"Bet?"
"Bet you flowers for me tonight."
"Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine! Okay. Promise to
admit it--if I have the right answer? No hedging?"
"Promise."
"You'll go out--on condition I won't make a pass at you."
She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I
wanted to go Dutch."
"I know you did."
"How?"
"I know how women think, as they term it."
"You're right, though."
I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the
two sets of bar checks and gave Fred--who was loitering about in the
background with overt patience--a sound tip.
"Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I
hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you
of Roland--"
"He never grew them to wear--or for bouquets. Just to breed."
"See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch."
3
It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every
term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to
swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor
system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others
prefer--a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air.
This--like most events and experiences--is more a matter of mental
climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught,
or environment-taught.
One's frontal lobes are liable--unless trained in every particular
at autocriticism--to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance
with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing
cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to
be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment:
great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord,
nerves, organs and muscles. These, then, like a converted Christian,
are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to
the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis
or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd
though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at
least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to
live; people aren't very critical--or even observant.
Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere
semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough,
reasonable, even charitable. Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And
only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum
of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.
Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I
was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself,
been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees
is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My
constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood
is mythical--mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it
contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex
holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room
without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot
weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the
day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your
skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain--where
the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold.
I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in
temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquillity and this is the
message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel--not as the authority
for a trance--but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the
opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good
result.
The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of
them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on
cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized
themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running
dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear
little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one
voice on earth--God's, of course.
The point here is--I liked the warm day.
But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter,
now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?
The elevator gnashed its teeth.
I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my
shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my
serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a corner
of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles,
pencils, and my pen.
I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of--of what
in hell was her name?--Yvonne Prentiss--as a barricade. Now, it
dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the
Cheshire Cat's--that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had
been.