HIDDEN THINGS
It was not until a week had passed that the first stimulus of the
amazing life into which I had been plunged abated, leaving me a prey to
melancholy reflections. The memory of Esther, which I had tried so hard
to put away, began to recur incessantly. I felt shut off from humanity,
a survival from a generation whose memory, even, had become legendary.
They seemed to understand my feelings, although they could not know
their cause, and tried to keep me from brooding. By tacit understanding
no references were made to my past. They accepted me as a stranger, and
yet there was the same latent suspicion on Elizabeth’s part. And I could
not help seeing that some heavy grief or apprehension hung over them.
And I felt that I was an intruder upon it. At night I would hear David
pacing his room for hours, and sometimes a groan would break from his
lips.
He gave me to understand that the summons to appear before the Council
might be delayed for days or weeks. It was always presented
unexpectedly, and always peremptory, he said. During the week following
my arrival at the Strangers’ House I never went out alone. Whenever I
made the suggestion, David either volunteered to accompany me or found
some excuse to detain me. In particular, he requested me to stay within
doors during the four hours when he was at the Bureau, in the morning.
Finally I became almost exasperated. “You have told me that I am free,”
I protested.
“And you are free, Arnold,” he answered. “It is for your own sake that I
make this request of you. There are hidden things, shadows against the
sunlight of our civilization, and transitory, I hope, which you would
hardly understand. You must learn them by degrees, Arnold. To me they
have seemed necessary in this transitional epoch; but they are hard,
Arnold; hard to endure.”
And he sighed in so melancholy a fashion that I suspected one of those
shadows rested on his own home.
Yes, there were hidden things, and I got no nearer the heart of them,
although I had hints as to their nature. For instance, there was the
Animal Vivisection Bureau. I wondered why David spoke of the Animal
Vivisection Bureau, and not of the Vivisection Bureau.
I never had realized before how large a share animals played in our
lives. The horse, I was told, had not existed in the British Province
for a generation. Cats disappeared when the rodent virus was invented,
and were now only to be found in a wild state in the woods. There seemed
to be no dogs, and I did not ask David about them.
There was no social life at all. The other inmates of the Strangers’
House were lodged on the different floors and ate in common, living
under the watchful care of the deputies, who occasionally came to David
for advice or instructions. Our only neighbor on the top floor was a
little woman with two children who had come from a northern city and
intended to return as soon as passes for leaving London, which had been
stopped, were again issued. Inspectors from the Children’s Bureau
visited her nearly every day, always leaving her in a condition of
terror, as I inferred from a remark dropped by Elizabeth. Her husband
had dropped dead in the street two months before. David told me that
these sudden deaths were common, and were considered a triumph for
medical science.
And yet I knew that David had visitors after the solar lights went out.
My room was at the end of the apartment near the street; but I heard
strangers tiptoe along the passage, and whispered colloquies in David’s
room. My host would appear abstracted the next morning, and watch me
very thoughtfully. At such times I felt more than ever an intruder in
the household.
Yes, it was a world Lazaroff would have appreciated, could he have had
his wish fulfilled, to be born into it. Would his viewpoint have
changed, I wondered? It was a world from which all the amenities and
charities of life seemed to have been banished. I tried to lead up to
that subject in my talks with David, but he appeared unable to
understand me.
Was it an atheistic world? I had not ventured to question David about
this. But I knew that there was no Sunday upon the calendar, and that
the tenth day was the civil holiday. That day had fallen already, and
endless crowds had marched through the streets, to the music of bands,
to play-places in waste spots outside London. The Council supervised the
games, which were compulsory. Of all the paternal regulations of the
Council, this seemed to me the most arbitrary and oppressive.
“We have to keep the people under discipline,” David explained. “Once
they were allowed to wander at will; but they tore up the trees and
flowers and strewed paper and broken bottles everywhere.”
That was true. I remembered the public fields of my own age. I recalled
how one writer had seen in them a complete indictment of democracy
itself.
I was amazed and alarmed increasingly by what I saw in my journeys about
the town with David: the large brass tags that gave each person his
label, the occupation badges, the insolence of the whites, passing with
bodyguards of blues who elbowed all out of their way. And once there
came a frantic scramble to make a passage for a tall, black-bearded man
in a dark-blue uniform, who passed in the midst of his retinue with
clanking sword.
I had noticed these men in uniform about the streets. They strode like
conquerors amid a servile populace. I learned that the tall man was
Mehemet, a Turk in command of an international force, the bodyguard of
Sanson, and devoted to him.
Perhaps it was as well that, before my enlightenment came, I completed a
cursory survey of the new civilization. At my request David took me to
one of the public schools. I was astonished to discover that no history
prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the
curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. So great had
been the progress in knowledge that, on opening some of the text-books,
I discovered that I was quite unable to understand them.
I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public
schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having
been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the
distinctive stamp of character that they produced. To prevent tutors of
personality from imparting to their pupils the elements of humane
tradition, David told me, the text-books were so written as to eliminate
entirely the personal element in instruction, a reform that the prophet
Wells had urged rather furiously, and perhaps invidiously, in his own
century.
“The Council shapes each citizen’s education from the cradle to the
workshop,” said David. “It is very anxious to secure precision of
knowledge. For instance, it is a criminal offense for mothers to teach
their children fairy stories. It is the duty of the inspectors to
question children rigorously, in order to ascertain whether they are
acquainted with any of this unscientific, heretical folk-lore.”
“Which has doubtless all perished,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he answered, “an immense quantity of it has come down
to us, practically unchanged, through all the revolutions of the past
century, and not only that but new tales have arisen. The authorities
are at their wits’ end to discover who is responsible for the existence
of this masonic secret among the younger generation.”
From the school we went to the workshop. On the way home we stopped at
one of the open-air moving picture shows, and saw two or three
dramatized versions of public affairs. Ingenious mechanism synchronized
the movements of the figures upon the screen, which were in stereoscopic
relief, with speeches made through the telephone funnels. These, David
said, took the place of newspapers when the socialized State destroyed
the printed news-sheet by the simple process of killing the advertising.
We also looked inside the district art gallery. None of the pictures
antedated the year 1978, and each illustrated some phase of the new
civilization in an educational way. I must not forget to say that later
I found a novel in David’s home, which Elizabeth must have read in her
schoolgirl days. The scene was laid in the early twentieth century, and
the story dealt with the adventures of a young man of property,
depicting the romance of his care-free life. A moral at the end, and
copious footnotes, inserted by the Council’s order, drew attention to
the improvement in the human lot since that barbarous period.
So, day by day, I waited, and my eyes were opened more and more to my
environment. Daily I expected the Council summons that did not come, and
daily the constraint grew. I was thinking of suggesting to David that I
should be located among the other strangers in place of continuing to
accept his hospitality; but before I could decide to approach him an
incident occurred which revealed to me the existence of conditions
which, unintelligible though they were, made me decide to approach David
again with a view to a mutual understanding.
David was at the Strangers’ Bureau and would not return for at least two
hours. Under Elizabeth’s instruction I had made swift progress in
understanding the combinations of syllables that make up the written
language. I had just begun, in fact, to master the ingenious Brebœuf
system, whereby the simpler of the syllables have been combined to form
the written speech of four of the five Provinces. David had told me that
the Council’s inability to enforce the invented language Spekezi as the
universal tongue, had been one of the severest shocks that the new
civilization had received. Then came Brebœuf with his universal syllabic
symbols.
Now, if the written language were merely pictorial, it could have been
used to represent all the languages on earth. But since it is syllabic,
and therefore depicts words instead of ideas, it was a supreme
achievement to have invented a written language adapted to four tongues.
The Brebœuf system is based, of course, upon the common Latin and
Sanskrit elements. Brebœuf, who was one of the last of the classical
scholars, was rewarded, as is well known, by being freed from the
defectives’ art factories in his old age, and pensioned.
However, it was not my purpose to touch upon this matter. My interest
was beginning to flag, and I was paying more attention to Elizabeth than
to the lesson. I was trying to trace in her features some elusive
resemblance to Esther. I was wondering whether I could ever become a
normal citizen of this strange world. Suddenly the telephone funnel
shouted Elizabeth’s name.
She sprang from her chair and rushed into her bedroom, which was next to
the external elevator shaft. Her expression and gestures alarmed me so
greatly that I ran after her. When I reached her door I saw her standing
in the middle of the room, deathly white, and clenched in her hand was a
knife, which she was aiming at her heart.
I ran into the room and wrested the weapon from her grasp. She fell upon
the floor unconscious. All the while this was happening the funnel was
shouting stridently, “Elizabeth!” “Elizabeth!” together with the string
of letters and figures that completed her nomenclature.
I went to the funnel and lied to the voice. “She is not here,” I said.
“Then tell her, when she returns, that the price of the dress will be
five units more, on account of the new wool schedule,” the voice
responded.
Such was the half-comic ending of what had nearly been a tragedy. I
revived the girl and explained the matter to her, but for some time she
remained in a condition approaching collapse. When she began to regain
consciousness she wept hysterically.
It was only the fear of causing David anxiety that enabled her to resume
her accustomed demeanor by the time he returned. She begged me to make
no mention of the matter to him, and I agreed on condition that she
would never use the knife except in the last extremity. But I was
working in the dark, for, though she consented to the bargain, when I
begged her to tell me what it was she feared, she remained mute, shaking
her head and closing her mouth obstinately.
“Will you not trust me, Elizabeth?” I pleaded.
Then, to my surprise, she looked accusingly at me. “Will you trust me?”
she asked. “Will you not trust my father and me? Haven’t you news of
Paul?” Her expression was indescribably beseeching.
“We don’t know who you are,” she went on rapidly. “My father trusts
everybody. But I know your assumed ignorance is impossible. You don’t
trust us, Arnold, and you are playing with us. You have been here three
weeks and the Council has not sent for you. If you were what you claim
to be you would know your danger. Trust us, and, if you are what we
hoped you were, tell me about Paul. Is he safe? Is he well?”
“I never heard of him,” I stammered. “I—”
She looked at me with reproach and glided quietly away. I heard her sigh
mournfully. And still I groped in a fog of mystery and could learn
nothing.