dr. Wainewright. "Well, not very. Perhaps just a little." "How can I make you more grateful?" "You know the subject I'm interested in." "I hoped you were interested in me." "Well, so I am," and she gave him a slight proof of her interest. Jael knew little about love-making; nothing, perhaps, for she did not know, and now would never know, whether her strange experience in the sky had anything to do with love. She might have dreamed it. Like a dream it had colored her life, leaving her with an almost unbearable nostalgia for it and the sense of oneness and wholeness that it gave her. Only then had she been herself, no, not herself but much more than herself, because for the first and only time she had wanted nothing; her being had been fulfilled in someone else's. Now she was much less than herself, for she was living only by her will, living on a grievance, living to get her own back. Get her own back! But how could she, since "her own," the essential part of her, was irretrievably lost--lost in the sky, scattered among the elements, like the ashes of someone who has been cremated. Perhaps she had really died then, and this new self was a changeling who occupied her body in the same way that her new face occupied the site of her old face. But no, it couldn't have been then that she lost herself; even a spiritual experience recognizes facts; and the fact was that until she saw herself in the mirror--shamed, parodied, outside, she had remained more or less the same inside. Michael's bewilderment when he saw her in the hospital, his embarrassment, his coldness, might have warned her; but it hadn't. It had shaken her, but she had tried to believe it was a passing mood, which Time would put right. She would never get her own back, in the sense that mattered most. But something she would get back, if she caused the Dictator's downfall, or better still, if she destroyed him with her own hand: the sense of counting for something, of being fulfilled as a person, even if she died in the attempt. And there were still moments when her moral indignation against the Dictator seemed to her noble, as if she was doing humanity a service, not just avenging herself. She tried to think so now, while Dr. Wainewright's eager hands traveled over her, above, below, around, sometimes caressing the skin of her body, which was so much more responsive than her face--so much more responsive that every now and then, between her bouts of almost anguished resistance to him, as if he were the one creature in the world with whom she had nothing in common, she felt twinges of physical desire that bitterly distressed and shamed her. At such times she found herself breathing almost as heavily as he was and half wishing that every breath might be her last. "Does the Dictator have these pleasures?" she managed to bring out. "If so, they are too good for him. But I suppose all men need physical love, just as women do," she giggled. "As a matter of fact he doesn't," Dr. Wainewright giggled, too, and fondled her still more intimately. "You mean he is too old? I thought men never were." "It's not exactly that. No, don't take your hand away." "You mean he doesn't like women? He prefers his own sex, as some people have always said--and it may very well be true--the way he treats us." "I didn't mean that either." "Darling, you are so mysterious." "I should be less mysterious, if you were kinder to me." "But aren't I being kind?" "You could be kinder." "How?" "By taking off this sackcloth that you will insist on wearing. It discourages me." "But it's Sackcloth Day today." "It was, but midnight is just striking, and you know what that means." "What does it mean?" "It means that all who love each other should show it by their acts." "Is it a law?" "No, just a _memento amare__. The Dictator doesn't make laws, as you know, or very few--he just issues edicts." "It's now or never," Jael thought, and started to take off her clothes. They had been messed about so much that she couldn't at once find the fastenings. "No, let me help you." But his eager fingers fumbled and shook so much that her dress was being torn, not taken, off her. And not only her dress, all of her was being torn; her skin was coming off with her dress; she was being flayed. "Ah, here it is!" "What is?" "Your skin--your own dear skin--it's mine at last." He began to babble incoherent endearments, pressing his head against her neck. Then he remembered and with many a long-drawn chuckle--ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha--he began to take his own clothes off. "Oh please!" cried Jael. She didn't know for what she was imploring; was it to be let off, to be released? Or was it for guidance, for inspiration? How different he looked without his clothes. Pathetic, in a way, with nothing but his flesh to recommend him. All at once he seemed to feel himself inadequate. He shivered slightly and murmured: "Darling, let's talk." "But do people talk when they are making love?" He scented a trap in this, and answered, "I'm told they do. It wouldn't be quite... quite friendly, would it, if they didn't? There's such a lot to say. I mean, we've such a lot to say, to explain why--well, no, not to explain, because it explains itself, doesn't it?--but to say something--that goes _with__ the feeling. It should spring to the lips, shouldn't it? If it doesn't, something must be missing. It isn't an occasion like any other, is it? I mean, it's every part of us that is involved--our voices, too. Nothing must be left out or forgotten." He looked at her appealingly and a little timidly, seeming like some strange shaggy animal in his nakedness, and vulnerable and defenseless for all his brave intentions. And he was shivering, whether from desire or cold or nervousness, he himself could not have told. "Say something, please," he said, "just... just to start the ball rolling." "What shall I say?" "Say that you love me, even if you don't mean it." She tried to say it and couldn't, there were so many other things she wanted to say. She began to babble, in a tone of endearment, but without endearing words, for she couldn't bring her tongue to frame them. Panic seized her, for during her wordless monologue he had pulled back the bedclothes, and half pushed, half lifted her into the bed. She felt against her the hardness of his body which his clothes had softened and concealed. She sat up straight in bed and cried: "Oh no, oh no, I can't!" "All right, all right," he soothed her, confidence returning to him with the warmth that was stealing through his limbs from her and from the bedclothes. "Easy does it. If you're not in a hurry, darling, neither am I. I like it better this way--just a little at a time so that we can find out about each other. You're my very dear friend, don't be frightened. I'll put the light out, if you like." "No, no," she muttered, looking downward at his tousled head, half-wishing she could love it. "All right, then. This is my arm, you see, that just goes around you. It's nothing to be afraid of, is it; I'm really rather proud of it." And he flexed the muscles so that they dug into her side. "And this is you--but I'm not greedy, darling, I don't want to know all your secrets straight away--I'll give you plenty of time, if you'll give me time. Ask me to look for something and I'll find it. Have you a little mole, perhaps, that you've kept hidden from me?" She didn't answer. "I ought to know," he coaxed her, "because I've seen you before, for duty, not for pleasure--though it was a pleasure, too, and then you didn't mind, so don't mind now, dear, darling 97. If you have a birthmark, I should love it. Some people have birthmarks in the most unexpected places. It's like their signature, written on them, a sign to know them by. I knew someone once--" he stopped. "Yes?" said Jael. "Oh nothing, darling." "But I want to know, because perhaps I have it, too, and then I could show it to you." "Oh no, you haven't. No one else has, and it isn't interesting, only just a birthmark." "How do you know? It might be interesting to me--most interesting. I felt so happy, I was just dropping off to sleep and now you've spoiled it all." "I've told you, it was only a birthmark." "Yes, but what?" "Why do you want to know?" "Because I want to love you." She looked down at him, with all the tenderness her Beta face could muster. Once more he hesitated, and then said: "If you want to know, it was shaped like a heart." "How touching, how romantic! And where was it?" "Just below... just below... the heart itself." "But how wonderful, how symbolical, to have two hearts--one inside, and one out! And whose was it?" "Oh, somebody's--a patient's." "A man patient's or a woman patient's? You didn't seem sure." "Being with you confuses me--it was a man patient's, of course." "Why 'of course'? A woman might have a heart-shaped birthmark just as well as a man." Looking down, she saw how agitated he was; the sensuality had left his face: it was all wariness and apprehension. His nakedness seemed a separate fact, apart from him, and an unpleasant one, and his whole body, that had looked so proud and sure of itself a moment since, seemed drained of life, as if it had been punctured. "Don't be silly," he snapped. "I know my patients like the palm of my own hand." "Was it the Dictator's?" she asked casually. At that he jumped straight out of bed, and stared at her with terror--yes, with terror--in his eyes. Almost her first thought was: I shall never see him again.

Chapter Twenty-five

DAZED with shock and triumph, Jael walked slowly home and softly let herself in. Joab was asleep; she could hear the gentle, regular snores which seemed so typical of his personality. Far too excited to go to bed, she paced the sitting room feeling as victorious as if she had already beaten the Dictator to his knees. Yet as her pacing gradually calmed down her excitement, so it also chilled her spirit; for what, after all, did her success amount to? She knew now what the Sign was: paradoxically it was a heart, the very organ the Dictator lacked. But just as he didn't wear his heart upon his sleeve, neither did he wear the Sign in any place where you could see it; he would not, like the Emperor in the story, parade his nudity through the deserts and streets of the New State. Nudityl The thought of it made her flesh creep; it was only tolerable to the eyes of love. Her thoughts belittled it and with it the birthmark, which seemed a trivial physical sign to distinguish the Dictator. Much as she hated him, her thoughts had invested him with grandeur; they had never been able to comprehend him, any more than if he had been God. And now a birthmark, just as if he was the most commonplace of mortals! The long-lost child, with a strawberry mark on his right arm! What a letdown, what an anticlimax. And yet to her tired mind and changing mood the mystery persisted, indeed was reborn in a different form: the mere idea that a man distinguished by nothing more remarkable than a birthmark could make his will, his wicked will, prevail over the wills of thousands, bending them to his, and never with more public acclaim than now, when he had turned their little rising into a vote of confidence in himself! Not without violence, not without bloodshed, as he had pretended; no one knew, no one would ever know, what the Inspectors with their pulverizing arts had done to the insurgents. Yet she had escaped; she, a marked woman, who had done everything to make herself conspicuous, had never been molested. Why? Not for the first time she asked herself, why had she been spared? The question struck her almost like a blow, and in the midst of her pacing she stopped dead. Her eyes mechanically sought the window sill where, hardly alive but certainly not dead, stood the cineraria, whose dark-blue velvet petals, long since shriveled, had once enshrined a hope so strong that it seemed like a fulfillment. Tending it, trying to find out what was good for it, she had nourished something in herself that perhaps was still alive, however overlaid by the destructive impulses which governed her now. Was it that which had preserved her, the unknown spring in her own life, which wanted to create, not to destroy? But how could it have preserved her? How could a hope exist without an object? And she had ample proof that the object had ceased to exist--she had seen its extinction in his face, she had seen it in her looking glass, no other proof was needed. Had some virtue from the giver lived on in his gift, protecting her? In a world of substitutes, this plant alone was real. Battered and untidy as it was, fit only for the dustbin to which her brother had often bidden her consign it, it had something which was rare in the New State--an organic personality, a life of its own that was nourished on the mystery of its growth. No doubt it was a hothouse flower; to some extent its human cultivators had tampered with it. In days long past they had experimented with flowers, altering the type, producing larger but less fragrant blooms. But now that there were so few flowers left upon the earth--a handful, perhaps, in every country--men's one idea was to keep them alive, to promote their natural growth, to make them happy in their own way. Nothing was imposed on them, no regimentation, no standardization, their slightest whim was gratified. How spoiled they were, the darlings! And none more spoiled than hers. On it she had lavished all the love and care that she would have lavished on the giver, had not he--Could it be that the flower, more faithful than he was, had shown its gratitude, and through bypaths of the spiritual world, which even the scientist Inspectors had not yet explored, lent her a helping hand, so that instead of being pulverized and scattered to the elements, she was still in being, still able to think and feel for herself, and plan revenge? In the hospital ward those other cinerarias, the plastic kind, still stood by every bed-head; and the patients liked them just as much as if they had been real. Even at its best hers had never reached their artificial perfection; her fellow patients had condoled with her on hers. Theirs came from a factory; and if one got knocked over, or damaged in some way, the matron got in touch with the factory, and the factory replaced it. But hers came who knew how, or who knew whence, and was an emblem of love, the love she had known for such a short time, the love she had been robbed of when she was robbed of her face. She did not blame him, she had never blamed him, for who could go on loving something which no longer was the thing he had loved, more and worse than that, which had been changed to resemble every other object of its kind--the Beta face? Beta is best--but best for what? Not for a godlike Inspector, whose fancy was at liberty to roam where it chose, until it lit on her. She did not blame him, but she did blame the Dictator. Had the Dictator, she wondered, muddled by sleepiness and all the experiences she had been through, a Beta face? And was this ridiculous heart implanted on the skin the only means by which the Head of the State could be identified? Did even that august personage have to bear some sign of mortal weakness, some trivial token of individuality so that those who knew (of whom she was one) could say, beholding it, "This is the Dictator!"? Of course not, for the Dictator was a man, and had the privilege of looking like a man, not a mere replica of other men. Was it possible that the idea of standardization could ever really bore people? Could it ever be rammed down their throats too hard? Could she, Jael, add one more to the infinite number of variations which the Dictator had invented to make it appetizing, which would somehow show it up? Could she inoculate them against it by giving them an overdose of it? But as she sat down before her typewriter a thought came to her that made her jump to her feet. Why write when what she wrote would never be printed?--for Dr. Wainewright was now her mortal enemy, as she was his: he would never approach the editor on her behalf, and without his intervention, the article would never be accepted. By drawing his secret out of him, she had drawn her own sting. Sickened with frustration and defeat, her head drooped till it nearly touched the table. And then, as suddenly, it jerked upward. For, of course, he would persuade the editor to print it. He would have to! All she need do was to enclose with the typescript a covering note--"Dear Dr. Wainewright"--the "Dear" could be left out--"In view of what you told me last night--this morning--a piece of information which will be all the more interesting to the outside world as coming from you--I have no doubt at all that you will see your way to get this printed. Otherwise--but I need not say what 'otherwise' means to a man of your discernment, exemplified nonprofessionally, as well as professionally"--something like that. Blackmail, perhaps; but it would bring him to heel. Jael sat down again; the typewriter looked much more cooperative this time.