Facial Justice (4 page)

Chapter Six

CAMBRIDGE--for so the settlement was named--was built on the supposed site of the famous University town, not a vestige of which remained. It was a place of about ten thousand inhabitants. Ten thousand was the upward limit allowed to any one town except London, and communication between towns was not encouraged. A few roads had been built but they were worse than third class. "The sense of distance must be restored," the Dictator had said. The Inspectors, on the other hand, could get from one end of England to the other with miraculous speed. No one knew how they traveled: some said on flying saucers. The Dictator, of course, seemed to be omnipresent. His voice was heard not only in every town but in every room and there was no way of silencing it. Radio sets were so constructed that even when they were turned off his voice still came through. One handicap that the Motor Expeditions (Country) Service had to face was the fact that, during the Third World War, nearly all the Ancient Monuments had been wiped out As far as the works of man went, there was nothing to make an objective for an expedition. And to some extent this was also true of the works of God. The atomic weapons had not spared them either. Not only had they stripped the countryside of verdure, replacing green with a color like mud but colder, grayer, and less luminous, they had also, in many places, leveled the hills and filled up the valleys--the prophecy enshrined in the Dictator's signature tune had come literally as well as figuratively true. So there was, for the gaping trippers, really nothing to look at--no buildings, no beauty spot, no view, no "sight" of any sort. The expeditions, however, took different routes, in so far as there remained different routes to take, and these were numbered, for the sake of convenience, A1, A2, A3, like the roads of the prewar world. Most of the expedition addicts (as they were called) took whichever coach happened to be going, without inquiring its destination; and this was the accepted practice. Others, however, professed to find one route more satisfactory than another, and would fiercely champion the hillock visible from A1 against the pond that, five miles from the start, was visible from A2. These arguments sometimes grew quite heated, although, strictly speaking, they were out of order, since the whole idea of preference was taboo. Those were on safer ground who admitted frankly that they favored one route rather than another because they had a prejudice in favor of certain numbers and figures; A1 or A2 had an almost mystical attraction for them. For with public and official opinion the irrational had much more weight (and was treated with more respect) than the rational. An argument was a proof of being out of line with official theory; a prejudice had the authority or at any rate the excuse of the subconscious mind to back it and was a matter for compassion and the psychiatrist. The postwar landscape, then, was, all over the country, featureless and dull. But in the neighborhood of Cambridge there was an exception to this. Owing to one of those freaks in the process of destruction, of which the Second World War had given many examples, the western tower of Ely Cathedral still survived. The rest of the church was flat, its ruins scarcely distinguishable in the mud that heaved around it, but the tower still stood, a gigantic and awe-inspiring landmark. Indeed its effect was so overwhelming that beholders had been known to faint at the sight of it, and even the least sensitive were moved with tumultuous feelings for which they couldn't account. Those few who remembered the great building in its glory would sometimes try to describe it but they got no encouragement to do this, for nostalgia of any kind was looked on askance. Not that the Dictator frowned upon religion; he even encouraged it as a necessary outlet of the human spirit; but it had to be the contemporary religion of his own brand, and the Litany was the only form of it that he permitted to delinquents. The Litany in which everyone was equal, equal in sinnerdom. The tower of Ely Cathedral, piercing the heavens, spoke another language. All the same, excursions to visit Ely were allowed, and although they were far the most popular they had to take their turn with the others, and like the others were known by a number, in this case A5. Jael did not talk much about her project. Few people did, for it was as unwise to broadcast in advance a proposed peccadillo as it would have been to say you meant to ride your bicycle on the footpath (bicycles were allowed) or get drunk on Saturday night. (Drunkenness was treated very leniently by the regime.) But the Dictator's pronouncement led to a buzz of conversation about the expeditions as a whole, and it was generally agreed that by making them unsafe he had snuffed them out altogether. No one would go at the risk of life and limb. Would passengers who had already taken tickets get their money back? Or would they lose their ticket money and their fine money as well? Jael listened, and common sense told her that her best plan would be to try to get her money back. But it would be a complicated and time-taking business and the official would be short with her, as he had been when he issued the ticket. He had made her feel that she was out of step, letting down the side. But that slight embarrassment would soon be over, it didn't really count. What did count was the simple fact that she wanted to go, and that mysteriously the threat of the accident only inflamed her desire. People might say what they liked; she would go! The worst moment was when she had to break the news to her brother. "I can't understand you," he grumbled. "Ever since you started this face-saving business you've been a different creature. By rights I should report you to the Ministry of Psychia-try." "But you wouldn't do that, would you?" asked Jael anxiously. "Only because you are my sister and Relations Needn't Tell." "Relations Needn't Tell," repeated Jael. "But they can, of course, and I should be doing it for your sake, not mine." "Of course," said Jael, automatically. "Don't think I don't realize the difficulty of your position. As a Failed Alpha you represent the Voluntary Principle. The Voluntary Principle, as the Dictator has said, is like the appendix in the human body--it is of no use, but unless it gives serious trouble it had better be retained. If it gives serious trouble--" "Yes?" said Jael. "Well, there might be an order for all appendices to be removed. By clinging to your face--" "I don't exactly cling to it," objected Jael. "Well, by refusing to be Betafied, you have shown that your Voluntary Principle is unhealthy, and if you now go on this expedition you will prove it is inflamed. Besides--" "Besides what?" Jael asked. "Besides there is the danger of an accident." Jael thought a moment and her eyes brightened. "Oh no," she said decidedly. "Not to me. Nothing ever happens to me. Have you ever known anything happen to me, Joab? And if it did--" "If it did?" repeated her brother. "Well, it might be rather fun." Joab shook his head disgustedly. "I don't know what's come over you, Jael," he said. "If worry had not been forbidden, except in certain well-defined cases, I should worry about you. I might ask for a permit to worry--" "Oh, please don't do that!" "I might, if I thought it would bring you to your senses. Jael, I sometimes suspect you of secret worrying." Jael changed color. "Of course I don't." "Worry is Waste of Time," said Joab. "Worry is Waste of Time," repeated Jael. "What makes you think I worry?" "I can see it in your face. If you had been Betafied--" "Yes!" "You wouldn't show it. Betas don't show their feelings." "I know. That's what I don't like." "But why? They can show feelings. The choice is almost endless. You can have any one of ninety-nine expressions." "I still prefer my own." "Jael, aren't you rather conceited? Let me read you some of them," Joab went to a filing cabinet and opened a drawer. He took out a sheet of cardboard, rather like those which customs-house officers used to give travelers from abroad to remind them of what they had to declare. "Amiable," he began, "affable, agreeable. What's wrong with any of those?" "But I don't always feel amiable, or affable, or agreeable." "Perhaps not, but wouldn't you rather look as if you did? Well, here are some more--compounds of Beta. Beta--Beauty (that's a general favorite), Beta--Belle, Beta--Buxom, Beta-Birdie (perhaps that wouldn't suit you), Beta--Bright--" Jael shuddered. "I should hate to be always bright." "But other people would like you to be. Then there's Busy Beta (a play on busy bee, of course), British Beta--that's a good, hard-wearing expression, I believe." "I don't like any of them," said Jael. "Not for keeps, I mean." "Well, let's leave the Betas. 'Pert, pensive, patient, provocative--'" "Would you like me to look provocative?" "Well, I'm told that women want to." "Yes, but not all the time." "Stern, serious, saucy, sidelong." Joab cocked his eye at her. "How would 'sidelong' do?" But Jael could bear it no longer. Her eyes smarting with tears she jumped up, and ran into the next room, which she occupied as Joab's secretary. Work in plenty lay upon her writing table but she stared at it with unseeing eyes. Presently Joab followed her in, and sat down awkwardly on the other chair. "I'm sorry, Jael," he said. "I never realized you were such an emotional type." He glanced at her tear-stained face and red, swollen eyes. "Betas can't cry, you know," he went on kindly, "at least they can, but it runs off, the surface is waterproofed. Wouldn't you like Beta better?" Still sobbing, Jael shook her head. Her brother rose. "I'll leave you now," he said. "Take it easy this morning and in the afternoon go for a good walk." "But I'm going to Ely," spluttered Jael. Joab turned back. "Oh no, you won't. You'll see, nobody will go. A few may turn up, but the buses won't start unless they have a proper load." Jael said nothing.

Chapter Seven

JAEL started early for the Square where the coaches were accustomed to assemble. As she went she kept asking herself why she was so restless and unhappy and there seemed to be only one answer. "Because you're out of step! Ever since you refused to be Betafied you have been feeling the whole weight of the Community's disapproval. They may not look disapproving because disapproval isn't one of the recognized Shades of Expression; but underneath they are; if they could pull a face at you they would! And what have you got out of it? Only the doubtful blessing of your own face. You may be a Failed Alpha and prettier now than most people; but soon you will be old and plain, whereas Beta faces don't change, or only once, when they get their Older Women's Replacement! You'll never be happy until you can think and feel and look like other people. Remember what the slogan says: 'You can't be happy off the Beta Track.' " And now she was off the Beta Track again. Perhaps she was the only member of the whole community who was going to Ely. She looked around for confirmation of her fears. But they Were not confirmed. Others were going the same way she was, some singly, some in groups of two or three; they had a furtive, excited air, and talked in snatches interspersed by peals of high-pitched laughter. The March-day climate, with its chilly wind and pallid sun that never quite came through, tended to keep pedestrians on the move; but these were walking fast, sometimes running to keep up with each other. Jael had her seat reserved, but she couldn't help hurrying, too. Around the next bend the Square came into sight, square in name, but oval in shape, because of the Dictator's aversion to angles and straight lines. And it was full, or nearly full, of people. Jael could only see the tops of the six coaches, for the crowds that were surging around them. For a moment she thought that they all meant to board the coaches; she would never get in. A sharp stab of feeling, half disappointment, half relief, ran through her. Slowly she edged her way to where a placard, "A5," reared itself on a pole beside a bus. Sure enough, people were trying to get in and the conductor was fending them off and shouting, "Show your tickets!" Jael showed hers. "Make way there, make way there!" shouted the conductor, and she managed to squeeze through the throng and climb into her place. Once there, she looked down on a tossing sea of faces, upturned toward the coach; and though the great majority were Betas, and therefore incapable of much facial expression, their eyes were eloquent, and what did she see in most of them? Envy, Bad E--envy of her good fortune. It took her a moment or two to recognize it, for hitherto it had only been a name and an idea to her; now that she saw it lift its ugly head she was as appalled as if she had raised the Devil. In the half hour before the coaches were due to start, and while they were filling up, the Square was filling, too, and the pandemonium increased. The crowd had come to see the coaches off, the conductor said: it was the news that one of them would have an accident that had drawn so many people. But the fascination of the risk had taken such a hold that many of the spectators wanted to go, too; it wasn't fair, they declared, that only ticket holders should go: everyone should go in the name of Equality! When this word was heard some tried to perform the appropriate ritual dance; but there was no room for it, and lacking this outlet, tempers rose, fists were shaken, and eyes blazed through impassive faces. Some mounted the steps of the coaches and clung there; some perched themselves on the hoods, and when the moment came to start, the drivers dared not, for fear of mowing down the mob. It looked as though an impasse had been reached and the expeditions would have to be abandoned, when suddenly the first phrase of "Every Valley" soared slowly into the air. It was repeated twice and silence fell, then a voice thundered: "Patients and delinquents! "What is the meaning of this disgraceful disturbance? Are you even crazier than we have always thought you? Disperse to your homes quietly and in shame, and attend the Litany which until further notice will be the only form of entertainment permitted to you. Tomorrow at noon we shall have more to say and it may be our sad task to read the list of casualties which the Voluntary Principle has claimed from among you." The Voice ceased, the men put on their hats, the women curtsied. Its tension gone, the huge crowd sagged and flopped. People looked at their feet, at the horizon, anywhere but at each other. The drivers of the coaches sounded their horns imperiously, at which the crowd fell back and made lanes for them to pass through. As they lumbered off a feeble cheer was raised, but Jael scarcely heard it, she was thinking of the Dictator's closing words. "I don't mind if there are casualties," she told herself, "and I don't mind if I'm one!" The coach groaned, plunged, and shuddered over the potholes of the Ely road. On either side the land once reclaimed from the fen had gone back to marsh, featureless, malodorous, and unhealthy, differing little in aspect from the higher land, except that this was wet and that was dry. No trees, no vegetation, nothing to attract the eye; she might as well have been blind, Jael thought, for any visual stimulus the landscape gave her. She could have described it without seeing it; it was just like people said it was; they were right who declared that a guide book to England could be written on a single page. And yet there was something in being out among it all--something she wouldn't have got if she had stayed at home thinking about it--a kind of exhilaration. Where did it come from? Not from the movement of the coach which, when the novelty wore off, only brought discomfort, not from the conversation of her neighbors, not from the sour smell of the marsh, not from the taste of the Joyful Journey tablets with which she fortified herself, not from anything to which she could give a name. Yes, she could--it was expectancy, she was waiting for something. Before all this, before she had decided to reject Betafication, she never waited for anything--it was all laid on. Nothing tempted her spirit out of its retreat; her mood was one of passive and, it must be admitted, pleased acceptance. Everything was arranged for her; there were no surprises. She moved with the general movement; she was a part of it, like a drop of water in a river. That general movement was going on around her now. If anything disturbed the unbroken contour of the landscape, a hillock or a hollow, it might be, or a patch of darker or lighter colored earth--all eyes turned to it at once. Nobody had to say "Look!" If an unusual sound made itself heard above the general uproar, everyone listened simultaneously. And if anybody laughed, everybody laughed, without asking what it was about. They were like a flock of birds, telepathic to each others' thoughts. Thoughts, but were they thoughts? Were they not rather manifestations of instinct, of a common consciousness, which reacted to stimuli in precisely the same way, and excluded thought? The Dictator wants to replace intelligence by instinct, someone had said. Perhaps he was right. With nothing outside one to invite comparison, indeed with the whole idea of comparison frowned upon and virtually forbidden, what was there left to think about? If personality expresses itself by acts of discrimination, and discrimination, besides being taboo, has no material to work on, what becomes of personality? It shrinks, it atrophies, it dies. Oh this flatness, within and without! Yet once Jael would not have minded it, did not mind it; she had accepted it with everything else that made up the Horizontal View of Life, of which, at lectures and on the radio, everyone heard so much. Of course, there were jokes about it, cartoons depicted patients and delinquents in all stages of nonerectness, at every slope and angle, bending, kneeling, going on all fours, stretched out, prone or prostrate; many of them were improper, for in matters of sex the Dictator was not puritanical, he thought that indecency was an aid to relaxation. But, for all that, the Horizontal View of Life, or On the Level as it was sometimes more familiarly called, was generally accepted. Without knowing why, Jael looked up. Everyone was looking up. Straight ahead, through the window beside the driver, she saw something breaking the line of the horizon, something sticking up. It might have been a puff of smoke, but it was too solid for that and did not move. Somebody said, "There it is!" in a tone of awe, and a silence fell. The next moment the tower disappeared behind the driver's head, but it had left its presence in the coach, a most disturbing presence, like a thought that had found its way into one's mind and would not be expelled. Soon the tower reappeared; sometimes it was on one side of the coach, sometimes on the other, sometimes straight ahead, but always it was growing larger, and as it grew so did the thought grow in Jael's mind. When the tower was halfway up the window and perhaps only a mile or so away, for the stonework of its structure was becoming visible, somebody called out, "Let's go backl" "Yes, let's," cried someone else, and Jael, from some inner compulsion, was going to say the same, when the thought seemed to swell in her and choke her utterance. "No, no," she heard herself saying, "we must go on!" and when she had said this others took it up. "We must go on!" The sense of public disagreement was almost new to Jael; in an assembly she expected to feel what everybody felt: now she wanted her will, her private, personal will to prevail; she felt other wills arrayed against her, trying to thwart her will. "Go on! Go on!" They went on; she had carried the day. Now they had reached the foot of the hill on which the tower stood, this monstrous mound of earth which had somehow survived the bombs. Of the tower itself, only the lower part was visible, blocking the windows, shutting out the light. "It will fall on us!" a man cried, but still the coach went on, painfully climbing upward, until suddenly, when no one was expecting it to, it stopped. "Ely Cathedral," the conductor said. But nobody got out; nobody moved; they seemed to be frozen in their places. Then Jael felt a loosening of her limbs, as though an enchantment was letting go its hold, and she stumbled out and stood under the tower, and looked up. The western transept had been broken away, only the tower remained, and its immense height filled her mind with awe and terror. She thought she might be going to faint but the feeling passed, and she took two or three uncertain steps to-ward the tower, raising her hands toward it as she did so. By now others had joined her, and joined their terrors to hers, as the reality of height took possession of them, driving from their minds the two-dimensional world in which they had been brought up. Hysteria seized them, they dropped writhing to the bare earth, covering their faces with their hands. "Stand up! Stand up!" cried Jael, striding in and out between their heaving bodies like a fury. "Stand up and look up!" Some scrambled to their feet and shading their eyes forced their gaze to travel slowly up the crumbling masonry which had so miraculously been spared. To them, as to Jael, their first realization of the idea of height brought an overpowering sense of sin; they were doing the forbidden thing, and every faculty they had protested; but soon it established itself as something awe-inspiring and worshipful. Craning their necks toward the four round turrets of the summit, they felt they could never have enough of it. The beautiful Galilee chapel had gone; they had never seen it so they did not miss it; but a torn arch led into the tower, and through this Jael, the first to recover her volition, made her way. Here, in the confined space between the four walls, the effect of height was still more overwhelming; arcades of rounded arches, tier on tier, led--not to the roof, for the roof had long since crashed--but to a patch of sky at once darker and more luminous than the gray sky outside. At this they gazed, drawing deep breaths of longing, which, when their lungs were tired, expired in sighs. Somehow or other Jael found herself outside, at first panting and exultant, then with a crazy desire to dance and sing. Soon she was doing both, though to no steps or tune she knew. Others came out and joined her in the impromptu ballet; they took hands and there were just enough of them to make a ring around the base of the tower. Encircling it they danced and danced, all singing what they had come to think of as "the Height Song," picking up the words from each other by the power of instinctive transmission:  Hail to height! Which gives to sight  A new delight! Which gives to thought  A treasure, brought  From endless night. What if it made no sense? It had a meaning for them. On and on they danced, the women with streaming hair like Maenads, the men with athletic gestures of which their normal, ordinary bearing gave no hint whatever, until the current passing through their linked hands seemed to sweep away the barriers of individuality and leave a single personality, as homogeneous and indivisible as a wedding ring. What bliss was theirs! And what vital energy and endurance their bliss gave them! They felt themselves tireless, sustained by an inexhaustible inflowing strength; and when at last they did tire, they tired at the same moment: the current was switched off and they lay with twitching limbs on the caked, dun-colored earth as though the Angel of Death was passing over them. Above their prostrate bodies soared the tower, expressionless and unconcerned, unchanged to the eye but transfigured to the mind, like a vessel that was empty and now is full, like a god that has received a sacrifice.