"The first men landed," continued the witch, "where great rocks
were strewn beside a steaming sea. They sky was red. Emerging from
standardized comfort volcano smoke made them cough. Torrents crashed
down the sides of black mountains. The newcomers decided that this was
no place to live. But ere they could re-embark a landslide smashed
their car. It burst into flames. One man watched the 4.30 P. M.
edition of _The Daily Up_ curl into black ash, wondering how
many millions of years it might be before this difficult world were so
standardized and safe that puzzles would again be published hourly."
The witch poured more tea for herself.
"Conditions were difficult. Those who didn't die were those who most
quickly changed. Their children changed. The agile and imitative turned
into monkeys after a million years. Poets voted for the ecstatic
present, for song, for Dionysius--and turned towards the birds.
"I've sat in my study" the witch said, "and seen a thrush wing by
the window, glancing with one bright eye into the gray room, and his
face told me that he almost remembered when he, too, lived in a room,
believed in past and future, and ached with a desire to MAKE something,
as if that were possible. And a goat--is not a goat more like a man
than a goat?"
"What do you feel when you look into the eyes of a sheep? Is he your
brother or is he not? Have you ever heard the song of an ass? An ass
thinks himself a tragic philosopher. He cries: 'O Time! O death! O
weary world!', thinking this is wisdom. Accordingly in all lands he is
beaten with clubs.
"Taking on the form of their own nightmares and lusts men became
dinosaurs." The witch shuddered and was silent in respect for the
dead. "One sees an ape in a cage, a horse, or an alligator and says:
'There but for Chance go I, imprisoned in the form of the forgotten,
unconscious aspirations of my standardized forefathers!...
"'My history is a history of chaos,' she went on. 'All patterns are
lies, all selection a compromise that distorts the truth. If you
understand Life you know that no one life is more important than
another.... In my history I want to achieve a selection that will
in its pattern have the authentic angles of infinite chaos. This is
very difficult, especially for me because it is hard for me to make
decisions.'
"When she squats at her low desk, head down, her hands on her papers,
her elbows pointing toward the ceiling--she looks like a spider. She
writes thousands of words in her note-books, muttering as her pen moves
back and forth; but she makes no real headway because after two or
three pages she gets stuck and can't decide whether to leave some event
in or drop it out. Then she whimpers and twists her hands and runs to
the window. She has to bend double to see out into the gardens; and
stands there, her chin touching her knees, until she gets a new idea
and runs back to her desk to begin her history of the world all over
again.
"It seemed nothing could stop her talking. She hurried on: 'My
explanation explains everything. In the course of an endless migration
across infinity man arrived by airship on the earth, and there he
changed.... A jelly fish turned into Napoleon because he wanted to? My
hind leg!' said the witch. 'A man turned into a jelly fish, precisely
because he wanted to--because he did not want to think nor talk nor
walk nor work. And so now he lies in a warm tide, beyond memory. You
see, in my science there is no magic. I hold to but one dogma, which
is, Nothing comes from Nothing. Life is continuous; man evolves in all
directions at once--up, down, sideways. Life is chaos, except when, as
now, it is momentarily pressed into words.'
"'You have a wonderful memory!' I said.
"'I forget everything!' she replied sadly. 'Having seen the Beginning,
I must make up a theory about it, for the memory is gone. Somebody
wanted to live 300 years. Would that defeat memory? How much do you
remember of your childhood? One thinks to defeat death with longer
life? But death is not of the last moment alone. One dies every
moment ... forgets ... forgets....'
"The witch began to weep. Tears dripped through her fingers into her
tea.... 'You have completed the book you dreamed of in your youth,
Oh, happy man!', the witch said, as if quoting someone,--and the man
replied: 'Yes, but I have lost my Youth!'
"The witch wiped her eyes and her long nose.
"'I am alone,' she complained. 'I have work enough for fifty. History
is getting farther and farther ahead of me. What'll I do?' Her voice
rose to a wail. 'What'll I do? What'll I....'
"I reached for the cakes. She watched my hand and forgot what she was
saying. As I took a bite she glanced suspiciously into my eyes.
"'_You_ don't know what he thought in his tent that night!' she said,
writing as she talked.
"'Who?' I asked.
"'Napoleon! Nobody knows but me. I'll tell you.
"'It was getting on toward night and he was resting in his tent. Some
one threw a pine bough on a fire burning nearby. When the smell of it
reached him he looked around quickly, rising on his elbow. Then he
sighed.
"'He remembered suddenly how it felt to be a boy, filled with dreams.
He remembered some of the dreams, and tried to be exalted with pride of
having turned the boy into the Emperor, but he could not.... Without
the dreams, being Emperor was only hard work. It seemed that he had
taken young Napoleon and imprisoned him in a situation that was a
dungeon. He saw a slovenly boy tramping a dusty French road, felt the
pain of his blistered heel; he saw the boy sit by a stream and take off
his heavy boots and felt the cool, refreshing shock of the water. In a
game they had laughed at him for his accent. All right, he was just a
little undersized alien! He'd get even with all of them! He splashed
his feet. What came next? The Emperor could not remember! What happened
next was utterly lost! Had the Emperor, he asked himself, avenged the
lonely boy? No, because he could not! _The Emperor was the Emperor._ He
saw suddenly as in a clear vision the simple fact that the boy Napoleon
was lost forever--and somehow he never had thought of this before. It
reminded him that Emperor Napoleon would presently be gone, also. The
Emperor who would live in the minds of men would not be this man lying
in his tent, wondering why he had worked so hard, defeated because the
dreams were dying--not he, but a creature made of the fine phrases and
the dreams of lesser men! He would strut in his victories as the little
men who wrote the histories would have strutted! With such thoughts
as these he could not get back into a mood for effective work. His
officers, seeing him silent, thought he meditated some stupendous
strategy.... Well, he should have been doing so! These were the crucial
days,' said the old witch, still writing frantically."