Facial Justice (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

JOAB was dead; he was killed in the skirmishes that broke out on the night of the Dictator's abdication--as some called it. Jael felt his loss less than she had felt Judith's. This was not surprising, for her brother had never been close to her; from childhood he had been her keenest and most persistent critic. Yet in his way he had been fond of her and she of him. Unwittingly she had leaned on him, and she missed him as a prop, if not as a man. But events had moved so quickly toward chaos that the ties of family and friendship had ceased to have much meaning. Who is on our side, who? That was what mattered. Jael's revolutionary activities, once known to a few, were soon known to many; more than one faction courted her--she could choose between them. She chose what was for the moment the most radical--the Demolition Squad: with her own hands she helped to break down some more houses. But this group soon lost its following, for it was clear that in the present conditions no new houses would be built, and the occupiers of the New Housing Estate were as unwilling to take in lodgers as the evicted were to seek their hospitality. In the last of several bloody encounters the Demolition workers were badly beaten, and soon became absorbed in other groups. Most of these groups were frivolous, or idealistic or destructive; everybody wanted something undone, hardly anybody wanted anything done. The essential services had almost ceased to work, no regular hours were kept; there had never been much distinction between employer and employed, now there was none. The collective consciousness which the Dictator had fostered lingered on; people still knew what their fellows were feeling, and would rally to anyone who seemed like a leader; but initiative they had none, they could only do what they were told. The most popular pastime was still birthmark baiting; the excitement of it never seemed to pall; and some of the victims had been stripped in public half-a-dozen times. Many more birthmarks had come to light, but never the right one. Where were the Inspectors? No one knew; they had vanished, and rumor had it that they had founded a colony of their own, in some distant country, taking with them, some said, the Dictator. But the more general belief was that the Dictator had never existed; he was a hoax, and his last communication to his subjects was the greatest hoax of all. So things went on, in growing anarchy and chaos, until at last the free-for-all existence encountered a sharp check. Food supplies were running out. It had not occurred to the rioters that this might happen: the store of tablet meals had seemed inexhaustible. But it was managed by the Inspectors; no one else knew where to get it, least of all the underlings who were accustomed to distribute it. They still worked at the Food Office, when they felt so inclined, and recklessly handed out the rapidly diminishing store; but the day came when people were not getting enough to eat. Who was to blame? Who was to blame? The civil servants at the Food Office, of course; they were idlers and drones who had neglected their duties. An angry mob collected, and sacked the Food Office, incidentally killing the few employees who happened to be working there. Then the situation became acute; starvation threatened. There was only one thing to do. It was known that during the Dictator's regime relations with the Underworld had never quite been broken off; as between countries at war, the means of communication still existed, though what they were, and how they operated, no one knew. The hole in the ground through which the Pretty Gentleman's child spokesman had led his followers into the light of day, before his mysterious disappearance, was still there: round and above it, masking it horn view, was a low crematorium-like building, whose trans-verse lines were dominated by a fat, squat chimney, over which, at times, a plume of black smoke hung. The building was defended by an iron palisade topped with spikes, an unnecessary precaution, for the place, which was only just outside the town, was always shunned by the citizens, who believed that it brought bad luck even to touch the railings. During the disorders many, if not most, of the buildings in Cambridge had suffered in one way or another from the Demolitionists or from gangs bent on pure destruction: but the Hole Hall, as it was called, had never been touched. No one had ever been inside it except, presumably, the Inspectors, or the Dictator himself, but they had never been seen to enter it. The famine created, almost overnight, a Government of a kind, a Committee of Public Safety whose decrees were harsh and peremptory; any infringement of them was punishable by death. Its first act was to impose a curfew, everyone had to be indoors by eight o'clock, so that there were no witnesses when, toward midnight, a handful of men furtively approached the Hole Hall and, with the help of pickaxes and crowbars and one oxyacetylene lamp, broke their way in. Nor did any member of the public know by what means they made contact with the ruler of the Underworld; but contact they did make, and the results of it were posted up in the market place, next morning. The Ruler of the Underworld had made his conditions, and, as was only to be expected, they were severe. Before he would enter into any negotiations with the people of the so-called New State, he demanded that six of them, three men and three women, should be sent to him as hostages. How they would be treated when they arrived was not stated; but it was stated that they would not be permitted to return. The proclamation concluded by announcing that unless six volunteers for this service presented themselves at the Office of Public Safety before nightfall, the six would be conscripted. Panic seized the people, at first a silent panic, for they were too cowed by the examples which had just been made, some of whom were still hanging from hastily-erected gibbets. Accustomed to being treated _en bloc__, the idea that half-a-dozen should be singled out for a special purpose was almost inconceivable to them. They were conditioned to identifying themselves with the mass, with each other, in fact; and the idea that six of them were to have a quite separate destiny, which they couldn't share with their fellows and which they would have to endure alone, appalled them. The notion of existing in oneself, apart from other people, receiving no support from their thoughts and feelings, was too terrible to be borne. And still more terrible was the fate itself. Under the Dictator, the severest punishment for any offense (apart from the rumored pulverizations) was that of being sent back to the Underworld. R. E., Returned Empty, whatever it might mean, was still the worst thing that could happen. Unscrupulous kiddy-kuddlers sometimes used it as a threat to frighten refractory charges with "You'll be R. E.!"--and then the tears flowed faster, or, from terror, stopped. The recognition, by each member of the community, of a selfhood that must suffer, and suffer alone, involved a reversal of all their mental processes that acted on them like madness. Being entirely without self-discipline, relying only on the stimulus of what others thought and felt, they had no idea how to meet a situation which was to affect each one of them alone. Mass suicide, subject as they were to mass suggestion, they might have understood and acted on; but solitary suicide! Or solitary martyrdom, long drawn out, among indifferent or hostile people, with whose thoughts one could hold no communication, while with the passing of each agonizing minute they were driven deeper and deeper into themselves! The thought was so frightful that many went mad as soon as it had penetrated into their consciousness, while others died from shock. The cry went round, "A scapegoat! A scapegoat! Where is the Dictator, who has brought all this on us? Where is he? Let him be R. E., instead of us!" A few days before, they had collectively forgotten him; now the thought of him once more flooded their minds and with but one association: that he had condemned them all to this terrible punishment--for each man and woman felt that it was he or she on whom the lot would fall. Starvation was bad enough, but that at least they could all face together; this was something far, far worse, a threat that hanging over everybody would only fall on one. An outbreak of birthmark baiting started, but it was a feeble affair, for most of the hunters were so weakened by hunger that they could hardly stand; quite often the challengers and the challenged fell down in a heap on top of each other before they had had time to strip. The black-suited myrmidons of the Committee, who had appropriated what food there was left, had no difficulty in crushing the outbreak or in suitably punishing the ringleaders. When night fell, all was quiet in the streets.

Chapter Twenty-nine

JAEL was sitting alone in the house she had shared with Joab. For twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing and had only once been out. Going out, she had heard the news (her radio no longer worked) and seen the proclamation about the hostages. She had done something else, too, which made her feel lightheaded. It was raining. Rain was a rare phenomenon in the New State. The Inspectors knew how to get drinking water from the clouds; they could get it from the sea, too. But the ordinary patients and delinquents did not know. So in a sense the rain was opportune; for it meant that even if the population died of starvation it would not for the moment die of thirst. Rain meant a rainy season. In the New State it never rained but it poured, and poured for days, turning the crumbling earthy surface into a swamp. Some parts of the country were flatter than others; the district north of Cambridge was the flattest of all, being part of the old Fens, and would soon be waterlogged. How would the people, if there still were any, manage then? Jael mused on this, and on many other problems connected with the future, though for her they were academic problems, the solution of which, if there was one, she would never see. For she had volunteered to be a hostage, to be Returned Empty to the Underworld. At seven o'clock in the morning, when the curfew was lifted, she would proceed to the Committee's Office and surrender herself. From what she knew and what she had heard, she did not think that anyone would steal a march on her. Only she retained the faculty of private judgment and the power of choice. The others could not act against their collective wish for self-preservation. Of the six hostages, she would be the only volunteer. As this was to be the last night on earth, whatever happened to her below it, she had decided to spend it sitting up. She would be a long time dead and didn't want to waste her few remaining hours of consciousness. She would spend them communing with herself. The room next door was her bedroom; she had not imagined, when she made her bed that morning, that she would never sleep in it again. How had she come to her decision? In a flash. In a flash she had seen it was the only thing to do, and the logical outcome of everything that she had done so far. She wanted to assert the uniqueness of her personality, which in its external aspect, at any rate, the Dictator had taken from her. Yes, and in other ways, too; for a time she had been ensnared by the collective consciousness and had reacted accordingly; she had seen herself through other people's eyes instead of through her own. Why did that matter? To Jael it seemed to matter tremendously, but she couldn't have told why. Did it weigh with her, she wondered, that other people--the whole population of the New State, perhaps--might come to hear that she had voluntarily accepted the role of hostage, and regard her as a heroine? She didn't think so. Nor did she think they would be told; for hitherto the Committee had acted in secret, and suppressed the names of those who, for whatever reason it might be, had disappeared. You could not be a heroine if no one knew you were. Was she doing it for anybody's benefit but her own? She tried to answer this question dispassionately. In a way, yes. Once she had loved her fellow human beings; she did not love them now, she had seen them do too many unpleasant things. When she reflected that now only five instead of six would have to be conscripted, she felt a certain warmth about her heart. Somebody would get off on her account; but the woman, whoever she was, would never know what she had escaped, and the general panic would be as great as ever. Even if they were told, and they would not be told, that someone had volunteered to be a hostage and by so much had reduced the odds against them, they would still identify themselves with the remaining five. And Dr. Wainewright? How did she feel about him? He had been her stooge, just as, in a sexual way, she had been his, or would have been, if he could have made her. She had got the better of the bargain: she had used him, but he had not used her. She felt a certain compunction about him for he had loved her, whereas for him she had had no warmer feeling than a few unwilling twinges of sex. That gave him, in the moral balance, an advantage over her--an unfair advantage; for what was the use of being loved, if you could not return it? One-sided love was simply an embarrassment, an intolerable burden on the conscience and the feelings. Anyhow, she could do nothing about it now, for Dr. Wainewright was dead--he was one of the earliest victims of the riots. He had died, and half his secret with him. Jael thought of the Dictator, her arch-enemy. But she could not think of him clearly, or personally, as it were; her thoughts of him were still mixed up with other people's thoughts; he presented no consistent recognizable picture, not even to her hate. If she couldn't think about him, she could still hate him, and she must; for had not he been her undoing, had he not undone them all? He had corrupted and betrayed the people and was worthy of death. There, almost within arm's reach, lay the scalpel, unsterilized, rusty from disuse, that she was keeping for him. At the sight of it, her resentment against him flamed up once more. And yet she resented her resentment, for it disturbed the calm that had come over her spirit with her decision to dedicate herself--to herself. It was a jarring note in the growing harmony of her feelings. On the window sill, beside the scalpel, stood the cineraria, the plant that Michael, while he still loved her, had given her as an earnest of his love. It had survived the outbreaks of violence that had carried off so many human beings. It was still alive, though only half alive, and it would outlive her. It was the only thing she cared for in the world, she cared for it far more than for herself; for herself, except as an emblem of identity, she cared not at all. If only she could give it to someone--someone who would cherish it! But there was no one, no one to whom she wanted to make a gift. How the rain beat down! It pattered and sometimes drove against the window, it filled the street outside with a soft humming sound. Suddenly she remembered having been told, by a friend older than herself, who had heard it from her mother, that in the old days when plants abounded, and some people had as many as half-a-dozen in their houses, they used to put them out of doors when it rained, for the rain did them good in a way that artificial watering could not; it washed their leaves, put them in touch with Nature, and refreshed their entire beings. Flower pot in hand, she went to the front door and opened it a crack. All was dark; the street lamps no longer functioned; there was no sound but the hiss and patter of the rain. No one would see her if she stepped outside and stood the plant on the earth beside the doorstep. How the mud squelched! Tomorrow it would be ankle deep, or worse. Tomorrow was of no interest to her, but she must remember to take the plant back when it had its drink--when she went out at seven o'clock to give herself up. She must not forget. Would they perhaps let her take it with her? In the past, people condemned to death had sometimes been allowed a final boon. She did not think they would; the New Committee had as little respect for personal wishes as the Dictator had had. Yet something she must do, to try to preserve it after she was gone. How hard it was to rid the mind of all desires, to attain the peace she strove for! She would write a card: "Live cineraria, very precious--please preserve," and perhaps whoever lived in the house after her, supposing anyone did, would read it and respect her wishes. She wrote the note. No good putting it with the plant now; it would be washed away or smudged too much to read. She must remember this little duty in the morning, when she put the plant back in the house. Two things to remember, and she didn't want to remember anything! Consciousness wasn't such a blessing after all. Just close her eyes and lose it.