Aldous
Huxley’s
APE AND ESSENCE
____________________
I
TALLIS
IT WAS THE day of Gandhi’s assassination;
but on
‘You’ve always been such a help,’ Bob assured me, as he made
ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.
But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew
even better than I, he didn’t really want to be helped. He liked being in a mess and, still more, he
liked talking about his predicament. The
mess and its verbal dramatization made it possible for him to see himself as
all the Romantic Poets rolled into one – Beddoes committing suicide, Byron
committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of
Shelley. And seeing himself as all the
Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his
misery – the fact that he had none of their talents and very little of their
sexual potency.
‘We got to the point,’ he said (so tragically that it occurred
to me that he would have done better as an actor than as a writer of screen
plays), ‘we got to the point, Elaine and I, where we felt like … like Martin
Luther.’
‘Martin Luther?’ I repeated in some astonishment.
‘You know – ich kann
nicht anders.
We just couldn’t – but couldn’t
– do anything but go off together to
And Gandhi, I reflected, just couldn’t do anything but resist
oppression non-violently and go to prison and finally get shot.
‘So there it was,’ he went on.
‘We got on a plane and flew to
‘Finally!’
‘What do you mean, “finally”?’
‘Well, you’d been thinking about it for a long time, hadn’t
you?’
Bob looked annoyed. But
I remembered all the previous occasions when he had talked to me about the
problem. Should he or should he not make
Elaine his mistress? (That was his wonderfully old-world way of putting
it.) Should he or should he not ask
Miriam for a divorce?
A divorce from the woman who in a very real sense was still
what she had always been – his only love; but in another very real sense Elaine
was also his only love – and would be still more so if he finally decided (and
that was why he couldn’t decide) to ‘make her his mistress.’ To be or not to be – the soliloquy had gone
on for the best part of two years, and if Bob could have had his way, it would
have gone on for ten years longer. He
liked his messes to be chronic and mainly verbal, never so acutely carnal as to
put his uncertain virility to yet another humiliating test. But under the influence of his eloquence, of
the baroque façade of a profile and prematurely snowy hair, Elaine had
evidently grown tired of a merely chronic and platonic mess. Bob was presented with an ultimatum; it was to
be either
So there he was, bound and committed to adultery no less
irrevocably than Gandhi had been bound and committed to non-violence and prison
and assassination, but, one may suspect, with more and deeper misgivings. Misgivings which the event
had wholly justified. For though
poor Bob didn’t actually tell me when had happened at Acapulco, the fact that
Elaine was now, as he put it, ‘acting strangely’ and had been several times in
the company of that unspeakable Moldavian baron, whose name I have fortunately
forgotten, seemed to tell the whole ludicrous and pathetic story. And meanwhile Miriam had not only refused to
give him a divorce: she had taken the opportunity of Bob’s absence and her
possession of his power of attorney to have the title to the ranch, the two
cars, the four apartment houses, the corner lots at Palm Springs and all the
securities transferred from his name to hers. And meanwhile he owed
thirty-three thousand dollars to the Government for arrears of income tax. But when he asked his producer for that extra
two hundred and fifty dollars a week which had been as good as promised him,
there was only a long and pregnant silence.
‘What about it, Lou?’
Measuring his words with a solemn emphasis, Lou Lublin gave
his answer.
‘Bob,’ he said, ‘in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus
Christ himself could get a rise.’
The tone was friendly; but when Bob tried to insist, Lou had
banged his desk and told him that he was being un-American. That finished it.
Bob talked on. But what
a subject, I was thinking, for a great religious painting! Christ before
And then there would be Breughel’s version of the
subject. A great synoptic view of the
entire Studio; a three-million-dollar musical in full production, with every
technical detail faithfully reproduced; two or three thousand figures, all
perfectly characterized; and in the bottom right-hand corner long search would
finally reveal a Lublin, no bigger than a grasshopper, heaping contumely upon
an even tinier Jesus.
‘But I’ve had an absolutely stunning idea for an original,’
Bob was saying with that optimistic enthusiasm which is the desperate man’s
alternative to suicide. ‘My agent’s
absolutely crazy about it – thinks I ought to be able to sell it for fifty or
sixty thousand.’
He started to tell the story.
Still thinking of Christ before Lublin, I visualized the scene
as Piero would have painted it – the composition, luminously explicit, an
equation in balanced voids and solids, in harmonizing and contrasting hues; the
figures in adamantine repose. Lou and
his assistant producers would all be wearing those Pharaonic head-dresses,
those huge inverted cones of white or coloured felt, which in Piero’s world
serve the double purpose of emphasizing the solid-geometrical nature of the
human body and the outlandishness of Orientals.
For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the
inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry, and
throughout the whole we should feel the all-pervading presence of Plato’s God,
for ever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art.
But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form
of government. In the field of politics
the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or
picture, a police state under a dictatorship.
The Marxist calls himself scientific, and to this claim the Fascist adds
another: he is the poet – the scientific poet – of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for
each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in
the laboratory and the ivory tower. They
simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as
inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favourite
hypothesis, they consign to the waster-paper basket all that, to their mind,
falls short of perfection. And because
they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the
prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights
and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered, and
from morning till night a million school teachers and broadcasters proclaim the
infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.
‘And after all,’ Bob was saying, ‘there’s no reason why a
movie shouldn’t be a work of art. It’s
this damned commercialism …’
He spoke with all the righteous indignation of an ungifted
artist denouncing the scapegoat whom he has chosen to take the blame for the
lamentable consequences of his own lack of talent.
‘Do you think Gandhi was interested in art?’ I asked.
‘Gandhi? No, of course not.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘Neither in art nor in
science. And that’s why we killed
him.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, we. The intelligent, the
active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a
reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little
individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshipping the
Brahman who is also Atman. It was
intolerable. No wonder we bumped him
off.’
But even as I spoke, I was thinking that that wasn’t the whole
story. The whole story included an
inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This
man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the subhuman
mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic,
institutions of the nation-state. He got
himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness
and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity. But nationalism and the politics of power had
proved too much for him. It is not at
the centre, not from within the organization, that the saint can cure our
regimented schizophrenia; it is only from without, at the periphery. If he makes himself a part of the machine, in
which the collective madness is incarnated, one or other of two things is bound
to happen. Either he remains himself, in
which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes
unusable, reject or destroy him. Or he
will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which
he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with
any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.
‘Well, to get back to their disgusting commercialism,’ Bob
said at last. ‘Let me give you an
example….’
But I was thinking that the dream of Order begets tyranny, the
dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.
Athena, the patroness of the arts, is also the goddess of scientific
warfare, the heavenly Chief of every General Staff. We killed him because, after having briefly
(and fatally) played the political game, he refused any longer to go on
dreaming our dreams of a national Order, a social and economic Beauty; because
he tried to bring us back to the concrete and cosmic facts of real people and
the inner Light.
The headlines I had seen that morning were parables; the event
they recorded, an allegory and a prophecy.
In that symbolic act, we who so longed for peace had rejected the only
possible means to peace and had issued a warning to all who, in the future,
might advocate any courses but those which lead inevitably to war.
‘Well, if you’ve finished your coffee,’ said Bob, ‘let’s go.’
We rose and walked out into the sunshine. Bob took my arm and squeezed it.
‘You’ve been enormously helpful,’ he assured me again.
‘I wish I could believe it, Bob.’
‘But it’s true, it’s true.’
And perhaps it was true, in the sense that stirring the mess
before a sympathetic public made him feel better, more like the Romantics.
We walked on for a little in silence – past the Projection
Rooms and between the Churrigueresque bungalows of the executives. Over the entrance to the largest of them a
great bronze plaque bore the inscription LOU LUBLIN PRODUCTIONS.
‘What about that salary raise?’ I
asked. ‘Shall we go in and have another
shot at it.’
Bob uttered a rueful little laugh, and there was another
silence. When at last he spoke, it was
in a pensive tone.
‘Too bad about old Gandhi,’ he said. ‘I suppose his great secret was not wanting anything for himself.’
‘Yes, I suppose that was one of the secrets.’
‘I wish to God I didn’t want things so much.’
‘Same here,’ I fervently concurred.
‘And when you finally get what you want, it’s never what you
thought it was going to be.’
Bob sighed and relapsed into silence. He was thinking, no doubt, of
We emerged from the street of executive bungalows, crossed a
parking lot and entered a canyon between towering sound stages. A tractor passed, pulling a low trailer, on
which was the bottom half of the west door of a thirteenth-century Italian
cathedral.
‘That’s for “Catherine of Siena.”’
‘What’s that?’
‘Hedda Boddy’s new picture. I worked on the script two years ago. Then they gave it to Streicher. And after that it was rewritten by the
O’Toole-Menendez-Boguslavsky team. It’s
lousy.’
Another trailer rattled past with the upper half of the
cathedral door and a pulpit by Niccolò Pisano.
‘When you come to think of it,’ I said, ‘she’s very like
Gandhi in some ways.’
‘Who?
Hedda?’
‘No, Catherine.’
‘Oh, I see. I thought
you were talking about the loincloth.’
‘I was talking about saints in politics,’ I said. ‘They didn’t actually lynch her, of course; but
that was only because she died too young.
The consequences of her politics hadn’t had time to show up. Do you go into all that in the script?’
Bob shook his head.
‘Too depressing,’ he said.
‘The public likes its stars to be successful. Besides, how can you talk about church
politics? It would certainly be
anti-Catholic and might easily become un-American. No, we play safe – concentrate on the boy she
dictated her letters to. He’s wildly in
love – but it’s all sublimated and spiritual, and after she’s dead he goes into
a hermitage and prays in front of her picture.
And then there’s the other boy who actually made passes at her. It’s mentioned in her letters. We play that for all it’s worth. They’re still hoping to be able to sign up
Humphrey …’
A loud tooting made us both jump.
‘Look out!’
Bob caught my arm and pulled me back. From the courtyard in the rear of the
‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ shouted the driver as
he passed.
‘Idiot!’ Bob yelled back; then,
turning to me, ‘Do you see what it’s loaded with?’ he asked. ‘Scripts.’ He shook his head. ‘Taking them to the
incinerator. Which
is where they belong. A million dollars’ worth of literature.’
He laughed with melodramatic bitterness.
Twenty yards up the road, the truck swung sharply to the
right. Its speed must have been
excessive; centrifugally propelled, half a dozen on the topmost scripts spilled
out into the road. Like prisoners of the
Inquisition, I thought, making a miraculous escape on the way to the stake.
‘The man can’t drive,’ Bob was grumbling. ‘One of these days he’ll kill somebody.’
‘But meanwhile let’s see who’s been saved.’
I picked up the nearest of the scripts.
‘“A Miss is as good as a Male,” Screenplay by Albertine
Krebs!’ Bob remembered it. It stank.
‘Well, what about “Amanda”?’
I turned over the pages. ‘It must
have been a musical. Here’s some poetry:
‘Amelia needs a
meal,
But Amanda needs a man….’
Bob wouldn’t let me go on.
‘Don’t, don’t! It made
four and a half million during the
I dropped ‘Amanda’ and picked up another of the spread-eagled
volumes. This one, I noticed, was bound
in green, not in the Studio’s standard crimson.
‘“Ape and Essence,”’ I read aloud from the hand-lettered front
cover.
‘“Ape and Essence”?’ Bob repeated in
some surprise. I turned the flyleaf.
‘“An original Treatment by William Tallis,
Cottonwood Ranch,
‘They get thousands of these things,’ Bob explained.
Meanwhile I was looking into the body of the script.
‘More poetry.’
‘Christ!’ said Bob in a tone of disgust.
‘“Surely it’s obvious,”’ I began reading:
‘Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t every schoolboy
know it?
Ends are ape-chosen;
only the means are man’s.
Papio’s procurer,
bursar to baboons,
Reason comes running,
eager to ratify;
Comes, a catch-fart with
Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;
Comes, a pimp for
Comes, with Medicine to
administer the Ape-King’s aphrodisiac;
Comes, rhyming and with
Rhetoric, to write his orations;
Comes with the Calculus
to aim his rockets
Accurately at the
orphanage across the ocean;
Comes, having aimed,
with incense to impetrate
Our
Lady devoutly for a direct hit.’
There was a silence. We
looked at one another questioningly.
‘What do you think of it?’ Bob said at last.
I shrugged my shoulders.
I really didn’t know.
‘Anyhow, don’t throw it away,’ he went on. ‘I want to see what the rest is like.’
We resumed our walk, turned a final corner, and there, a
Franciscan convent among palm trees, was the Writers’ Building.
‘Tallis,’ Bob was saying to himself, as we entered, ‘William
Tallis …’ He shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.
And anyhow, where’s
The following Sunday we knew the answer – knew it not merely
in theory and on the map, but experimentally, by going there, at eighty miles
an hour, in Bob’s (or rather Miriam’s) Buick convertible.
The long drought had broken two days before. The sky was still overcast and a cold wind
blew steadily from the west. Ghostly
under their roof of slate-coloured cloud, the
An old deaf man, at whom we had to shout our questions, at
last understood what we were talking about.
Along the irrigation ditch the cottonwoods and willows were
aliens, clinging precariously, in the midst of those tough ascetic lives in the
desert, to another, easier, more voluptuous mode of being. They were leafless now,
the mere skeletons of trees, white against the sky; but one could imagine how
intense, under the fierce clear sun, would be the emerald of their young leaves
three months from now.
The car, which was being driven much too fast, crashed heavily
into an unexpected dip. Bob swore.
‘Why any man in his senses should choose to live at the end of
a road like this, I can’t imagine.’
‘Perhaps he takes it a little more slowly,’ I ventured to suggest.
Bob did not deign so much as to glance at me. The car rattled on at undiminished
speed. I tried to concentrate on the
view.
Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a
noiseless but almost explosive transformation.
The clouds had shifted and the sun was now shining on the nearest of
those abrupt and jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands out of
the enormous plain. A moment before they
had been black and dead. Now suddenly
they had come to life; between a shadowed foreground and a background of cloudy
darkness they shone as if with their own incandescence.
I touched Bob’s arm and pointed.
‘Now do you understand why Tallis chooses to live at the end
of this road?’
He took a quick look, swerved round a fallen Joshua-tree,
looked again for a fraction of a second and brought his eyes back to the road.
‘It reminds me of that etching by Goya – you know the
one. The woman riding a stallion, and the animal’s turning its head and has her
dress between its teeth – trying to pull her down, trying to tear the clothes
off her. And she’s laughing like a
maniac in a frenzy of pleasure. And in
the background there’s a plain, with buttes sticking out of it, just like
here. Only if you look carefully at
Goya’s buttes, you see that they’re really crouching animals, half rats, half
lizards – as big as mountains. I bought
a reproduction of it for Elaine.’
But Elaine, I reflected in the ensuing silence, hadn’t taken
the hint. She had allowed the stallion
to drag her to the ground; she had lain there, laughing and laughing,
uncontrollably, while the big teeth ripped at her bodice, tore the skirt to
shreds, grazing the soft skin beneath with a fearful but delicious threat, with
the tingling imminence of pain. And
then, at
But meanwhile we had reached our destination. Between the trees along the ditch I saw a
white frame-house under an enormous cottonwood, with a windmill to one side of
it, a corrugated iron barn to the other.
The gate was closed. Bob stopped
the car and we got out. A white board
had been nailed to the gatepost. On it
an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermillion.
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The
prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And
do you like the human race?
No, not much.
THIS MEANS YOU,
KEEP OUT
‘Well, we’ve evidently come to the right place,’ I said.
Bob nodded. We opened
the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten earth and knocked at the door
of the house. It was opened almost
immediately by a stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue
cotton dress and a very old red jacket.
She gave us a friendly smile.
‘Car broken down?’ she inquired.
We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see
Mr. Tallis.
‘Mr. Tallis.’
The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her
head. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said. ‘Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago.’
‘Do you mean, he’s dead?’
‘Passed on,’ she insisted, then
launched out into her story.
Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year. She and her husband went to live in the
little old cabin behind the barn. It
only had an outside toilet, but they had been used to that back in
‘I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?’
The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she
meant to leave it there.
‘Had he been sick for a long time?’ I asked.
‘Not sick at all,’ she answered. ‘Though he always did say he had heart
trouble.’
And that was why he had passed on. In the bathroom. She found him there one morning when she came
to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from the store. Stone cold. He must have lain there all night. She had never had such a shock in all her
life. And then what a
commotion on account of there not being any relatives that anybody knew about! The doctor was called and then the sheriff,
and there had to be a court order before the poor man could even be buried,
much less embalmed. And then all the
books and papers and clothes had to be packed up and seals put on the boxes,
and everything stored somewhere in
She paused for breath.
Bob and I exchanged glances.
‘Well, in the circumstances,’ I said, ‘I think we’d better be
going.’
But the old lady wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Come in,’ she insisted, ‘come in.’
We hesitated; then, accepting her invitation, followed her
through a tiny entrance lobby into the living room. An oil stove was burning in a corner of the
room; the air was hot and an almost tangible smell of friend food and diapers
filled the house. A little old man like
a leprechaun was seated in a rocking-chair near the window, reading the Sunday
comics. Near him a pale,
preoccupied-looking young girl – she couldn’t have been more than seventeen –
was holding a baby in one arm and, with the other hand, buttoning her pink
blouse. The child belched; a bubble of
milk appeared at the corner of its mouth.
The young mother left the final button undone and tenderly wiped the
pouting lips. Through the open door of
another room came the sound of a fresh soprano voice singing, ‘Now is the
Hour,’ to the accompaniment of a guitar.
‘This is my husband,’ said the old lady. ‘Mr. Coulton.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the leprechaun, without looking up
from his comics.
‘And this is our granddaughter, Katie. She got married last year.’
‘So I see,’ said Bob.
He bowed to the girl and gave her one of those fascinating smiles for
which he was so famous.
Katie looked at him as though he were
merely a piece of furniture; then, fastening that final button, she turned
without a word and started to climb the steep stairs that led to the upper
floor.
‘And these,’ Mr. Coulton went on, indicating Bob and myself,
‘are two friends of Mr. Tallis.’
We had to explain that we weren’t precisely friends. All we knew of Mr. Tallis was his work; but
that had interested us so much that we had come here hoping to make his
acquaintance – only to learn the tragic news of his death.
Mr. Coulton looked up from his paper.
‘Sixty-six,’ he said.
‘That’s all he was. I’m seventy-two myself. Seventy-two last October.’
He uttered the triumphant little laugh of one who has scored a
victory, then returned to Flash Gordon – Flash the invulnerable, Flash the
immortal, Flash the perpetual knight-errant to girls, not as they lamentably
are, but as the idealists of the brassiere industry proclaim that they ought to
be.
‘I happened to see what Mr. Tallis had sent in to our Studio,’
said Bob.
Again the leprechaun looked up.
‘You’re in the movies?’ he inquired.
Bob admitted that he was.
In the next room the music broke off suddenly in the middle of
a phrase.
‘One of those big shots?’ Mr. Coulton
inquired.
With the most charming false modesty, Bob assured him that he
was only a writer who occasionally dabbled in directing.
The leprechaun nodded slowly.
‘I see in the paper where that guy Goldwyn says all the big
shots got to take a fifty per cent. cut in their
salary.’
His eyes twinkled gleefully, once
again he uttered his triumphant little laugh.
Then, abruptly disinteresting himself from reality, he returned to his
myths.
Christ before
I turned my head. In
the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and a tartan skirt, there stood – who? Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost her
virginity to Coligny, la petite
Morphilany, Anna Karenina in the schoolroom.
‘This is Rosie,’ said Mrs. Coulton proudly, ‘our other
granddaughter. Rosie’s studying
singing,’ she confided to Bob. ‘She
wants to get into the movies.’
‘But how interesting!’ cried Bob enthusiastically, as he rose
and shook hands with the future Lady Hamilton.
‘Maybe you could give her some advice,’ said the doting
grandmother.
‘I’d be only too happy …’
‘Fetch another chair, Rosie.’
The girl raised her eyelids and gave Bob a brief but intense
look. ‘Unless you don’t mind sitting in
the kitchen,’ she said.
‘Of course not!’
They vanished together into the inner room. Looking out of the window, I saw that the
buttes were again in shadow. The
rat-lizards had closed their eyes and were shamming dead – but only to lull
their victim into a sense of false security.
‘It’s more than luck,’ Mrs. Coulton was saying, ‘it’s
‘Just when movies are going to fold up like vaudeville,’ said
the leprechaun without raising his eyes from the page before him.
‘What makes you say those things?’
‘It’s not me that says them,’ the old man answered. ‘It’s that Goldwyn guy.’
From the kitchen came the sound of a startlingly childish
laugh. Bob was evidently making
headway. I foresaw another trip to
Innocently the procuress, Mrs. Coulton, smiled with pleasure.
‘I like your friend,’ she said. ‘Gets on well with kids. None of that stuffed shirt business.’
I accepted the implied rebuke without comment and asked her
again if she had known that Mr. Tallis was interested in movies.
She nodded. Yes, he’d
told her that he was sending something to one of the Studios. He wanted to make some money. Not for himself; for though he’d lost most of
what he once had, there was still enough to live on. No, he wanted some extra money to send to
Her words suddenly reminded me of something in Tallis’s script
– something about children in post-war
‘What happened to the wife?’ I asked. ‘And the granddaughter’s parents?’
‘They passed on,’ said Mr. Coulton. ‘I guess they were Jewish, or something.’
‘Mind you,’ said the leprechaun suddenly, ‘I don’t have
anything against Jews. But all the same
…’ He paused. ‘Maybe Hitler wasn’t so
dumb after all.’
This time, I could see, it was to the Katzenjammer Kids that
he returned.
Another peal of childish laughter broke out in the
kitchen. Lady Hamilton at sixteen
sounded as though she were about eleven.
And yet how mature, how technically perfect had been the look with which
she greeted Bob! Obviously, the most
disquieting fact about Rosie was that she was simultaneously innocent and
knowing, a calculating adventuress and a pig-tailed schoolgirl.
‘He married again,’ the old lady went on, ignoring both the
giggle and the anti-semitism. ‘Someone on the stage.
He told me the name, but I’ve forgotten it. Anyhow, it didn’t last long. She went off with some other fellow. I say it served him right for going off with
her when he had a wife back there in
In the ensuing silence I fabricated a whole biography for this
man I had never seen. The
young New Englander of good family.
Carefully educated, but not to the point of pedantry. Naturally gifted, but not
so overwhelmingly as to make him want to exchange a life of leisure for the
fatigues of professional authorship.
From Harvard he had gone on to
La belle
Américaine,
Qui
rend les homes fous,
Dans deux ou trios semaines
Partira
pour
But this one didn’t leave
for
Looking back from the vantage point of 1947, the Tallis of my
imagination could see precisely what he had done: for the sake of a physical
pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an erotic
imagination, he had condemned a wife and a daughter to death at the hands of
maniacs, and a granddaughter to the caresses of any soldier or black marketer
with a pocketful of sweetmeats or the price of a decent meal.
Romantic fancies! I
turned to Mrs. Coulton.
‘Well, I wish I’d known him,’ I said.
‘You’d have liked him,’ she assured me. ‘We all liked Mr. Tallis. I’ll tell you something,’ she confided. ‘Every time I make the trip to
‘And I bet he hates it,’ said the leprechaun.
‘Now, Elmer,’ his wife protested.
‘But I heard him say it,’ Mr. Coulton insisted. ‘Time and again. “If I die here,” he says, “I want to be
buried out in the desert.”’
‘He wrote as much in that script he sent to the Studio,’ I
said.
‘He did?’ Mrs.
Coulton’s tone was one of incredulity.
‘Yes, he even describes the grave he meant to be buried
in. All by itself,
under a Joshua-tree.’
‘I could have told him it wasn’t legal,’ said the
leprechaun. ‘Not since the morticians
lobbied that bill through the Legislature at
He chuckled at the recollection.
‘I wouldn’t want to
be buried in the desert,’ said his wife emphatically.
‘Why not?’
‘Too lonely,’ she answered.
‘I’d hate it.’
While I was wondering what to say next, the pale young mother
came down the stairs carrying a diaper.
She stopped for a moment to look in at the kitchen.
‘Listen, Rosie,’ she said in a low, angry voice, ‘it’s time
you did some work for a change.’
Then she turned and walked towards the entrance lobby, where
an open door revealed the modern conveniences of that indoor bathroom.
‘He’s got diarrhoea again,’ she said bitterly, as she passed
her grandmother.
Flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, the future Lady
Hamilton emerged from the kitchen. Behind her, in the doorway, stood the future
‘Grandma,’ the girl announced, ‘Mr. Briggs thinks he can arrange
for me to have a screen test.’
The idiot! I got up.
‘Time we were going, Bob,’ I said, knowing that it was already
too late.
From the half-open door of the bathroom came the squelchy
sound of diapers being rinsed in the toilet bowl.
‘Listen!’ I whispered to Bob as we passed.
‘Listen to what?’ he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
Ears have they, neither do they hear.
Well, that was the nearest we ever got to Tallis in the
flesh. In what follows the reader can
discover the reflection of his mind. I
print the text of ‘Ape and Essence’ as I found it, without change and without
comment.
II
THE SCRIPT
TITLES, CREDITS and finally, to the
accompaniment of trumpets and a chorus of triumphant angels, the name of the PRODUCER.
The music changes its character, and if Debussy were alive to
write it, how delicate it would be, how aristocratic, how flawlessly pure of
all Wagnerian lubricity and bumptiousness, all Straussian vulgarity! For here on the screen, in something better
than Technicolor, it is the hour before sunrise. Night seems to linger in the darkness of an
almost unruffled sea; but from the fringes of the sky a transparent pallor
mounts from green through deepening blue to the zenith. In the east the Morning Star is still
visible.
NARRATOR
Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding …
But,
alas, on our screen
This
emblem of an emblem
Will
probably look like
Mrs.
Somebody’s illustration
To
a poem by Ella
Wheeler Wilcox.
Out
of the sublime in Nature
Art
all too often manufactures
Only the ludicrous.
But
the risk must be run;
For
you there, you in the audience,
Somehow
and at any price,
Wilcox
or worse,
Somehow
you must be reminded,
Be
induced to remember,
Be
implored to be willing to
Understand
what’s What.
As the Narrator speaks, we fade out of our emblem of an emblem
of Eternity into the interior of a picture palace filled to capacity. The light grows a little less dim and suddenly we become aware that the audience
is composed entirely of well-dressed baboons of both sexes and of all ages from
first to second childhood.
NARRATOR
But man, proud man,
Drest
in a little brief authority –
Most
ignorant of what he is most assur’d.
His
glassy essence – like an angry ape,
Plays
such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As
make the angels weep.
Cut to the screen, at which the apes are so attentively
gazing. In a setting such as only
Semiramis or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could have imagined we see a bosomy young
female baboon, in a shell-pink evening gown, her mouth painted purple, her
muzzle powdered mauve, her fiery red eyes ringed with mascara. Swaying as voluptuously as the shortness of
her hind legs will permit her to do, she walks on to
the brightly illuminated stage of a nightclub and, to the clapping of two or
three hundred pairs of hairy hands, approaches the Louis XV microphone. Behind her, on all fours and secured by a
light steel chain attached to a dog collar, comes Michael Faraday.
NARRATOR
‘Most ignorant of what he is most assur’d …’ And I need hardly
add that what we call knowledge is merely another form of ignorance – highly
organized, of course, and eminently scientific, but for that very reason all
the more complete, all the more productive of angry apes. When Ignorance was merely ignorance, we were
the equivalents of lemurs, marmosets and howler monkeys. Today, thanks to that Higher Ignorance which
is our knowledge, man’s stature has increased to such an extent that the least
among us is now a baboon, the greatest an orang-utan
or even, if he takes rank as a Saviour of Society, a true Gorilla.
Meanwhile the baboon-girl has reached the microphone. Turning her head, she catches sight of
Faraday on his knees, in the act of straightening his bent and aching back.
‘Down, sir, down!’
The tone is peremptory, she gives the
old man a cut with her coral-headed riding-switch. Faraday winces and obeys,
the apes in the audience laugh delightedly.
She blows them a kiss, then, drawing the microphone towards her, she bares
her formidable teeth and starts to sing, in an expiring bedroom contralto, the
latest popular success:
Love, Love, Love –
Love’s
the very essence
Of
everything I think, of everything I do.
Give
me, give me, give me,
Give
me detumescence.
That
means you.
Close-up of Faraday’s face, as it registers astonishment,
disgust, indignation and, finally, such shame and anguish that tears begin to
flow down the furrowed cheeks.
Montage shots of the Folks in Radio Land,
listening-in.
A stout baboon housewife frying sausages,
while the loudspeaker brings her the imaginary fulfilment and real exacerbation
of her most unavowable wishes.
A baboon baby standing up in its cot,
reaching over to the portable on the commode and dialling the promise of
detumescence.
A middle-aged, baboon financier,
interrupting his reading of the stockmarket news to listen, with closed eyes
and a smile of ecstasy. Give me, give me, give me, give me.
Two baboon teenagers, fumbling to music in a
parked car. ‘That means you-ou.’ Close-up of mouths and paws.
Cut back to Faraday’s tears.
The singer turns, catches sight of his agonized face, utters a cry of
rage and starts to beat him, blow after savage blow, while the audience
applauds tumultuously. The gold and
jasper walls of the nightclub evaporate and for a moment we see the figures of
the ape and her captive intellect silhouetted against the dawning twilight of
our first sequence. Then these too fade
out, and there is only the emblem of an emblem of Eternity.
NARRATOR
The sea, the bright planet, the boundless crystal of the sky –
surely you remember them! Surely! Or can it be that you have forgotten, that
you have never even discovered what lies beyond the mental Zoo and the inner
Asylum and all that Broadway of imaginary theatres, in which the only name in
lights is always your own?
The Camera moves across the sky, and now the black serrated
shape of a rocky island breaks the line of the horizon. Sailing past the island is a large,
four-masted schooner. We approach, we
see that the ship flies the flag of
NARRATOR
This new bright day is
The scene darkens; there is a noise of gunfire. When the light comes up again, there squats
Dr. Albert Einstein, on a leash, behind a group of baboons in uniform.
The Camera moves across a narrow no-man’s-land of rubble,
broken trees and corpses, and comes to rest on a second group of animals,
wearing different decorations and under another flag, but with the same Dr. Albert
Einstein, on an exactly similar string, squatting at the heels of their
jackboots. Under the tousled aureole of
hair, the good, innocent face wears an expression of pained bewilderment. The Camera travels back and forth from
Einstein to Einstein. Close shots of the
two identical faces, staring wistfully at one another between the polished
leather boots of their respective masters.
On the soundtrack, the voice, the saxophones and ‘cellos
continue to yearn for detumescence.
‘Is that you, Albert?’ one of the Einsteins hesitantly
inquires.
The other slowly nods his head.
‘Albert, I’m afraid it is.’
Overhead the flags of the opposing armies suddenly begin to
stir in the freshening breeze. The
coloured patterns open out, then fold in again upon themselves, are revealed
and once more hidden.
NARRATOR
Vertical stripes, horizontal stripes,
noughts and crosses, eagles and hammers.
Mere arbitrary signs. But every reality to which a sign has been
attached is thereby made subject to its sign.
Goswami and Ali used to live at peace.
But I got a flag, you got a flag, all Baboon-God’s children got
flags. So even Ali and Goswami got
flags; and because of the flags it immediately became right and proper for the
one with the foreskin, and for the circumcised to shoot the uncircumcised, rape
his wife and roast his children over slow fires.
But meanwhile, above the bunting float the huge shapes of
clouds, and beyond the clouds is that blue void which is an emblem of our
glassy Essence, and at the foot of the flagstaff grows the wheat and the
emerald-green rice and the millet. Bread for the body and bread for the spirit. Our choice is between bread and bunting. And bunting, I need hardly add, is what we
have almost unanimously chosen.
The Camera drops from the flags to the Einsteins and passes
from the Einsteins to the much-decorated General Staffs in the background. All at once and simultaneously the two Field
Marshalissimos shout an order.
Immediately, from either side, appear baboon technicians, with fully
motorized equipment for releasing aerosols.
On the pressure-tanks of one army are painted the words SUPERTULAREMIA;
on those of their opponents, IMPROVED GLANDERS, GUARANTEED 99.44% PURE. Each group of technicians is accompanied by
its mascot, Louis Pasteur, on a chain.
On the soundtrack there is a reminiscence of the baboon-girl. Give
me, give me, give me, give me detumescence…. Then
these voluptuous strains modulate into ‘
NARRATOR
What land, you ask?
And I answer,
Any old land.
And
the Glory, of course, is the Ape-King’s,
As
for the Hope –
Bless
your little heart, there is no hope,
Only
the almost infinite probability
Of
consummating suddenly,
Or
else by agonizing inches,
The
ultimate and irremediable
Detumescence.
Close shot of paws at the stop-cocks; then the Camera draws
back. Out of the pressure-tanks two
streams of yellow fog start to roll towards one another, sluggishly across
no-man’s-land.
NARRATOR
Glanders, my friends, Glanders – a disease
of horses, not common among humans.
But, never fear, Science can easily make it universal. And these are its symptoms. Violent pains in all the joints. Postules over the whole
body. Below the skin hard
swellings, which finally burst and turn into sloughing
ulcers. Meanwhile the mucus
membrane of the nose becomes inflamed and exudes a copious discharge of
stinking pus. Ulcers rapidly form within
the nostrils and eat away the surrounding bone and cartilage. From the nose the infection passes to the
eyes, mouth, throat and bronchial passages.
Within three weeks most of the patients are dead. To see that all shall die has been the task of some of those brilliant young
D.Sc.’s now in the employ of your government.
And not of your government only: of all the other elected or
self-appointed organizers of the world’s collective schizophrenia. Biologists, pathologists, physiologists –
here they are, after a hard day at the lab, coming home to their families. A hug from the sweet little
wife. A romp
with the children. A quiet dinner with friends, followed by an evening of chamber
music or intelligent conversation about politics or philosophy. Then bed at eleven and the familiar ecstasies
of married love. And in the morning,
after orange juice and Grapenuts, off they go again to their job of discovering
how yet greater numbers of families precisely like their own can be infected with
a yet deadlier strain of bacillus mallei.
There is another yelp of command from the Marshalissimos. Among the booted apes in charge of either
army’s supply of Genius there is a violent cracking of whips, a tugging of
leashes.
Close shot of the Einsteins as they try to resist.
‘No, no … I can’t.’
‘I tell you I can’t.’
‘Disloyal!’
‘Unpatriotic!’
‘Filthy Communist!’
‘Stinking bourgeois-Fascist!’
‘Red Imperialist!’
‘Capitalist-Monopolist!’
‘Take that!’
‘Take that!’
Kicked, whipped, half throttled, each of the Einsteins is finally
dragged towards a kind of sentry box.
Inside these boxes are instrument boards with dials, knobs and switches.
NARRATOR
Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t
every schoolboy know it?
Ends
are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.
Papio’s
procurer, bursar to baboons,
Reason
comes running, eager to ratify;
Comes,
a catch-fart with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;
Comes,
a pimp for
Comes,
with Medicine to administer the Ape-King’s aphrodisiac;
Comes,
rhyming and with Rhetoric, to write his orations;
Comes
with the Calculus to aim his rockets
Accurately
at the orphanage across the ocean’
Comes,
having aimed, with incense to impetrate
Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.
The brass bands give place to the most glutinous of
Wurlitzers, ‘
NARRATOR
Church and State’
Greed
and Hate:-
Two Baboon-Persons in one Supreme Gorilla.
OMNES
Amen, amen.
THE BISHOP
In
nominee Babuini …
On the soundtrack it is all vox humana and the angel voices of choristers.
‘With the (dim) Cross of (pp) Jesus,
(ff) going on before.’
Huge paws hoist the Einsteins to their feet and, in a
close-up, seize their wrists.
Ape-guided, those fingers, which have written equations and played the
music of Johann Sebastian Bach, close on the master switches and, with a
horrified reluctance, slowly press them down.
There is a little click, then a long silence which is broken at last by
the voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
Even at supersonic speeds the missiles will take an
appreciable time to reach their destinations.
So what do you say, boys, to a spot of breakfast while we’re waiting for
our Last Judgement!
The apes open their haversacks, throw some bread, a few carrots
and two or three lumps of sugar to the Einsteins, then
fall to themselves on rum and
We dissolve to the deck of the schooner, where the scientists
of the Rediscovery Expedition are also breakfasting.
NARRATOR
And these are some of the survivors of that Judgement. Such nice people! And the civilization they represent – that’s
nice too. Nothing very
exciting or spectacular, of course.
No Pantheons or Sistine Chapels, no
One of the men raises his binoculars and peers at the shore,
now only a mile or two distant. Suddenly
he utters an exclamation of delighted astonishment.
‘Look!’ He hands the
glasses to one of his companions. ‘On the crest of the hill.’
The other looks.
Telescopic shot of low hills.
On the highest point of the ridge, three oil derricks stand silhouetted
against the sky, like the equipment of a modernized and more efficient
‘Oil!’ cries the second observer excitedly. ‘And the derricks are still standing.’
‘Still standing?’
There is general astonishment.
‘That means,’ says old Professor Craigie, the geologist, ‘that
there can’t have been much of an explosion hereabouts.’
‘But you don’t have to have explosions,’ explains his
colleague from the Department of Nuclear Physics. ‘Radio-active gases do the job just as
effectively and over much wider areas.’
‘You seem to forget the bacteria and the viruses,’ puts in
Professor Grampian, the biologist. His
tone is that of a man who feels that he has been slighted.
His young wife, who is only an anthropologist and so has
nothing to contribute to the argument, contents herself with glaring angrily at
the physicist.
Athletic in tweeds, but at the same time brightly intelligent behind
her horn-rimmed glasses, Miss Ethel Hook, of the Department of Botany, reminds
them that there was, almost certainly, a widespread employment of plant
diseases. She turns for confirmation of
what she says to her colleague, Dr. Poole, who nods approvingly.
‘Diseases of food plants,’ he says in his professorial manner, ‘would have a long-range effect hardly less decisive
than that produces by fissionable material or artificially induced
pandemics. Consider, for example, the
potato …’
‘But why bother about any of this fancy stuff?’ bluffly booms
the engineer of the party, Dr. Cudworth.
‘Cut the aqueducts, and it’s all over in a week. No drinky, no livey.’ Delighted by his own joke, he laughs
enormously.
Meanwhile Dr. Shneeglock, the psychologist, sits listening
with a smile of hardly disguised contempt.
‘But why even bother about aqueducts?’ he asks. ‘All you need
do is just to threaten your neighbour with any of the weapons of mass
destruction. Their own panic will do the
rest. Remember what the psychological
treatment did to
NARRATOR
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out
goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and
truth. What remains is the dumb or
studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in
the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any
windows. And now the thing bears down on
him. He feels a hand on his sleeve,
smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously
towards him. ‘Your turn next,
brother. Kindly step
this way.’ And in an instant his
quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as
it is futile. There is no longer a man
among his fellow-men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other
rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in
the trap. For in the end fear casts out
even a man’s humanity. And fear, my good
friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which,
while it raises our standard of living, increases the probability of our
violently dying. Fear of the science
which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with
the other. Fear of the demonstrably
fatal institutions for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and
die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have
raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder
and enslave us. Fear of the War we don’t
want and yet do everything we can to bring about.
As the Narrator speaks, we dissolve to the alfresco picnic of
the baboons and their captive Einsteins.
They eat and drink with gusto, while the first two bars of ‘Onward,
Christian Soldiers’ are repeated again and again, faster and faster, louder and
louder. Suddenly the music is
interrupted by the first of a succession of enormous explosions. Darkness. A long-drawn, deafening
noise of crashing, rending, screaming, moaning. Then silence and increasing light, and once
again it is the hour before sunrise, with the morning star and the delicate,
pure music.
NARRATOR
Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding …
Far off, from below the horizon, a column of rosy smoke pushes
up into the sky, swells out into the likeness of an enormous toadstool and
hangs there, eclipsing the solitary planet.
We dissolve again to the scene of the picnic. The baboons are all dead. Horribly disfigured by burns, the two
Einsteins lie side by side under what remains of a flowering apple tree. Not far off, a pressure-tank is still oozing
its Improved Glanders.
FIRST EINSTEIN
It’s unjust, it isn’t right …
SECOND EINSTEIN
We, who never did any harm to anybody;
FIRST EINSTEIN
We, who lived only for Truth.
NARRATOR
And that precisely is why you are dying in the murderous
service of baboons. Pascal explained it
all more than three hundred years ago.
‘We make an idol of truth; for truth without charity is not God, but his
image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.’ You lived for the worship of an idol. But, in the last analysis, the name of every
idol is Moloch. So here you are, my
friends, here you are.
Stirred by a sudden gust, the stagnant plague-fog noiselessly
advances, sends a wreath of pus-coloured vapour swirling among the apple
blossoms, then descends to engulf the two recumbent
figures. A choking scream announces the
death by suicide, of twentieth-century science.
We dissolve to a point on the coast of
NARRATOR
Pantheon, Coliseum –
Glory that was
And
there are all the others:-
And the Holy Wisdom, floating in repose.
But
the glory that was Queen
Remains unquestionably the W.C.;
The
grandeur that was Franklin Delano
Is
this by far the biggest drainpipe ever –
Dry
now and shattered, Ichabod, Ichabod;
And
its freight of condoms (irrepressibly buoyant,
Like
hope, like concupiscence) no longer whitens
This
lonely beach with a galaxy as of wind-flowers
Or
summer daisies.
Meanwhile the scientists, with Dr. Craigie at their head, have
crossed the beach, scrambled up the low cliff and are making their way across
the sandy and eroded plain towards the oil-wells on the hills beyond.
The Camera holds on Dr. Poole, the Chief Botanist of the
Expedition. Like a browsing sheep, he
moves from plant to plant, examining flowers through his magnifying glass,
putting away specimens in his collecting box, making notes in a little black
book.
NARRATOR
Well, here he is, our hero, Dr.
Alfred Poole, D.Sc. Better
known to his students and younger colleagues as Stagnant Poole. And the nickname, alas, is painfully
apt. For though not unhandsome, as you
see, though a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and by no means a
fool, in the circumstances of practical life his intelligence seems to be only
potential, his attractiveness no more than latent. It is as though he lived behind plate glass,
could see and be seen, but never establish
contact. And the fault, as Dr.
Schneeglock of the Psychology Department is only too ready to tell you, the
fault lies with that devoted and intensely widowed Mother of his – that saint,
that pillar of fortitude, that vampire, who still presides at his breakfast
table and with her own hands launders his silk shirts and sacrificially darns
his socks.
Miss Hook now enters the shot – enters it on
a burst of enthusiasm.
‘Isn’t this exciting, Alfred!’ she exclaims.
‘Very,’ says Dr. Poole politely.
‘Seeing Yucca gloriosa
in its native habitat – who would have imagined that we’d ever get the
chance? And Artemisia tridentata.’
‘There are still some flowers on the Artemisia,’ says Dr. Poole.
‘Do you notice anything unusual about them?’
Miss Hook examines them, and shakes her head.
‘They’re a great deal bigger than what’s described in the old
texts-books,’ he says in a tone of studiedly repressed excitement.
‘A great deal bigger?’ she repeats. Her face lights up. ‘Alfred, you don’t think…?’
Dr. Poole nods.
‘I’m ready to bet on it,’ he says. ‘Tetraploidy.
Induced by irradiation with gamma-rays.’
‘Oh, Alfred!’ she cries ecstatically.
NARRATOR
In her tweeds and her horn-rimmed spectacles Ethel Hook is one
of those extraordinarily wholesome, amazingly efficient and intensely English
girls to whom, unless one is oneself equally wholesome, equally English and
even more efficient, one would so much rather not be married. Which is probably why, at
thirty-five, Ethel is still without a husband. Still without a husband – but not, she dares
to hope, for much longer. For though
dear Alfred has not yet actually proposed, she knows (and knows that he knows)
that his Mother’s dearest wish is for him to do so – and Alfred is the most
dutiful of sons. Besides, they have so
much in common – botany, the University, the poetry of Wordsworth. She feels confident that before they get back
to
Cut to the other members of the expedition, as they toil up
the hill towards the oil-wells.
Professor Craigie, their leader, halts to mop his brow and to take stock
of his charges.
‘Where’s
Somebody points and, in a long shot, we see the distant figures
of the two botanists.
Cut back to Professor Craigie, who cups his hands around his
mouth and shouts: ‘
‘Why don’t you leave them to their little romance?’ asks the
genial Cudworth.
‘Romance indeed!’ Dr. Schneeglock snorts derisively.
‘But she’s obviously sweet on him.’
‘It takes two to make a romance.’
‘Trust a woman to get her man to pop the question.’
‘You might as well expect him to commit incest with his
Mother,’ says Dr. Schneeglock emphatically.
‘
He renews his shouting.
Cut back to Dr. Poole and Miss Hook. They hear the distant call, look up from
their tetraploid Artemisia, wave
their hands and start in pursuit of the others.
Suddenly Dr. Poole catches sight of something that makes him cry aloud.
‘Look!’ He point a forefinger.
‘What is it?’
‘Echinocacutus
Hexaedrophorus – the most beautiful specimen.’
Medium long shot from his viewpoint of a ruined bungalow among
the sage-brush. Then a close shot of the
cactus growing between two paving-stones, near the front door. Cut back to Dr. Poole. From the leather sheath at his belt he draws
a long, narrow-bladed trowel.
‘You’re not going to dig it up?’
His only answer is to walk over to where the cactus is growing
and squat down beside it.
‘Professor Craigie will be so cross,’ protests Miss Hook.
‘Well, then, run ahead and keep him quiet.’
She looks at him for a few seconds with an expression of
solicitude.
‘I hate to leave you alone, Alfred.’
‘You talk as though I were five years old,’ he answers
irritably. ‘Go ahead, I tell you.’
He turns away and starts to dig.
Miss Hook does not immediately obey, but stands looking at him
in silence for a while longer.
NARRATOR
Tragedy is the farce that involves our sympathies; farce, the
tragedy that happens to outsiders.
Tweedy and breezy, wholesome and efficient, this object of the easiest
kind of satire is also the subject of an Intimate Journal. What flaming sunsets she has seen and vainly
attempted to describe! What velvety and
voluptuous summer nights! What lyrically
lovely days of spring! And oh, the
torrents of feeling, the temptations, the hopes, the passionate throbbing of
the heart, the humiliating disappointments!
And now, after all these years, after so many committee meetings
attended, so many lectures delivered and examination papers corrected, now at
last, moving in His mysterious ways, God has made her, she feels, responsible
for this helpless and unhappy man. And
because he is unhappy and helpless, she loves him – not romantically, of
course, not as she loved that curly-headed scamp who, fifteen years ago, swept
her off her feet and then married the daughter of that rich contractor, but
genuinely nonetheless, with a strong, protective tenderness.
‘All right,’ she says at last.
‘I’ll go ahead. But promise you
won’t be long.’
‘Of course I won’t be long.’
She turns and walks away.
Dr. Poole looks after her; then, with a sigh of relief at finding
himself once more alone, resumes his digging.
NARRATOR
‘Never,’ he is repeating to himself, ‘Never! Whatever Mother may say.’ For though he respects Miss Hook as a
botanist, relies on her as an organizer and admires her as a high-minded
person, the idea of being made one flesh with her is as unthinkable as a
violation of the Categorical Imperative.
Suddenly, from behind him, three villainous-looking men,
black-bearded, dirty and ragged, emerge very quietly from out of the ruins of
the house, stand poised for a moment, then throw themselves upon the
unsuspecting botanist and, before he can so much as utter a cry, force a gag into
his mouth, tie his hands behind his back and drag him down into a gully, out of
sight of his companions.
We dissolve to a panoramic view of
NARRATOR
The sea and its clouds, the mountains glaucous-golden,
The
valleys full of indigo darkness,
The
drought of lion-coloured plains,
The rivers of pebbles and white sand.
And in the midst of them the City of the Angels.
Half
a million houses,
Five
thousand miles of streets,
Fifteen
hundred thousand motor vehicles,
And
more rubber goods than
More
celluloid than the Soviets,
More
Nylons than
More
brassieres than
More
deodorants than
More
oranges than anywhere,
With
bigger and better girls –
The great Metropolis of the West.
And now we are only five miles up and it becomes increasingly
obvious that the great Metropolis is a ghost town, that
what was once the world’s largest oasis is now its greatest agglomeration of
ruins in a wasteland. Nothing moves in
the streets. Dunes of sand have drifted
across the concrete. The avenues of
palms and pepper trees have left no trace.
The Camera comes down over a large rectangular graveyard, lying
between the ferro-concrete towers of
Overseeing the labourers from the roof of an adjacent
mausoleum sits a man in his middle forties, tall, powerfully built, with the dark
eyes and hawk nose of an Algerian corsair.
A black curly beard emphasizes the moistness and redness of his full
lips. Somewhat incongruously, he is
dressed in a pale grey suit of mid-twentieth-century cut, a little too small
for him. When we catch our first sight
of him, he is absorbed in the paring of his nails.
Cut back to the gravediggers.
One of them, the youngest and handsomest of the men, looks up from his
shovelling, glances surreptitiously at the overseer on the roof and, seeing him
busy with his nails, turns an intensely concupiscent look on the plump girl who
stands, stooped over her spade, beside him.
Close shot of the two prohibitory patches. No and again No, growling larger and larger
the more longingly he looks. Cupped
already for the deliciously imagined contact, his hand goes out, tentative,
hesitant; then, with a jerk, as conscience abruptly gets the better of
temptation, is withdrawn again. Biting
his lip, the young man turns away and, with redoubled zeal, addresses himself
once more to his digging.
Suddenly a spade strikes something hard. There is a cry of delight, a flurry of
concerted activity. A moment later a
handsome mahogany coffin is hoisted to the surface of the ground.
‘Break it open.’
‘O.K., Chief.’
We hear the creaking and cracking of rent wood.
‘Man or woman?’
‘Man.’
‘Fine! Spill him out.’
With a yo-heave-ho they tilt the coffin, and the corpse rolls
out on to the sand. The eldest of the
bearded gravediggers kneels down beside it and starts methodically to relieve
the thing of its watch and jewellery.
NARRATOR
Thanks to the dry climate and the embalmer’s art, what remains
of the Managing Director of the Golden Rule Brewing Corporation looks as though
it had been buried only yesterday. The
cheeks are still pink with the rouge applied by the undertaker for the
lying-in-state. Stitched into a
perpetual smile, the upturned corners of the lips impart to the round,
crumpet-like face the maddeningly enigmatic expression of a Madonna by
Boltraffio.
Suddenly the lash of a dog-whip cuts across the shoulders of
the kneeling gravedigger. The Camera
pulls back to the reveal the Chief impending, whip in hand, like the embodiment
of divine Vengeance, from the height of his marble Sinai.
‘Give back that ring.’
‘Which ring?’ the man falters.
For answer the Chief administers two or three more cuts with
the dog-whip.
‘No, no – please!
Ow! I’ll give it back. Stop!’
The culprit inserts two fingers into his mouth and after a
little fumbling draws forth the handsome diamond ring which the deceased brewer
bought for himself when business was so hearteningly good during the Second
World War.
‘Put it there with the other things,’ commands the Chief, and,
as the man obeys, ‘Twenty-five lashes,’ he continues with grim relish, ‘that’s
what you’re going to get this
evening.’
Blubbering, the man begs for indulgence – just for this
once. Seeing that tomorrow is Belial Day
… And after all he’s old, he has worked faithfully all his life, has risen to
the rank of a Deputy Supervisor …
The Chief cuts him short.
‘This is a Democracy,’ he says. ‘We’re all equal before the Law. And the Law says that everything belongs to
the Proletariat – in other words, it all goes to the State. And what’s the penalty for robbing the
State?’ The man looks up at him in
speechless misery. ‘What’s the penalty?’
the Chief bellows, raising his whip.
‘Twenty-five lashes,’ comes the
almost inaudible reply.
‘Good! Well, that
settles that, doesn’t it? And now, what
are the clothes like?’
The younger and slimmer of the girls bends down and fingers
the corpse’s double-breasted black jacket.
‘Nice stuff,’ she says.
‘And no stains.
He hasn’t leaked or anything.’
‘I’ll try them on,’ says the Chief.
With some difficulty they divest the cadaver of its trousers,
coat and shirt, then drop it back into the grave and shovel the earth back over
its one-piece undergarment. Meanwhile
the Chief takes the clothes, sniffs at them critically, then
doffs the pearl-grey jacket which once belonged to the Production Manager of
Western-Shakespeare Pictures Incorporated, and slips his arms into the more
conservative tailoring that goes with malt liquors and the Golden Rule.
NARRATOR
Put yourself in his place.
You may not know it, but a complete scribbler, or first card-engine,
consists of a breast, or small swift, and two swifts, with the accompanying
workers, strippers, fancies, doffers, etc.
And if you don’t have any carding machinery or power looms, if you don’t
have any electric motors to run them, or any dynamos to generate the
electricity, or any turbines to turn the dynamos, or any coal to raise steam,
or any blast furnaces to make steel – why then, obviously, you must depend for
your fine cloth on the cemeteries of those who once enjoyed these advantages. And so long as the radio-activity persisted,
there weren’t even any cemeteries to exploit.
For three generations the dwindling remnant of those who survived the
consummation of technological progress lived precariously in the
wilderness. It is only during the last
thirty years that it has been safe for them to enjoy the buried remains of le confort moderne.
Close shot of the Chief, grotesque in
the borrowed jacket of a man whose arms were much shorter and whose belly was
much larger than his own. The sound of
approaching footsteps makes him turn his head.
In a long shot from his viewpoint we see Dr. Poole, his hands
tied behind his back, trudging wearily through the sand. Behind him walk his three captors. Whenever he stumbles or slackens his pace,
they prick him in the rear with needle-sharp yucca leaves and laugh
uproariously to see him wince.
The Chief stares at them in astonished silence as they
approach.
‘What in Belial’s name?’ he brings out at last.
The little party comes to a halt at the foot of the
mausoleum. The three members of Dr.
Poole’s escort bow to the Chief and tell their story. They had been fishing in their coracle off
There is a long silence, broken finally by the Chief.
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Yes, I speak English,’ Dr. Poole stammers.
‘Good. Untie him; hoist
him up.’
They hoist him – so unceremoniously that he lands on all fours
at the Chief’s feet.
‘Are you a priest?’
‘A priest?’ Dr. Poole echoes in
apprehensive astonishment. He shakes his
head.
‘Then why don’t you have a beard?’
‘I … I shave.’
‘Oh, then you’re not …’ The Chief passes a finger across Dr.
Poole’s chin and cheek. ‘I see, I
see. Get up.’
Dr. Poole obeys.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘
Dr. Poole swallows hard, wishes his mouth were less dry, his
voice less tremulous with terror.
‘
‘Very far.’
‘You came in a big ship?
With sails?’
Dr. Poole nods, and adopting that lecture-room manner which is
always his refuge when personal contracts threaten to become too difficult,
proceeds to explain why they weren’t able to cross the Pacific under steam.
‘There would have been no place to refuel. It’s only for coastwise traffic that our
shipping companies are able to make use of steamers.’
‘Steamers?’ the Chief repeats, his face alight with
interest. ‘You still have steamers? But that must mean you didn’t have the
Thing?’
Dr. Poole looks puzzled.
‘I don’t quite catch your meaning,’ he says. ‘What thing?’
‘The
Thing. You know – when He took
over.’
Raising his hands to his forehead, he makes the sign of the
horns with extended forefingers.
Devoutly, his subjects follow suit.
‘You mean the Devil?’ says Dr. Poole dubiously.
The other nods.
‘But, but … I mean, really
…’
NARRATOR
Our friend is a good Congregationalist, but, alas, on the
liberal side. Which
means that he has never given the Prince of this world His ontological due. To put it brutally, he doesn’t believe in
Him.
‘Yes, He got control,’ the Chief explains. ‘He won the battle and took possession of
everybody. That was when they did all
this.’
With a wide, comprehensive gesture he takes in the desolation
that was once
‘Oh, I see. You mean
the Third World War. No, we were lucky;
we got off without a scratch. Owing to
its peculiar geographical situation,’ he adds professorially, ‘
The Chief cuts short a promising lecture.
‘Then you’ve still got trains?’ he questions.
‘Yes, we’ve still got trains,’ Dr. Poole answers, a little
irritably. ‘But, as I was saying …’
‘And the engines really work?’
‘Of course they work.
As I was saying …’
Startlingly the Chief lets out a whoop of delight and claps
him on the shoulder.
‘Then you can help us to get it all going again. Like in the good old days before …’ He makes
the sign of horns. ‘We’ll have trains,
real trains.’ And in an ecstasy of
joyous anticipation he draws Dr. Poole towards him, puts an arm round his neck
and kisses him on both cheeks.
Shrinking with an embarrassment that is reinforced by disgust
(for the great man seldom washes and is horribly foul-mouthed), Dr. Poole
disengages himself.
‘But I’m not an engineer,’ he protests. ‘I’m a botanist.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A botanist is a man who knows about plants.’
‘War plants?’ the Chief asks hopefully.
‘No, no, just plants.
Things with leaves and stalks and flowers – though, of course,’ he adds
hastily, ‘one mustn’t forget the Cryptograms.
And as a matter of fact the Cryptograms are my special pets.
‘But what about the engines?’
‘Engines?’ Dr. Poole repeats
contemptuously. ‘I tell you, I don’t know
the difference between a steam turbine and a diesel.’
‘Then you can’t do anything to help us get the trains running
again?’
‘Not a thing.’
Without a word the Chief raises his right leg, places his foot
against the pit of Dr. Poole’s stomach, then sharply
straightens the bent knee.
Close shot of Dr. Poole as he raises himself, shaken and
bruised, but with no bones broken, from the heap of sand on to which he has
fallen. Over the shot we hear the Chief
shouting to his retainers.
Medium shot of the gravediggers and fishermen as they come
running in response to the summons.
The Chief points down to Dr. Poole.
‘Bury him.’
‘Alive or dead?’ asks the plumper of the girls in her rich
contralto voice.
The Chief looks down at her.
Shot from his viewpoint. With an
effort he turns away. His lips
move. He is repeating the relevant
passage from the Shorter Catechism.
‘What is the nature of woman?
Answer: Woman is the vessel of the Unholy Spirit, the source of all
deformity, the enemy of the race, the …’
‘Alive or dead?’ the plump girl repeats.
The Chief shrugs his shoulders.
‘As you like,’ he answers with studied indifference.
The plump girl claps her hands.
‘Goody, goody!’ she cries, and turns to her companions. ‘Come on, boys. Let’s have some fun.’
They close in on Dr. Poole, lift him screaming from the ground
and drop him feet-first into the half-filled grave of the Managing Director of
the Golden Rule Brewing Corporation.
While the plump girl holds him down, the men shovel the loose dry earth
into place. In a very short time he is
buried up to the waist.
On the sound track the victim’s screams and the excited
laughter of the executioners taper off into a silence that is broken by the
voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes;
All
men are merciful and all are murderers.
Doting
on dogs, they build their Dachaus;
Fire
whole cities and fondle the orphans;
Are
loud against lynching, but all for Oakridge;
Full
of future philanthropy, but today they NKVD.
Whom
shall we persecute, for whom feel pity?
It
is all a matter of the moment’s mores,
Of
words on wood-pulp, of radios roaring,
Of communist kindergartens or first communions.
Only
in the knowledge of his own Essence
Has
any man ceased to be many monkeys.
The laughter and the pleas for mercy return to the
soundtrack. Then, suddenly, we hear the
Chief.
‘Stand back,’ he shouts.
‘I can’t see.’
They obey. In silence
the Chief looks down at Dr. Poole.
‘You know all about plants,’ he says at last. ‘Why don’t you grow some roots down there?’
The sally is greeted by enormous guffaws.
‘Why don’t you put out some nice little pink flowers?’
We are shown a close-up of the botanist’s agonized face.
‘Mercy, mercy …’
The voice breaks, grotesquely; there is another bust of
hilarity.
‘I could be useful to you.
I could show you how to get better crops. You’d have more to eat.’
‘More to eat?’ the Chief repeats with sudden interest. Then he frowns savagely. ‘You’re lying!’
‘I’m not. I swear by
Almighty God.’
There is a murmur of shocked protest.
‘He may be almighty in
‘But I know I can help you.’
‘Are you ready to swear by Belial?’
Dr. Poole’s father was a clergyman and he himself is a regular
church-goer; but it is with heartfelt fervour that he does what is asked of
him.
‘By Belial. I swear by Almighty Belial.’
Everyone makes the sign of the horns. There is a long silence.
‘Dig him up.’
‘Oh, Chief!’ the plump girl protests. ‘That isn’t fair!’
‘Dig him up, you vessel of Unholiness!’
His tone carries immediate conviction; they dig with such
fervour that in less than a minute Dr. Poole is out of his grave and standing,
rather unsteadily, at the foot of the mausoleum.
‘Thank you,’ he manages to say; then his knees give way and he
collapses.
There is a chorus of contemptuous good-humoured laughter.
The Chief leans from his marble perch. ‘Here, you there, the red-headed
vessel.’ He hands the girl a
bottle. ‘Make him drink some of this,’
he orders. ‘He’s got to be able to
walk. We’re going back to Headquarters.’
She sits down beside Dr. Poole, raises his limp body, props
the wobbling head against the interdictions on her bosom, and administers the
restorative.
Dissolve to a street.
Four of the bearded men are carrying the Chief in a litter. The others straggle behind, moving slowly
through the drifted sand. Here and
there, under the porches of ruined filling-stations, in the gaping doorways of
office buildings, lie heaps of human bones.
Medium close shot of Dr. Poole. Still holding the bottle in his right hand,
he walks a little unsteadily, singing ‘Annie Laurie’ to himself with intense
feeling. Drunk on an empty stomach – the
empty stomach, moreover, of a man whose Mother has
always had conscientious objections to alcohol – the strong red wine has taken
prompt effect.
‘And for bonny
Annie Laurie
I’d lay me doon and dee….’
In the middle of the final phrase, the two girl gravediggers
enter the shot. Approaching the singer
from behind, the plump one gives him a friendly slap on the back. Dr. Poole starts, turns round, and looks
suddenly apprehensive. But her smile is
reassuring.
‘I’m Flossie,’ she says.
‘And I hope you’re not cross with me because I wanted to bury you.’
‘Oh, no, no, not a bit,’ Dr. Poole assures her in the tone of
one who says he has no objection to the young lady lighting a cigarette.
‘It’s not that I had anything against you,’ Flossie assures
him.
‘Of course not.’
‘I just wanted a laugh, that’s all.’
‘Quite, quite.’
‘People look so screamingly funny when they’re being buried.’
‘Screamingly,’ Dr. Poole agrees, and forces a nervous giggle.
Feeling the need for more courage, he fortifies himself with
another swig from the bottle.
‘Well, see you later,’ says the plump girl. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to the Chief about
lengthening the sleeves of his new jacket.’
She gives him another slap on the back and hurries away.
Dr. Poole is left alone with her companion. He steals a glance at her. She is eighteen; she has red hair and
dimples, a charming face and a slender, adolescent body.
‘My name’s Loola,’ she volunteers. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Alfred,’ Dr. Poole replies.
‘My Mother was a great admirer of In
Memoriam,’ he adds by way of explanation.
‘Alfred,’ the red-headed girl repeats. ‘I shall call you Alfie. I’ll tell you something, Alfie: I don’t
really like these public burials. I
don’t know why I should be different from other people; but they don’t make me
laugh. I can’t see anything funny about
them.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ says Dr. Poole.
‘You know, Alfie,’ she resumes, after a little silence,
‘you’re really a very lucky man.’
‘Lucky?’
Loola nods.
‘First of all you’re dug up – and I’ve never seen that happen before – and now you walk
straight into the Purification Ceremonies.’
‘Purification Ceremonies?’
‘Yes, it’s Belial Day tomorrow – Belial Day,’ she insists in
response to the blank look of incomprehension on the other’s face. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what happens on
Belial Eve.’
Dr. Poole shakes his head.
‘But when do you
have your Purification?’
‘Well, we take a bath every day,’ says Dr. Poole, who has just
been reminded, yet once more, that Loola most decidedly doesn’t.
‘No, no,’ she says impatiently. ‘I mean the Purification of the Race.’
‘Of the Race?’
‘Hell, your priests don’t let the deformed babies go on
living, do they?’
There is a silence; then Dr. Poole counters with a question of
his own.
‘Are there many deformed babies born here?’
She nods affirmatively.
‘Ever since the Thing – ever since He’s been in charge.’ She makes the sign of the horns. ‘They say that before that there weren’t
any.’
‘Did anyone ever tell you about the effect of gamma-rays?’
‘Gamma-rays? What’s a gamma-ray?’
‘It’s the reason for all these deformed children.’
‘You’re not trying to suggest that it wasn’t Belial, are
you?’ Her tone is one of indignant
suspicion; she looks at him as St. Dominic might have eyed an Albigensian
heretic.
‘No, no, of course not,’ Dr. Poole hastens to assure her. ‘He’s the primary cause – that goes without
saying.’ Clumsily and inexpertly, he
makes the sign of the horns. ‘I was merely
suggesting the nature of the secondary causes – the means He used to carry out
His … His providential purpose, if you see what I mean.’
His words and, still more, his pious gesture
allay Loola’s suspicions. Her
face clears; she gives him her most charming smile. The dimples in her cheeks come to life like a
pair of adorable little creatures fitfully leading a secret autonomous
existence in independence of the rest of Loola’s face. Dr. Poole returns her smile, but almost
instantly looks away, blushing as he does so to the roots of his hair.
NARRATOR
Out of the enormity of his respect for his Mother, our poor
friend here is still, at thirty-eight, a bachelor. Too full of an unnatural piety to marry, he
has spent half a lifetime surreptitiously burning. Feeling that it would be a sacrilege to ask a
virtuous young gentlewoman to share his bed, he inhabits, under the carapace of
academic respectability, a hot and furtive world, where erotic phantasies beget
an agonizing repentance and adolescent desires forever struggle with the
maternal precepts. And now here is Loola
– Loola without the least pretension to education or good breeding, Loola au naturel
with a musky redolence which, on second thoughts, has something really rather
fascinating about it. What wonder if he
reddens and (against his will, for he longs to go on looking at her) averts his
eyes.
For consolation and in hope of an accession of boldness, he
resorts again to the bottle. Suddenly
the boulevard narrows to a mere footpath between the two dunes of sand.
‘After you, says Dr. Poole, politely bowing.
She smiles her acknowledgement of a courtesy to which, in this
place where men take precedence and the vessels of the Unholy Spirit follow
after, she is wholly unaccustomed.
Trucking shot, from Dr. Poole’s viewpoint, of Loola’s
back. NO NO, NO NO, NO NO, step after
step in undulant alternation. Cut back
to a close shot of Dr. Poole, gazing, wide-eyed, and from Dr. Poole’s face once
again to Loola’s back.
NARRATOR
It is the emblem, outward, visible, tangible, of his own inner consciousness.
Principle at odds with concupiscence, his Mother and the Seventh
Commandment superimposed upon his fancies and the facts of life.
The dunes subside. Once
more the road is wide enough for two to walk abreast. Dr. Poole steals a glance at his companion’s
face and sees it clouded with an expression of melancholy.
‘What is it?’ he asks solicitously and, greatly daring, adds
‘Loola’ and lays a hand on her arm.
‘It’s terrible,’ she says in a tone of quiet despair.
‘What’s terrible?’
‘Everything. You don’t want to think about those things;
but you’re one of the unlucky ones – you can’t help thinking about them. And you almost go crazy. Thinking and thinking about someone, and
wanting and wanting. And you know you
mustn’t. And you’re scared to death of
what they might do if they found out.
But you’d give everything in the world just for five minutes, to be free
for five minutes. But
no, no, no. And you clench your
fists and hold yourself in – and it’s like tearing yourself to pieces. And then suddenly, after all that suffering,
suddenly …’ she breaks off.
‘Suddenly what?’ inquires Dr. Poole.
She looks at him sharply, but sees on his face only an
expression of inquiring and genuinely innocent incomprehension.
‘I can’t make you out,’ she says at last. ‘Is it true, what you told the Chief? You know, about your not being a priest.’
All at once she blushes.
‘If you don’t believe me,’ says Dr. Poole with a wine-begotten
gallantry, ‘I’m ready to prove it.’
She looks at him for a moment, then shakes her head and, in a
kind of terror, turns away. Nervously she smoothes her apron.
‘And meanwhile,’ he continues, emboldened by her new-found
shyness, ‘you haven’t told me just what it is that suddenly happens.’
Loola glances about her to make sure that nobody is within
earshot, then speaks at last almost in a whisper.
‘Suddenly He starts to take possession of everybody. For weeks He makes them think about those
things – and it’s against the Law, it’s wicked.
The men get so mad, they start hitting you and calling you a vessel, the
way the priests do.’
‘A vessel?’
She nods.
‘Vessel of the Unholy Spirit.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘And then comes Belial Day,’ she goes on after a little
pause. ‘And then … well, you know what
that means. And afterwards, if you have
a baby, the chances are that He’ll punish you for what He has made you do.’ She shudders, then
makes the sign of the horns. ‘I know we
have to accept what He wills,’ she adds.
‘But oh, I do so hope that, if ever I have any babies, they’ll be all
right.’
‘But of course they’ll be all right,’ cried Dr. Poole. ‘After all, there isn’t anything wrong about you.’
Delighted by his own audacity, he looks down at her.
Close shot from his viewpoint.
NO NO NO, NO NO NO …
Mournfully, Loola shakes her head.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ she says. ‘I’ve got an extra pair of nipples.’
‘Oh,’ says Dr. Poole, in a tone which makes us realize that
the thought of his Mother has momentarily obliterated the effects of the red
wine.
‘Not that there’s anything really bad about that,’ Loola
hastily adds. ‘Even the best people have
them. It’s perfectly legal. They allow you up to three pairs. And seven toes and fingers. Anything over that gets liquidated at the
Purification. My friend Polly – she had a baby this season. Her first one. And it’s got four pairs, and no thumbs. There isn’t any chance for it. In fact, it’s been condemned already. She’s had her head shaved.’
‘Had her head shaved?’
‘They do it to all the girls whose babies are liquidated.’
‘But why?’
Loola shrugs her shoulders.
‘Just to remind them that He’s the Enemy.’
NARRATOR
‘To put it,’ as Schroedinger has said, ‘drastically, though perhaps
a little naïvely, the injuriousness of a marriage between first cousins might
very well be increased by the fact that their grandmother had served for a long
period as an X-ray nurse. It is not a
point that need worry any individual personally. But any possibility of gradually infecting
the human race with unwanted latent mutations ought to be a matter of concern
to the community.’ It ought to be; but,
needless to say, it isn’t. Oakridge is
working three shifts a day; an atomic power plant is going up on the coast of
Cumberland; and on the other side of the fence, goodness only knows what
Kapitza is up to on the top of Mount Ararat, what surprises that wonderful
Russian Soul, about which Dostoevsky used to write so lyrically, has in store
for Russian bodies and the carcases of Capitalists and Social Democrats.
Once again sand bars the road.
They enter another winding pathway between the dunes and are suddenly
alone, as though in the middle of the
Trucking shot from Dr. Poole’s viewpoint. NO NO, NO NO … Loola
halts and turns back towards him. NO NO NO. The Camera
moves up to her face and all at once he notices that its expression is
tragical.
NARRATOR
The Seventh Commandment, the Facts of Life. But there is also another
Fact, to which one cannot react by a mere departmentalized negation or a no
less fragmentary display of lust – the Fact of Personality.
‘I don’t want them to cut my hair,’ she says in a breaking
voice.
‘But they won’t.’
‘They will.’
‘They can’t, they mustn’t.’
Then, amazed by his own daring, he adds, ‘It’s
much too beautiful.’
Still tragic, Loola shakes her head.
‘I feel it,’ she says, ‘in my bones. I just know
it’ll have more than seven fingers. They’ll
kill it, they’ll cut my hair off, they’ll whip me – and He makes us do these things.’
‘What things?’
She looks at him for a moment without speaking; then, with an
expression almost of terror, drops her eyes.
‘It’s because He wants
us to be miserable.’
Covering her face with her hands, she starts to sob
uncontrollably.
NARRATOR
The wine within and, without, the musky reminder
Of
those so near, warm, ripe, orby and all but
Edible
Facts of Life…. And now her tears, her tears …
Dr. Poole takes the girl in his arms and, while she sobs
against his shoulder, strokes her hair with all the tenderness of the normal
male he has momentarily become.
‘Don’t cry,’ he whispers, ‘don’t cry. It’ll be all right. I’ll always be there. I won’t let them do anything to you.’
She permits herself gradually to be comforted. The sobbing becomes less violent and finally
ceases altogether. She looks up, and the
smile she gives him through her tears is so unequivocally amorous that anyone
but Dr. Poole would have accepted the invitation forthwith. The seconds pass and, while he is still
hesitating, her expression changes, she drops her eyelids over an avowal that
she suddenly feels to have been too frank, and turns away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, and starts to rub away her tears
with the knuckles of a hand that is as grubby as a child’s.
Dr. Poole takes out his handkerchief and tenderly wipes her
eyes.
‘You’re so sweet,’ he says.
‘Not a bit like the men here.’
She smiles up at him again.
Like a pair of enchanting little wild animals emerging from concealment,
out come the dimples.
So impulsively that he has no time to feel surprise at what he
is doing, Dr. Poole takes her face between his hands and kisses her on the
mouth
Loola resists for a moment, then
abandons herself in a surrender so complete as to be more active than his
assault.
On the soundtrack ‘Give me detumescence’ modulates into Libestod from Tristan.
Suddenly Loola stiffens into a shuddering rigidity. Pushing him away, she stares up wildly into
his face; then turns and glances over her shoulder with an expression of guilty
terror.
‘Loola!’
He tries to draw her close again, but she breaks away from him
and starts to run along the narrow path.
NO NO, NO NO, NO NO …
We dissolve to the corner of
‘That looks good,’ says the Chief genially.
The butcher grins and, with bloody fingers, makes the sign of
the horns.
A few yards away stand the communal ovens. The Chief orders a halt, and graciously
accepts a piece of the newly baked bread.
While he is eating, ten or twelve small boys enter the shot, staggering
under inordinate loads of fuel from the nearby Public Library. They tumble their burdens on to the ground
and, stimulated by the blows and curses of their elders, hurry back for more. One of the bakers opens a furnace door and
starts to shovel the books into the flames.
All the scholar in Dr. Poole, all the
bibliophile, is outraged by the spectacle.
‘But this is frightful!’ he protests.
The Chief only laughs.
‘In goes The
Phenomenology of Sprit, out comes the cornbread. And damned good bread it is.’
He takes another bite.
Meanwhile Dr. Poole has bent down and, from the very brink of
destruction, has snatched to safety a charming little duodecimo Shelley.
‘Thank G …’ he begins, but fortunately remembers where he is
and manages to check himself in time.
He slips the volume into his pocket and, turning to the Chief,
‘But what about culture?’ he asks. ‘What
about the social inheritance of humanity’s painfully acquired wisdom? What about the best that has been thought and
…’
‘They can’t read,’ the Chief answers with his mouth full. ‘No, that’s not quite true. We teach all of them to read that.’
He points. Medium shot
from his viewpoint of Loola – Loola with dimples and all the rest, but also
with the large red NO on her apron, the two smaller NO’s on her shirt front.
‘That’s all the book learning they need. ‘And now,’ he commands his bearers, ‘move
on.’
Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried through the
doorless entrance of what was once the Biltmore Coffee Shop. Here, in the malodorous twilight, twenty or
thirty women, some middle-aged, some young, some mere girls, are busily weaving
on primitive looms of the kind used by the Indians of Central America.
‘None of these vessels had a baby this season,’ the Chief
explains to Dr. Poole. He frowns and
shakes his head. ‘When they’re not
producing monsters, they’re sterile.
What we’re going to do for manpower, Belial only knows …’
They advance further into the Coffee Shop, pass a group of
three- and four-year-old children under the supervision of an aged vessel with
a cleft plate and fourteen fingers, and come to a halt under an archway giving
access to a second dining-room only slightly smaller than the first.
Over the shot we hear the sound of a chorus of youthful voices
reciting in unison the opening phrases of the Shorter Catechism.
‘Question: What is the chief end of Man? Answer: The chief end of Man is to propitiate
Belial, deprecate His enmity and avoid destruction for as long as possible.’
Cut to a close shot of Dr. Poole’s face, on which we see an
expression of amazement mingled with a growing horror. Then a long long shot from his
viewpoint. In five rows of twelve, sixty
boys and girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen stand rigidly at attention,
gabbling as fast as they can in a shrill harsh monotone. Facing them, on a dais, sits a small, fat man
wearing a long robe of black-and-white goatskins and a fur cap with a stiff
leather edging, to which are attached two medium-sized horns. Beardless and sallow, his face shines with a
profuse perspiration, which he is forever wiping away with the hairy sleeve of
his cassock.
Cut back to the Chief, as he leans down and touches Dr. Poole
on the shoulder.
‘That,’ he whispers, ‘is our leading Satanic Science
Practitioner. I tell you, he’s an
absolute whiz at Malicious Animal Magnetism.’
Over the shot we hear the mindless gabble of the children.
‘Question: To what fate is Man predestined? Answer: Belial has, out of His mere good
pleasure, from all eternity elected all now living to everlasting perdition.’
‘Why does he wear horns?’ asks Dr. Poole.
‘He’s an Archimandrite,’ the Chief explains. ‘Due for his third horn any
time now.’
Cut to a medium shot of the dais.
‘Excellent,’ the Satanic Science Practitioner is saying in a
high piping voice, like the voice of an extraordinarily priggish and
self-satisfied small boy.
‘Excellent!’ He wipes his
forehead. ‘And now tell me why you
deserve everlasting perdition.’
There is a moment’s silence.
Then, in a chorus that starts a little raggedly, but soon swells to a
loud unanimity, the children answer.
‘Belial has perverted and corrupted us in all the parts of our
being. Therefore, we are, merely on
account of that corruption, deservedly condemned by Belial.’
Their teacher nods approvingly.
‘Such,’ he squeaks unctuously, ‘is the inscrutable justice of
the Lord of Flies.’
‘Amen,’ respond the children.
All make the sign of the horns.
‘And what about your duty towards your
neighbour?’
‘My duty towards my neighbour,’ comes the choral answer, ‘is
to do my best to prevent him from doing unto me what I should like to do unto
him; to subject myself to all my governors; to keep my body in absolute
chastity, except during the two weeks following Belial Day; and to do my duty
in that state of life to which it hath pleased Belial to condemn me.’
‘What is the Church?’
‘The Church is the body of which Belial is the head and all
possessed people are the members.’
‘Very good,’ says the Practitioner, wiping his face yet once
more. ‘And now I need a young vessel.’
He runs his eyes over the ranks of his pupils, then points a finger.
‘You there. Third from the left in the
second row … The vessel with the yellow hair. Come here.’
Cut back to the group around the litter.
The bearers are grinning with happy anticipation and, looking
intensely red and moist and fleshy among the black curls of the moustache and
beard, even the Chief’s full lips are curved into a smile. But there is no smile on Loola’s face. Pale, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide
and staring, she is watching the proceedings with the horror of one who has
been through this kind of ordeal herself.
Dr. Poole glances at her, then back at the victim, whom we now see, from
his viewpoint, slowly advancing towards the dais.
‘Up here,’ squeaks the almost babyish voice in a tone of
conqueror’s authority. ‘Stand by
me. Now face the class.’
The child does as she is told.
Medium close shot of a tall slender girl of
fifteen with the face of a Nordic Madonna. NO, proclaims the apron attached to the
waistband of her ragged pedal-pushers; NO and NO, the patches over her budding
breasts.
The Practitioner points at her accusingly.
‘Look at it,’ he says, wrinkling up his face into a grimace of
disgust. ‘Did you ever see anything so
revolting?’
He turns to the class.
‘Boys,’ he squeaks.
‘Any of you who feels any Malicious Animal Magnetism coming out of this
vessel, hold up your hand.’
Cut to a long shot of the class. Without exception, all the boys are holding
up their hands. Their faces wear that
expression of lustful and malevolent amusement with which the orthodox have
always looked on while their spiritual pastors torment the hereditary scapegoats
or still more severely punish the heretics who threaten the interests of the
Establishment.
Cut back to the Practitioner.
He sighs hypocritically and shakes his head.
‘I feared as much,’ he says.
Then he turns to the girl beside him on the dais. ‘Now tell me,’ he says, ‘what is the Nature
of Woman?’
‘The Nature of Woman?’ the child repeats unsteadily.
‘Yes, the Nature of Woman.
Hurry up!’
She glances at him with an expression of terror in her blue
eyes, then turns away.
Her face becomes deathly pale.
Her lips tremble; she swallows hard.
‘Woman,’ she begins, ‘woman …’
Her voice breaks, her eyes overflow with tears; in a desperate
effort to control her feelings she clenches her fists and bites her lip.
‘Go on!’ the Practitioner shrilly shouts. And picking up a willow switch from the
floor, he gives the child a sharp cut across the calves of her bare legs. ‘Go on!’
‘Woman,’ the girl begins once more, ‘is the vessel of the
Unholy Spirit, the source of all deformity, the … the … Ow!’
She winces under another blow.
The Practitioner laughs and the whole class follows suit.
‘The enemy …’ he prompts.
‘Oh yes – the enemy of the race, punished by Belial and
calling down punishment on all those who succumb to Belial in her.’
There is a long silence.
‘Well,’ says the Practitioner at last, ‘that’s what you are.
That’s what all vessels are. And
now go, go!’ he squeals, and with sudden fury he strikes at her again and
again.
Crying with pain, the child jumps down from the dais and runs
back to her place in the ranks.
Cut back to the Chief.
His brow is wrinkled in a frown of displeasure.
‘All this progressive education!’ he says to Dr. Poole. ‘No proper discipline. I don’t know what we’re coming to. Why, when I was a boy, our old Practitioner
used to tie them over a bench and go to work with a birch-rod. “That’ll teach you to be a vessel,” he’d say,
and then swish, swish, swish! Belial,
how they howled! That’s what I call education. Well, I’ve had enough of this,’ he adds. ‘Quick march!’
As the litter moves out of shot, the Camera holds on Loola,
who remains, staring in the agony of fellow-feeling at the tear-wet face and
heaving shoulders of the little victim in the second row. A hand touches her arm. She starts, turns apprehensively and is
relieved to find herself looking into the kindly face of Dr. Poole.
‘I entirely agree with you,’ he whispers. ‘It’s wrong, it’s unjust.’
Only after she has thrown a quick look over her shoulder does
Loola venture to give him a little smile of gratitude.
‘Now we must go,’ she says.
They hurry after the others.
Following the litter, they retrace their steps through the Coffee Shop,
then turn to the right and enter the Cocktail Bar. At one end of the room an enormous pile of
human bones reaches almost to the ceiling.
Squatting on the floor, in a thick white dust, a score of craftsmen are
engaged in fashioning drinking-cups out of skulls, knitting-needles from ulnas,
flutes and recorders from the longer shank-bones, ladles, shoehorns and
dominoes from pelvises, and spigots out of femurs.
A halt is called, and, while one of the workmen plays ‘Give me
detumescence’ on a shinbone flute, another presents the Chief with a superb
necklace of graded vertebrae ranging in size from a baby’s cervicals to the
lumbers of a heavyweight boxer.
NARRATOR
‘And he set me down in the midst of the valley that was full
of bones; and lo, they were very dry.’
They dry bones of some of those who died, by thousands, by millions, in
the course of those three bright summer days that, for you there, are still in
the future. ‘And he said unto me, Son of
man, can these bones live?’ The answer,
I replied, is in the negative. For though
Baruch might save us (perhaps) from taking our places in such an ossuary as
this, he can do nothing to avert that other, slower, nastier death …
Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried up the steps into
the main lobby. Here the stink is
overpowering, the filth beyond description.
Close-up of two rats gnawing at a mutton bone, of the
flies on the purulent eyelids of a small girl. The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with
shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuge on the floor, on the
tattered remnants of ancient beds and sofas.
Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and
all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare
lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters
of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples,
we hear the voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
For this other death – not by plague, this time, not by
poison, not by fire, not by artificially induced cancer, but by the squalid disintegration
of the very substance of the species – this gruesome and infinitely unheroic
death-in-birth could as well be the product of atomic industry as of atomic
war. For in a world powered by nuclear
fission everybody’s grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody’s grandmother –
everybody’s grandfather and father and mother as well, everybody’s ancestors
back to three and four and five generations of them that hate Me.
From the last of the deformed babies the Camera pulls back to
Dr. Poole, who is standing, his handkerchief held to his still too sensitive
nose, staring with horrified bewilderment at the scene around him.
‘All the babies look as if they were exactly the same age,’ he
says, turning to Loola, who is still beside him.
‘Well, what do you expect?
Seeing that practically all of them were born between
the tenth and the seventeenth of December.’
‘But that must mean that …’ He breaks off, deeply
embarrassed. ‘I think,’ he concludes
hastily, ‘that things must be rather different here from what they are in
In spite of the wine, he remembers his grey-haired Mother
across the Pacific and, blushing guiltily, coughs and averts his eyes.
‘There’s Polly,’ cries his companion, and hurries across the
room.
Mumbling apologies as he picks his way between the squatting
or recumbent mothers, Dr. Poole follows her.
Polly is sitting on a straw-filled sack near what was once the
Cashier’s desk. She is a girl of
eighteen or nineteen, small and fragile, her head shaved like that of a
criminal prepared for execution. She has
a face whose beauty is all in the fine bones and the big luminous eyes. It is with an expression of hurt bewilderment
that those eyes now look up into Loola’s face and from Loola’s face move
without curiosity, almost without comprehension, to that of the stranger who
accompanies her.
‘Darling!’
Loola bends down to kiss her friend. NO, NO, from Dr. Poole’s viewpoint. Then she sits down beside Polly, and puts a
comforting arm around her. Polly hides
her face against the other’s shoulder and both girls begin to cry. As though infected by their grief, the little
monster in Polly’s arms wakes up and utters a thin complaining howl. Polly raises her head from her friend’s
shoulder and, her face still wet with tears, looks down at the deformed child,
then opens her shirt and, pushing aside one of the crimson NO’s, gives it the
breast. With an almost frantic hunger
the child starts to suck.
‘I love him,’ Polly sobs.
‘I don’t want them to kill him.’
‘Darling,’ is all that Loola can find to say, ‘darling!’
A loud voice interrupts her.
‘Silence there! Silence!’
Other voices take up the refrain.
‘Silence!’
‘Silence there!’
‘Silence, silence!’
In the lobby all talk ceases abruptly and there is a long,
expectant hush. Then a horn is blown,
and another of those strangely babyish but self-important voices announces:
‘His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of
California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood.’
Long shot of the hotel’s main staircase. Dressed in a long robe of Anglo-Nubian
goatskins and wearing a golden crown set with four tall, sharp horns, the
Arch-Vicar is seen majestically descending.
An acolyte holds a large goatskin umbrella over his head and he is
followed by twenty or thirty ecclesiastical dignitaries, ranging in rank from
three-horned Patriarchs to one-horned Presbyters and hornless Postulants. All of them, from the Arch-Vicar downwards,
are conspicuously beardless, sweaty and fat-rumped, and, when any of them
speaks, it is always in a fluting contralto.
The Chief rises from his litter and advances to meet the
incarnation of spiritual authority.
NARRATOR
Church and State,
Greed
and Hate:-
Two
baboon-persons
In one Supreme Gorilla.
The Chief inclines his head respectfully. The Arch-Vicar raises his hands to his tiara,
touches the two anterior horns, then lays his
spiritually charged fingertips on the Chief’s forehead.
‘May you never be impaled upon His horns.’
‘Amen,’ says the Chief; then, straightening himself up and
changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly business-like,
‘Everything O.K. for tonight?’ he asks.
In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and
polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic long accustomed to playing
the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the
Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervision of the
Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of
Familiars and Postulants has travelled from settlement to settlement, making
the yearly census. Every mother of a
monster has been marked down. Heads have
been shaved and the preliminary whippings administered. By this time all the guilty have been
transported to one or other of the three Purification Centres at
Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Re-opening his eyes, he turns to the
ecclesiastics in his train.
‘Go, take the shaven ones,’ he squeaks, ‘take these defiled
vessels, these living testimonies of Belial’s enmity, and lead them to the
place of their shame.’
A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and
out into the crowd of mothers.
‘Hurry, hurry!’
‘In Belial’s name.’
Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their
feet. Their little burdens of deformity
pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move towards the door in a silence
more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.
Medium shot of Polly on the sack of straw. A young Postulant approaches and pulls her
roughly to her feet.
‘Up!’ he shouts in a voice of an angry and malevolent
child. ‘Get up, you spawner of filth!’
And he slaps her across the face. Cringing away from a second blow, Polly
almost runs to rejoin her fellow-victims near the entrance.
Dissolve to a night sky, with stars between thin bars of cloud
and a waning moon already low in the west.
There is a long silence; then we begin to hear the sound of distant
chanting. Gradually it becomes
articulate in the words, ‘Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest,’ repeated
again and again.
NARRATOR
An
inch from the eyes, the ape’s black paw
Eclipses
the stars, the moon, and even
Space
itself. Five stinking fingers
Are
all the World.
The silhouette of a baboon’s hand advances towards the Camera,
grows larger and more menacing, and finally engulfs everything in blackness.
We cut to the interior of the Los Angeles Coliseum. By the smoky and intermittent light of
torches we see the faces of a great congregation. Tier above tier, like massed gargoyles,
spouting the groundless faith, the subhuman excitement, the collective
imbecility which are the products of ceremonial religion – spouting them from
black eye-holes, from quivering nostrils, from parted lips, while the chanting
monotonously continues: ‘Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest.’ Below, in the arena, hundreds of shaven girls
and women, each with her tiny monster in her arms, are kneeling before the
steps of the High Altar. Awe-inspiring
in their chasubles of Anglo-Nubian fur, in their tiaras of gilded horns,
Patriarchs and Archimandrites, Presbyters and Postulants stand in two groups at
the head of the altar steps, chanting antiphonally in a high treble to the
music of bone recorders and a battery of xylophones.
SEMICHORUS I
Glory
to Belial,
SEMICHORUS II
To
Belial in the lowest!
Then, after a pause, the music of the
chant changes and a new phase of the service begins.
SEMICHORUS I
It
is a terrible thing,
SEMICHORUS II
Terrible,
terrible,
SEMICHORUS I
To
fall into the hands,
SEMICHORUS II
The
huge hands and the hairy,
SEMICHORUS I
Into
the hands of the living Evil,
SEMICHORUS II
Hallelujah!
SEMICHORUS I
Into
the hands of the Enemy of man,
SEMICHORUS II
Our
boon-companions;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the Rebel Against the Order of Things –
SEMICHORUS II
And
we have conspired with him against ourselves,
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the great Blowfly who is the Lord of Flies,
SEMICHORUS II
Crawling
in the heart;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the naked Worm that never dies,
SEMICHORUS II
And,
never dying, is the source of our eternal life;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the Prince of the Powers of the Air –
SEMICHORUS II
Spitfire
and Stuka, Beelzebub and Azazel, Hallelujah!
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the Lord of this world;
SEMICHORUS II
And
its defiler;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
the great Lord Moloch,
SEMICHORUS II
Patron
of all nations;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
Mammon our master,
SEMICHORUS II
Omnipresent:
SEMICHORUS I
Of
Lucifer the all-powerful,
SEMICHORUS II
In
Church, in State;
SEMICHORUS I
Of
Belial,
SEMICHORUS II
Transcendent,
SEMICHORUS I
Yet,
oh, how immanent!
ALL TOGETHER
Of
Belial, Belial, Belial, Belial.
As
the chanting dies away, two hornless Postulants descend, seize the nearest of
the shaven women, raise her to her feet and lead her up, dumb with terror, to
where, at the head of the altar steps, the Patriarch of Pasadena stands
whetting the blade of a long butcher’s knife.
The thick-set Mexican mother stands staring at him in fascinated horror,
open-mouthed. Then one of the Postulants
takes the child out of her arms and holds it up before the Patriarch.
Close
shot of a characteristic product of progressive technology – a hare-lipped
Mongolian idiot. Over the shot we hear
the chanting of the Chorus.
SEMICHORUS I
I
show you the sign of Belial’s enmity,
SEMICHORUS II
Foul,
foul;
SEMICHORUS I
I
show you the fruit of Belial’s grace,
SEMICHORUS II
Filth
infused in filth.
SEMICHORUS I
I
show you the penalty for obedience to His Will,
SEMICHORUS II
On
earth as it is in Hell.
SEMICHORUS I
Who
is the breeder of all deformities?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
Who
is the chosen vessel of Unholiness?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
And
the curse that is on our race?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed,
possessed –
SEMICHORUS II
Inwardly,
outwardly:
SEMICHORUS I
Her
incubus an object, her subject a succubus –
SEMICHORUS II
And
both are Belial;
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed by the Blowfly.
SEMICHORUS II
Crawling
and stinging,
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed
by that which irresistibly
SEMICHORUS II
Goads
her, drives her,
SEMICHORUS I
Like
the soiled fitchew,
SEMICHORUS II
Like
the sow in her season,
SEMICHORUS I
Down
a steep place
SEMICHORUS II
Into
filth unutterable;
SEMICHORUS I
Whence,
after much wallowing,
SEMICHORUS II
After
many long draughts of the swill,
SEMICHORUS I
Mother
emerging, nine months later,
SEMICHORUS II
Bears this monstrous mockery of a man.
SEMICHORUS I
How
then shall there be atonement?
SEMICHORUS II
By blood.
SEMICHORUS I
How
shall Belial be propitiated?
SEMICHORUS II
Only by blood.
The Camera moves from the altar to where, tier above tier, the
pale gargoyles stare down in hungry anticipation at the scene below. And suddenly the faces open their black mouths
and start to chant in unison, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence
and an ever greater volume of sound:
‘Blood, blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the
blood …’
We cut back to the altar.
The sound of the mindless, subhuman chanting continues monotonously over
the shot.
The Patriarch hands his whetstone to one of the attendant
Archimandrites, then with his left hand takes the deformed child by the neck
and impales it on his knife. It utters
two or three little bleating cries, and is silent.
The Patriarch turns, allows half a pint of blood to spill out
on the altar, then tosses the tiny corpse into the darkness beyond. The chanting rises in a savage crescendo:
‘Blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood
…’
‘Drive her away!’ cries the Patriarch in a commanding squeak.
In terror the mother turns and hurries down the steps. The two Postulants follow, striking at her
savagely with their consecrated bulls’ pizzles.
The chanting is punctuated by piercing screams. From the congregation comes a noise that is
half commiserating groan, half grunt of satisfaction.
Flushed and a little breathless from so unusually strenuous an exercise, the plump young Postulants seize another woman –
a girl this time, frail and slender almost to the point of childishness. Her face is hidden as they drag her up the
steps. Then one of them steps back a
little and we recognize Polly.
Thumbless, eight-nippled, the child is held up before the
Patriarch.
SEMICHORUS I
Foul,
foul! How shall there be atonement?
SEMICHORUS II
By blood.
SEMICHORUS I
How
shall Belial be propitiated?
This time it is the entire congregation that answers:
‘Only by blood, blood, blood, blood, the blood …’
The Patriarch’s left hand closes about the infant’s neck.
‘No, no, don’t.
Please!’
Polly makes a movement towards him, but is held back by the
Postulants. Very deliberately, while she
sobs, the Patriarch impales the child on his knife, then
tosses the body into the darkness behind the altar.
There is a loud cry. We
cut to a medium close shot of Dr. Poole.
Conspicuous in his front-row seat, he has fainted.
Dissolve to the interior of the Unholy of Unholies. The shrine, which stands at one end of the
arena’s shorter axis, to the side of the high altar, is a small oblong chamber
of adobe brick, with an altar at one end and, at the other, sliding doors,
closed at present, except for a gap at the centre, through which one can see
what is going on in the arena. On a
couch in the centre of the shrine reclines the Arch-Vicar. Not far off a hornless Postulant is frying
pigs’ trotters over a charcoal brazier, and near him a two-horned Archimandrite
is doing his best to revive Dr. Poole, who lies inanimate on a stretcher. Cold water and two or three sharp slaps in
the face at last produce the desired result.
The botanist sighs, opens his eyes, wards off another slap and sits up.
‘Where am I?’ he asks.
‘In the Unholy of Unholies,’ the Archimandrite answers. ‘And there is His Eminence.’
Dr. Poole recognizes the great man and has enough presence of
mind to incline his head respectfully.
‘Bring a stool,’ commands the Arch-Vicar.
The stool is brought.
He beckons to Dr. Poole, who scrambles to his feet, walks a little
unsteadily across the room and sits down.
As he does so a particularly loud shriek makes him turn his head.
Long shot, from his viewpoint, of the High
Altar. The Patriarch is in the
act of tossing yet another little monster into the darkness, while his acolytes
shower blows upon its screaming mother.
Cut back to Dr. Poole, who shudders and covers his face with
his hands. Over the shot we hear the
monotonous chanting of the congregation.
‘Blood, blood, blood.’
‘Horrible!’ says Dr. Poole.
‘Horrible!’
‘And yet there’s blood in your religion too,’ remarks the
Arch-Vicar, smiling ironically: “Washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Isn’t that correct?’
‘Perfectly correct,’ Dr. Poole admits. ‘But we don’t actually do the washing. We only talk about it – or, more often, we
only sing about it, in hymns.’
Dr. Poole averts his eyes.
There is a silence. At this
moment the Postulant approaches with a large platter, which, together with a
couple of bottles, he sets down on a table beside the couch. Spearing one of the trotters with a genuine
twentieth-century forgery of an early Georgian fork, the Arch-Vicar starts to
gnaw.
‘Help yourself,’ he squeaks between
two bites. ‘And here’s some wine,’ he
adds, indicating one of the bottles.
Dr. Poole, who is extremely hungry, obeys with alacrity and
there is another silence, loud with the noise of eating and the chant of the
blood.
‘You don’t believe it, of course,’ says the Arch-Vicar at
last, with his mouth full.
‘But I assure you …’ Dr. Poole protests.
His zeal to conform is excessive, and the other holds up a
plump, pork-greasy hand.
‘Now, now, now! But I’d like you to know that we have good
reasons for believing as we do. Ours, my
dear sir, is a rational and realistic faith.’
There is a pause while he takes a swig from the bottle and helps himself
to another trotter. ‘I take it that
you’re familiar with world history?’
‘Purely as a dilettante,’ Dr. Poole answers modestly. But he thinks he can say that he has read
most of the more obvious books on the subject – Graves’s Rise and Extinction of Russia, for example; Basedow’s Collapse of Western Civilization;
Bright’s inimitable Europe, An Autopsy;
and, though it’s only a novel, that genuinely veracious book, The Last Days of Coney Island by dear old
Percival Pott. ‘You know it, of course?’
The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.
‘I don’t know anything that’s been published after the Thing,’
he answers curtly.
‘But how stupid of me!’ cried Dr. Poole, regretting, as so
often in the past, that gushing loquacity with which he over-compensates a
shyness that, left to itself, would reduce him almost to speechlessness.
‘But I’ve read quite a lot of the stuff that came out before,’
the Arch-Vicar continues. ‘They had some
pretty good libraries here in
‘Like the Church in the Dark Ages,’ says Dr. Poole with
cultured enthusiasm. ‘Civilization has
no better friend than religion. That’s
what my agnostic friends will never …’ Suddenly remembering that the tenets of
that Church were not quite the same as those professed by this, he breaks off
and, to hide his embarrassment, takes a long pull at his bottle.
But fortunately the Arch-Vicar is too much preoccupied with
his own ideas to take offence at this faux
pas or even to notice it.
‘As I read history,’ he says, ‘it’s like this. Man pitting himself against Nature, the Ego
against the Order of Things, Belial (a perfunctory sign of the horns) ‘against
the Other One. For a hundred thousand
years or so the battle’s entirely indecisive.
Then, three centuries ago, almost overnight, the tide starts to run
uninterruptedly in one direction. Have
another of these pigs’ feet, won’t you?’
Dr. Poole helps himself to his second, while the other begins
his third.
‘Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum, man begins to
make headway against the Order of Things.’
The Arch-Vicar pauses for a moment to spit out a piece of
cartilage. ‘With more and more of the
human race falling into line behind him, the Lord of Flies, who is also the
Blowfly in every individual heart, inaugurates His triumphal march across a
world of which He will so soon become the undisputed Master.’
Carried away by his own shrill eloquence and forgetting for a
moment that he is not in the pulpit of
‘It began with machines and the first grain ships from the
Once again the Arch-Vicar utters his shrill laugh.
Dissolve to a shot through a powerful microscope of
spermatozoa frantically struggling to reach their Final End, the vast moon-like
ovum in the top left-hand corner of the slide.
On the soundtrack we hear the tenor voice in the last movement of
Lizst’s Faust Symphony: La femme
éternelle toujours nous élève. La femme
éternelle toujours … Cut to an aerial view of
‘O God,’ he intones in the slightly tremulous voice that is
always considered appropriate to such utterances, ‘we thank Thee for all these
immortal souls.’ Then, changing his
tone, ‘these immortal souls,’ he goes on, ‘lodged in bodies that grow
progressively sicklier, scabbier, scrubbier, year after year, as all the things
foreseen by Belial inevitably come to pass. The overcrowding
of the planet. Five
hundred, eight hundred, sometimes as many as two thousand people to a square
mile of food-producing land – and the land in process of being ruined by bad
farming. Everywhere
erosion, everywhere the leaching out of minerals. And the deserts spreading,
the forests dwindling. Even in
The Arch-Vicar pauses to take another swig from his bottle.
‘And remember this,’ he adds: ‘even without synthetic
glanders, even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His
purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps,
but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world
they lived in. They couldn’t
escape. He had them skewered on both His
horns. If they managed to wiggle off the
horn of total war, they would find themselves impaled on starvation. And if they were starving, they would be
tempted to resort to war. And just in
case they should try to find a peaceful and rational way out of their dilemma,
He had another subtler horn of self-destruction all ready for them. From the very beginning of the industrial
revolution He foresaw that men would be made so overwhelmingly bumptious by the
miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of
reality. And that’s precisely what happened.
These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate
themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature.
Conquerors of Nature, indeed! In
actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and
were about to suffer the consequences.
Just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before
the Thing. Fouling the rivers, killing
off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea,
burning up an ocean of petroleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the
whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress,’ he repeats, ‘Progress! I tell you, that was
too rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind – too
fiendishly ironical! There had to be
Outside Help for that. There had to be the Grace of Belial, which, of course,
is always forthcoming – that is, for anyone who’s prepared to co-operate with
it. And who isn’t?’
‘Who isn’t?’ Dr. Poole repeats with a giggle; for he feels
that he has to make up somehow for his mistake about the Church in the Dark
Ages.
‘Progress and Nationalism – those were the two great ideas he
put into their heads. Progress – the
theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in
one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone
understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what’s going to
happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience,
you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that
Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable
means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and
murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible),
obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Remember that phrase of Karl Marx’s: “Force
is the midwife of Progress”? He might
have added – but, of course, Belial didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag
at that early stage of the proceedings – that Progress is the midwife of
Force. Doubly the midwife, for the act
of technological progress provides people with the instruments of ever more
indiscriminate destruction, while the myth of political and moral progress
serves as the excuse for using those means to the very limit. I tell you, my dear sir, an undevout historian
is mad. The longer you study modern
history, the more evidence you find of Belial’s Guiding Hand.’ The Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns,
refreshes himself with another drink of wine, then continues: ‘And then there
was Nationalism – the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the
only true god, and that all other states are false gods; that all these gods,
true as well as false, have the mentality of juvenile delinquents; and that
every conflict over prestige, power or money is a crusade for the Good, the
True and the Beautiful. The fact that
such theories came, at a given moment of history, to be universally accepted is
the best proof of Belial’s existence, the best proof that at long last He’d won
the battle.’
‘I don’t quite follow,’ says Dr. Poole.
‘But surely it’s obvious.
Here you have two notions. Each
is intrinsically absurd and each leads to courses of action that are
demonstrably fatal. And yet the whole of
civilized humanity decides, almost suddenly, to accept these notions or guides
to conflict. Why? And at Whose suggestion, Whose prompting, Whose inspiration?
There can only be one answer.’
‘You mean, you think it was … it was the Devil?’
‘Who else desires the degradation and destruction of the human
race?’
‘Quite, quite,’ Dr. Poole agrees. ‘But all the same, as a Protestant Christian,
I really can’t …’
‘Is that so?’ says the Arch-Vicar sarcastically. ‘Then you know better than Luther, you know
better than the whole Christian Church.
Are you aware, sir, that from the second century onwards no orthodox
Christian believed that a man could be possessed by God? He could only be possessed by the Devil. And why did people believe that? Because the facts made it
impossible for them to believe otherwise. Belial’s a fact, Moloch’s a fact, diabolic possession’s a fact.’
‘I protest,’ cries Dr. Poole.
‘As a man of science …’
‘As a man of science you’re bound to accept the working
hypothesis that explains the facts most plausibly. Well, what are the facts? The first is a fact of experience and observation
– namely, that nobody wants to suffer, wants to be degraded, wants
to be maimed or killed. The second is a
fact of history – the fact that, at a certain epoch, the overwhelming majority
of human beings accepted beliefs and adopted courses of action that could not
possibly result in anything but universal suffering, general degradation and
wholesale destruction. The only
plausible explanation is that they were inspired or possessed by an alien
consciousness, a consciousness that willed their undoing and willed it more
strongly than they were able to will their own happiness and survival.’
There is a silence.
‘Of course,’ Dr. Poole ventures at last to suggest, ‘those
facts could be accounted for in other ways.’
‘But not so plausibly, not nearly so simply,’ insists the
Arch-Vicar. ‘And then consider all the
other evidence. Take the First World
War, for example. If the people and the
politicians hadn’t been possessed, they’d have listened to Benedict XV or Lord
Lansdowne – they’d have come to terms, they’d have negotiated a peace without
victory. But they couldn’t, they
couldn’t. It was impossible for them to
act in their own self-interest. They had
to do what the Belial in them dictated – and the Belial in them wanted the
Communist Revolution, wanted the Fascist reaction to that revolution, wanted
Mussolini and Hitler and the Politburo, wanted famine, inflation and
depression; wanted armaments as a cure for unemployment; wanted the persecution
of the Jews and the Kulaks; wanted the Nazis and the Communists to divide
Poland and then go to war with one another.
Yes, and He wanted the wholesale revival of slavery in its most brutal
form. He wanted forced migrations and
mass pauperization. He wanted
concentration camps and gas chambers and cremation ovens. He wanted saturation bombing (what a
deliciously juicy phrase!); He wanted the destruction overnight of a century’s
accumulation of wealth and all the potentialities of future prosperity decency,
freedom and culture. Belial wanted all
this, and, being the Great Blowfly in the hearts of the politicians and
generals, the journalists and the Common Man, He was easily able to get the
Pope ignored even by Catholics, to have Lansdowne condemned as a bad patriot,
almost a traitor. And so the war dragged
on for four whole years; and afterwards everything went punctually according to
Plan. The world situation went steadily
from bad to worse, and, as it worsened, men and women became progressively more
docile to the leadings of the Unholy Spirit.
The old beliefs in the value of the individual soul faded away; the old
restraints lost their effectiveness; the old compunctions and compassions
evaporated. Everything that the Other
One had ever put into people’s heads oozed out, and the resulting vacuum was
filled by the lunatic dreams of Progress and Nationalism. Granted the validity of those dreams, it
followed that mere people, living here and now, were
no better than ants and bedbugs and might be treated accordingly. And they were
treated accordingly, they most certainly were!’
The Arch-Vicar chuckles shrilly and helps himself to the last
of the trotters.
‘For his period,’ he continues, ‘old man Hitler was a pretty
good specimen of a demoniac. Not so completely
possessed, of course, as many of the great national leaders in the years
between 1945 and the beginning of the Third World War, but definitely above the
average of his own time. More than
almost any of his contemporaries, he had a right to say, “Not I, but Belial in
me.” The others were possessed only in
spots, only at certain times. Take the
scientists, for example. Good, well-meaning
men, for the most part. But He got hold
of them all the same – got hold of them at the point where they ceased to be
human beings and became specialists. Hence, the glanders and those bombs. And then remember that man – what was his
name? – the one that was President of the
‘
‘That’s it –
‘You say so,’ demurs Dr. Poole. ‘But what’s your proof?’
‘The proof?’ repeats the Arch-Vicar. ‘The whole of subsequent history is the
proof. Look at what happened when the
phrase became a policy and was actually put into practice. Unconditional surrender – how many millions
of new cases of tuberculosis? How many
millions of children forced to be thieves or prostituting themselves for bars
of chocolate? Belial was particularly
pleased about the children. And, again, unconditional surrender – the ruin of
For a few seconds they sit without speaking. The dim, blurred monotone of the chant swells
into audibility. ‘Blood, blood, blood,
the blood …’ There is a faint cry as yet
another little monster is spitted on the Patriarch’s knife, then the thudding
of the bulls’ pizzles on flesh and, through the excited roaring of the
congregation, a succession of loud, scarcely human screams.
‘You’d hardly think He could have produced us without a miracle,’ the Arch-Vicar
thoughtfully continues. But He did, He
did. By purely natural means, using
human beings and their science as His instruments, He created an entirely new
race of men, with deformity in their blood, with squalor all around them, and
ahead, in the future, no prospects but of more squalor, worse deformity and,
finally, complete extinction. Yes, it’s
a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living Evil.’
‘Then why,’ asks Dr. Poole, ‘do you go on worshipping Him?’
‘Why do you throw food to a growling tiger? To buy yourself a breathing
space. To put
off the horror of the inevitable, if only for a few minutes. In earth as it is in Hell – but at least
one’s still on earth.’
‘It hardly seems worthwhile,’ says Dr. Poole in the
philosophical tone of one who has just dined.
Another unusually piercing scream makes him turn his head
towards the door. He watches for a while
in silence. This time, his expression is
one in which horror has been considerably mitigated by scientific curiosity.
‘Getting used to it, eh?’ says the Arch-Vicar genially.
NARRATOR
Conscience,
custom – the first makes cowards,
Makes
saints of us sometimes, makes human beings.
The
other makes Patriots, Papists, Protestants,
Makes
Babbitts, Sadists, Swedes or Slovaks,
Makes
killers of Kulaks, chlorinators of Jews,
Makes
all who mangle, for lofty motives,
Quivering
flesh, without qualm or question
To mar their certainty of Supreme Service.
Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the
Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that
you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply
couldn’t happen – couldn’t happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled
daily to town by the eight-twenty-three.
And then reflect for a moment on a few of the horrors you now take for
granted; the outrages against the most rudimentary human decencies that have
been perpetrated on your behalf (or perhaps by your own hands); the atrocities
you take your little girl to see, twice a week, on the news reel – and she
finds them commonplace and boring.
Twenty years hence, at this rate, your grandchildren will be turning on
their television sets for a look at the gladiatorial games; and when those
begin to pall, there will be the Army’s mass crucifixion of Conscientious
Objectors, or the skinning alive, in full colour, of the seventy thousand
persons suspected, at Tegucigalpa, of un-Honduranean activities.
Meanwhile, in the Unholy of Unholies, Dr. Poole is still
looking out through the crack between the sliding doors. The Arch-Vicar is picking his teeth. There is a comfortable, post-prandial
silence. Suddenly Dr. Poole turns to his
companion.
‘Something’s happening,’ he cries excitedly. ‘They’re leaving their seats.’
‘I’d been expecting that for quite a long time now,’ replies
the Arch-Vicar, without ceasing to pick his teeth. ‘It’s the blood that does it. That and, of course, the whipping.’
‘They’re jumping down into the arena,’ Dr. Poole
continues. ‘They’re running after one
another. What on earth …? Oh, my God! I beg your pardon,’ he hastily
adds. ‘But really, really …’
Much agitated, he walks away from the door.
‘There are limits,’
he says.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ replies the Arch-Vicar. ‘There are no limits. Everybody’s capable of anything – but anything.’
Dr. Poole does not answer.
Drawn irresistibly by a force that is stronger than his will, he has
returned to his old place and is staring out, avidly and in horror, at what is
going on in the arena.
‘It’s monstrous!’ he cries indignantly. ‘It’s utterly revolting.’
The Arch-Vicar rises heavily from his couch and, opening a
little cupboard in the wall, takes out a pair of binoculars, which he hands to
Dr. Poole.
‘Try these,’ he says. ‘Night glasses. Standard Navy equipment from before the Thing. You’ll see everything.’
‘But you don’t imagine …’
‘Not merely do I imagine,’ says the Arch-Vicar, with an
ironically benignant smile; ‘I see with my own eyes. Go ahead, man. Look.
You’ve never seen anything like this in
‘I certainly have not,’ says Dr. Poole in the kind of tone his
Mother might have used.
All the same, he finally raises the binoculars to his eyes.
Long shot from his viewpoint. It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of
pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic
surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough
hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill
laughter.
Cut back to the Arch-Vicar, whose face is puckered into a
grimace of contemptuous distaste.
‘Like cats,’ he says at last.
‘Only cats have the decency not to be gregarious in their courting. And you still have doubts about Belial – even
after this?’
There is a pause.
‘Was this something that happened after … after the Thing?’
Dr. Poole inquires.
‘In two generations.’
‘Two generations!’ Dr. Poole whistles. ‘Nothing recessive about that mutation. And don’t they … well, I mean, don’t they
feel like doing this sort of thing at any other season?’
‘Just for five weeks, that’s all. And we only permit two weeks of actual
mating.’
‘Why?’
The Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns.
‘On general principles. They have to be punished for having been
punished. It’s the Law of Belial. And, I may say, we really let them have it if
they break the rules.’
‘Quite, quite,’ says Dr. Poole, remembering with discomfort
the episode with Loola among the dunes.
‘It’s pretty hard for the ones who throw back to the old-style
mating pattern.’
‘Are there many of those?’
‘Between five and ten per cent of the
population. We call them “Hots.”’
‘And you don’t permit …?’
‘We beat the hell out of them when we catch them.’
‘But that’s monstrous!’
‘Of course it is,’ the Arch-Vicar agrees. ‘But remember your history. If you want social solidarity, you’ve got to
have either an external enemy or an oppressed minority. We have no external enemies, so we have to
make the most of our Hots. They’re what
the Jews were under Hitler, what the bourgeois were under Lenin and Stalin,
what the heretics used to be in Catholic countries and the Papists under the
Protestants. If anything goes wrong,
it’s always the fault of the Hots. I
don’t know what we’d do without them.’
‘But don’t you ever stop to think what they must feel?’
‘Why should I? First of
all, it’s the Law. Condign
punishment for having been punished.
Second, if they’re discreet, they won’t get punished. All they’ve got to do is to avoid having
babies at the wrong season and to disguise the fact that they fall in love and
make permanent connections with persons of the opposite sex. And, if they don’t want to be discreet, they
can always run away?’
‘Run away? Where to?’
‘There’s a little community up north, near
Several seconds pass before Dr. Poole ventures to ask his next
question.
‘You mean, you …?’
‘Precisely,’ says the Arch-Vicar. ‘For the
The noise from the arena swells to a momentary climax.
‘Nauseous!’ squeaks the Arch-Vicar with a sudden
intensification of abhorrence. ‘And this
is nothing to what it will be later on.
How thankful I am that I’ve been preserved from such ignominy! Not they, but the Enemy of Mankind incarnate
in their disgusting bodies. Kindly look over there.’
He draws Dr. Poole towards him; he points a thick forefinger. ‘To the left of the High
Altar – with that little red-headed vessel. That’s the Chief. The Chief!’ he repeats with derisive
emphasis. ‘What sort of a ruler is he going to be during the next two weeks?’
Resisting the temptation to make personal remarks about a man
who, through temporarily in retirement, is destined to return to power, Dr.
Poole utters a nervous little laugh.
‘Yes, he certainly seems to be relaxing from the cares of
State.’
NARRATOR
But why, why does he have to relax with Loola? Vile brute and faithless strumpet! But there is at least one consolation – and
to a shy man, plagued with desires he dares not act upon, a very great
consolation: Loola’s conduct is the proof of an accessibility which, in New
Zealand, in academic circles, in the neighbourhood of his Mother, could only be
furtively dreamed about as something altogether too good to be true. And it is not only Loola who proves herself
accessible. The same thing is being demonstrated,
no less actively, no less vocally, by those mulatto girls, by Flossie, the
plump and honey-coloured Teuton, by that enormous Armenian matron, by the
little tow-headed adolescent with the big blues eyes….
‘Yes, that’s our Chief,’ says the Arch-Vicar bitterly. ‘Until he and the other pigs stop being
possessed, the Church just takes over.’
Incorrigibly cultured, in spite of his overwhelming desire to
be out there with Loola – or almost anyone else, if it comes to that – Dr.
Poole makes an apt remark about the Spiritual Authority and the Temporal Power.
The Arch-Vicar ignores it.
‘Well,’ he says briskly, ‘it’s time I got down to business.’
He calls a Postulant, who hands him a tallow dip, then crosses
over to the altar at the east end of the shrine. Upon it stands a single candle of yellow
beeswax, three or four feet high and disproportionately thick. The Arch-Vicar genuflects, lights the candle,
makes the sign of the horns, then comes back to where Dr. Poole is staring out,
wide-eyed with fascinated horror and shocked concupiscence, at the spectacle in
the arena.
‘Stand aside, please.’
Dr. Poole obeys.
A Postulant slides back first one door, then the other. The Arch-Vicar steps forward and stands in the
centre of the opening, touching the gilded horns of his tiara. From the musicians on the steps of the High
Altar comes a shrill screeching of the thigh-bone recorders. The noises of the crowd die away into a
silence that is only occasionally punctuated by the bestial utterance of some
joy or anguish too savagely violent to be repressed. Antiphonally, the priests begin to chant.
SEMICHORUS I
This
is the time,
SEMICHORUS II
For
Belial is merciless,
SEMICHORUS I
Time
for Time’s ending.
SEMICHORUS II
In the chaos of lust.
SEMICHORUS I
This
is the time,
SEMICHORUS II
For
Belial is in your blood,
SEMICHORUS I
Time
for the birth in you
SEMICHORUS II
Of
the Others, the Aliens,
SEMICHORUS I
Of
Itch, of Tetter,
SEMICHORUS II
Of tumid Worm.
SEMICHORUS I
This
is the time,
SEMICHORUS II
For
Belial hates you,
SEMICHORUS I
Time
for the Soul’s death,
SEMICHORUS II
For
the Person to perish,
SEMICHORUS I
Sentenced
by craving,
SEMICHORUS II
And
pleasure is the hangman;
SEMICHORUS I
Time
for the Enemy’s
SEMICHORUS II
Total
triumph,
SEMICHORUS I
For
the Baboon to be master,
SEMICHORUS II
That monsters may be begotten.
SEMICHORUS I
Not
your will, but His,
SEMICHORUS II
That you may all be lost forever.
From the crowd rises a loud, unanimous ‘Amen.’
‘His curse be on you,’ the Arch-Vicar
intones in his high-pitched voice, then moves back to the end of the shrine and
mounts the throne that stands next to the altar. From outside we hear a confused shouting that
grows louder and louder, and suddenly the shrine is invaded by a throng of
corybantic worshippers. They rush to the
altar, they tear off one another’s aprons and fling
them in a mounting pile at the foot of the Arch-Vicar’s throne. NO, NO, NO – and for each NO there is a
triumphant shout of ‘Yes,’ followed by an unequivocal gesture towards the
nearest person of the opposite sex. In
the distance the priests are monotonously chanting, ‘Not your will, but His,
that you may all be lost forever’ – again and again.
Close shot of Dr. Poole as he watches the proceedings from a
corner of the oratory.
Cut back to the crowd; face after mindless, ecstatic face
enters the field of view and passes out again.
And there, suddenly, is Loola’s face – the eyes shining, the lips
parted, the dimples wildly alive. She turns her head,
she catches sight of Dr. Poole.
‘Alfie!’ she cries.
Her tone and expression evoke an equally rapturous response.
‘Loola!’
They rush together in a passionate embrace. Seconds pass.
Vaseline-like, the strains of the Good Friday music from Parsifal make themselves heard on the
soundtrack.
Then the faces come unstuck, the Camera pulls back.
‘Quick, quick!’
Loola seizes his arm and drags him towards the altar.
‘The apron,’ she says.
Dr. Poole looks down at the apron, then, blushing as red as
the NO embroidered upon it, averts his eyes.
‘It seems so … so indecorous,’ he says.
He stretches out his hand, withdraws it, then
changes his mind yet again. Taking a
corner of the apron between his thumb and forefinger, he gives it a couple of
feebly ineffective tweaks.
‘Harder,’ she cries, ‘much harder!’
With an almost frantic violence – for it is not only the apron
that he is tearing away, it is also his Mother’s influence and all his
inhibitions, all the conventions in which he has been brought up – Dr. Poole
does as he is told. The stitching yields
more easily than he had anticipated and he almost falls over backwards. Recovering his balance, he stands there,
looking in sheepish embarrassment from the little diaper that represents the
Seventh Commandment into Loola’s laughing face and then down again at the
crimson prohibition. Cut back and forth:
NO, dimples, NO, dimples, NO …
‘Yes!’ shouts Loola triumphantly. ‘Yes!’
Snatching the apron out of his hand, she throws it down at the
foot of the throne. Then, with a ‘Yes’
and another ‘Yes,’ she rips the patches from her chest and, turning to the
altar, makes her reverence to the Candle.
Medium close shot from the back of Loola genuflecting. All at once an elderly man with a grey beard
rushes excitedly into the shot, tears the twin NO’s off the seat of her
homespun pants and starts to drag her towards the door of the shrine.
Giving him a slap in the face and a vigorous push, Loola
breaks away and for the second time throws herself into Dr. Poole’s arms.
‘Yes?’ she whispers.
And emphatically he answers ‘Yes!’
They kiss, smile rapturously at one another, then move in the direction of the darkness beyond the
sliding doors. As they pass the throne,
the Arch-Vicar leans down and, smiling ironically, taps
Dr. Poole on the shoulder.
‘What about my field glasses?’ he says.
Dissolve to a night scene of ink-black shadows and expanses of
moonlight. In the background stands the
mouldering pile of the
NARRATOR
Consider the birds.
What a delicacy in their love-making. What old-world chivalry! For although the hormones
produces within the body of the breeding hen predispose her to sexual emotion,
their effect is neither so intense nor of so brief a duration as that of the
ovarian hormones in the blood of female mammals during oestrus. Moreover, for obvious reasons, the cock bird
is in no position to enforce his desires upon an unwilling hen. Hence the prevalence among
male birds of bright plumage and of an instinct for courtship. And hence the conspicuous absence of these charming things among male mammals. For where, as in the mammals, the female’s
amorous desires and her attractiveness to the male sex are wholly determined by
chemical means, what need is there of masculine beauty or the niceties of
preliminary courtship?
Among humans every day of the year is potentially the mating
season. Girls are not chemically
predestined, during a few days, to accept the advances of the first male who
presents himself. Their bodies
manufacture hormones in doses sufficiently small to leave even the most
temperamental of them a certain freedom of choice. That is why, unlike his fellow-mammals, man
has always been a wooer. But now the
gamma-rays have changed all that. The
hereditary patterns of man’s physical and mental behaviour
has been given another form.
Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become
seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus, and the female’s
chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love
itself.
At this moment a radiant Loola and a considerably dishevelled
Dr. Poole emerge from the shadows. A
burly male, temporarily unattached, comes striding into the shot. At the sight of Loola he stops. His mouth falls open, his eyes widen, he breathes heavily.
Dr. Poole gives the stranger one look, then
turns nervously to his companion.
‘I think perhaps it might be a good thing if we walked this
way …’
Without a word the stranger rushes at him, gives him a push
that sends him flying and takes Loola in his arms. She resists for a moment; then the chemicals
in her blood impose their Categorical Imperative, and she ceases to struggle.
Making a noise like a tiger at feeding time, the stranger lifts
her off her feet and carries her into the shadows.
Dr. Poole, who has had time to pick himself up, makes as
though to follow, to wreak vengeance, to rescue the distressed victim. Then a combination of apprehension and
modesty causes him to slacken his pace.
If he advances, heaven knows what he may find himself intruding
upon. And then that man, that hairy hulk
of bone and muscle … On the whole it might perhaps be wiser … He comes to a
halt and stands hesitant, not knowing what to do. Suddenly two beautiful young mulatto girls
come running out of the
‘You great big beautiful bastard,’ they whisper in husky
unison.
For a moment Dr. Poole hesitates between the inhibitory
recollection of his Mother, the fidelity to Loola prescribed by all the poets
and novelists, and the warm, elastic Facts of Life. After about four seconds of moral conflict,
he chooses, as we might expect, the Facts of Life. He smiles, he returns the kisses, he murmurs
words which would startle Miss Hook and almost kill his Mother to hear, he
encircles either body with an arm, caresses either bosom with hands that have
never done anything of the kind except in unavowable imaginings. The noises of mating swell to a brief climax, then diminish.
For a little while there is complete silence.
Accompanied by a strain of Archimandrites,
Familiars, Presbyters and Postulants, the Arch-Vicar and the Patriarch of
Pasadena come pacing majestically into the shot. At the sight of Dr. Poole and the mulattoes
they come to a halt. Making a grimace of
disgusted abhorrence, the Patriarch spits on the ground. More tolerant, the Arch-Vicar only smiles
ironically.
‘Dr. Poole!’ he flutes in his odd falsetto.
Guiltily, as though he had heard his Mother calling, Dr. Poole
drops those busy hands of his and, turning towards the Arch-Vicar, tries to
assume an expression of airy innocence.
‘These girls,’ his smile is meant to imply, ‘who are these girls? Why, I
don’t even know their names. We were
just having a little chat about the higher Cryptogams, that’s all.’
‘You great big beautiful …’ begins a husky voice.
Dr. Poole coughs loudly and fends off the embrace that
accompanies the words.
‘Don’t mind us,’ says the Arch-Vicar pleasantly. ‘After all, Belial Day comes but once a
year.’
Approaching, he touches the gilded horns of his tiara, then lays his hands on Dr. Poole’s head.
‘Yours,’ he says with a suddenly professional unctuousness,
‘has been an almost miraculously sudden conversion. Yes, almost miraculously.’ Then, changing his tone, ‘By the way,’ he
adds, ‘we’ve had a bit of trouble with your friends from
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘But they’re not going to find you,’ says the Arch-Vicar
genially. ‘One of our Inquisitors went out with a posse of Familiars to deal
with them.’
‘What happened?’ Dr. Poole anxiously inquires.
‘Our men laid an ambush, let fly with arrows. One was killed, and the others made off with
the wounded. I don’t think we shall be
bothered again. But
just to make certain …’ He beckons to two of his attendants. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘There isn’t going to be a rescue and there
isn’t going to be an escape. I make you
responsible, do you understand?’
The two Postulants bow their heads.
‘And now,’ says the Arch-Vicar, turning back to Dr. Poole,
‘we’ll leave you to beget all the little monsters you can.’
He winks, pats Dr. Poole on the
cheek, then takes the Patriarch’s arm and, followed by his retinue, moves away.
Dr. Poole stares after the retreating figures, then glances uneasily at the two Postulants who have been
appointed to guard him.
Brown arms are thrown around his neck.
‘You great big beautiful …’
‘No, really. Not in public. Not with those men around!’
‘What difference does that make?’
And before he has time to answer, husky, musky, dusky, the
Facts of Life close in on him again, and in a complicated embrace, like some
half reluctant, half blissfully consenting Laocoon, he is ravished away into
the shadows. With an expression of
disgust, the two Postulants simultaneously spit.
NARRATOR
L’ombre
était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle
He
is interrupted by a burst of frenzied caterwauling.
NARRATOR
When
I look into the fishponds in my garden,
(And not mine only, for every garden is riddled
With
eel-holes and reflected moons), methinks
I
see a Thing armed with a rake that seems,
Out of the ooze, out of the immanence
Among
the eels of heaven, to strike at me –
At Me, the holy, Me divine! And yet
How tedious is a guilty conscience! How
Tedious,
for that matter, an unguilty one!
What
wonder if the horror of the fishponds
Draws
us towards the rake? And the Thing
strikes,
And
I, the uneasy Person, in the mud,
Or
in the liquid moonlight, thankfully
Find
others than myself to have that blind
Or radiant being.
Dissolve to a medium shot of Dr. Poole asleep on the drifted
sand at the foot of a towering wall of concrete. Twenty feet away one of his guards is also
sleeping. The other is absorbed in an
ancient copy of Forever Amber. The sun is already
high in the heavens and a close shot reveals a small green lizard crawling over
one of Dr. Poole’s outstretched hands.
He does not stir, but lies as though dead.
NARRATOR
And this, too, is the beatific being of somebody who most
certainly isn’t Alfred Poole, D.Sc. For
sleep is one of the preconditions of the Incarnation, the primary instrument of
divine immanence. Sleeping, we cease to
live that we may be lived (how blessedly!) by some nameless Other
who takes this opportunity to restore the mind to sanity and bring healing to
the abused and self-tormented body.
From breakfast to bedtime you may be doing everything in your
power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary
of his tricks and has to sleep. And,
while he sleeps, the indwelling Compassion preserves him, willy-nilly, from the
suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to
commit. Then the sun rises again, and
our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will
– to yet another day of trick-playing or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of
self-knowledge, to the first steps towards his liberation.
A peal of excited feminine laughter cuts short the Narrator’s
speech. The sleeper stirs and, at a
second, louder outburst, starts into full wakefulness and sits up, looking
around him in bewilderment, not knowing where he is. Again that laughter. He turns his head in the direction of the
sound. In a long shot from his viewpoint
we see his two brown-skinned friends of the previous night emerging at full
speed from behind a sand dune and darting into the ruins of the
The sleeping Postulant wakes up and turns to his companion.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
‘The usual thing,’ the other answers,
without looking up from Forever Amber.
As he speaks, shrill screams reverberate through the cavernous
halls of the Museum. The Postulants look
at one another in silence, then simultaneously spit.
Cut back to Dr. Poole.
‘My God!’ he says aloud.
‘My God!’
He covers his face with his hands.
NARRATOR
Into the satiety of this morning-after let loose a rodent
conscience and the principles learned at a Mother’s knee – or not infrequently
across it (head downwards and with shirt tails well tucked up), in condign
spankings, sadly and prayerfully administered, but remembered, ironically
enough, as the pretext and accompaniment of innumerable erotic daydreams, each
duly followed by its remorse, and each remorse bringing with it the idea of
punishment and all its attendant sensualities.
And so on, indefinitely. Well, as
I say, let those loose into this, and the result may easily be a religious
conversion. But a
conversion to what? Most ignorant
of what he is most assured, our poor friend doesn’t know. And here comes almost the last person he
would expect to help him to discover.
As the Narrator speaks this last sentence, Loola enters the
shot.
‘Alfie!’ she cries happily.
‘I was looking for you.’
Cut briefly to the two Postulants, who look at her for a
moment with all the distaste of enforced continence, then turn away and
expectorate.
Meanwhile, after one brief glance at those ‘lineaments of
satisfied desire,’ Dr. Poole guiltily averts his eyes.
‘Good morning,’ he says in a tone of formal politeness. ‘I hope you … you slept well?’
Loola sits down beside him, opens the leather bag which she
carries slung over her shoulder and extracts half a loaf of bread and five or
six large oranges.
‘Nobody can think of doing much cooking these days,’ she
explains. ‘It’s just one long picnic
until the cold season begins again.’
‘Quite, quite,’ says Dr. Poole.
‘You must be awfully hungry,’ she goes on. ‘After last night.’
Her dimples come out of hiding as she smiles at him.
Hot and blushing with embarrassment, Dr. Poole hastily tries
to change the subject of conversation.
‘Those are beautiful oranges,’ he remarks. ‘In
‘There!’ says Loola, interrupting him.
She hands him a thick hunk of bread, breaks off another for
herself and bites into it with strong white teeth.
‘It’s good,’ she says with her mouth full. ‘Why don’t you eat?’
Dr. Poole, who realizes that, in effect, he is ravenously
hungry, but who is unwilling, for the sake of decorum, to admit the fact too
openly, nibbles daintily at his crust.
Loola snuggles against him and leans her head on his shoulder.
‘It was fun, Alfie, wasn’t it?’ She takes another bite of bread, and without waiting
for him to answer continues: ‘More fun with you than with any of the
others. Did you think that too?’
She looks up at him tenderly.
Close shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole’s expression of
agonizing moral discomfort.
‘Alfie!’ she cries, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘Perhaps it would be better,’ he manages at last to say, ‘if
we talked about something else.’
Loola straightens herself up and looks at him for a few
seconds intently and in silence.
‘You think too much,’ she says at last. ‘You mustn’t think. If you think, it stops being fun.’ The light suddenly goes out of her face. ‘If you think,’ she goes on in a low voice,
‘it’s terrible, terrible. It’s a
terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living Evil. When I remember what they did to Polly and
her baby …’
She shudders, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.
NARRATOR
Those tears again, those symptoms of personality – the sight
of them evokes a sympathy that is stronger than the sense of guilt.
Forgetting the Postulants, Dr. Poole draws Loola towards him
and with whispered words, with the caresses one uses to quiet a crying child,
tries to comfort her. He is so
successful that, in a minute or two, she is lying quite still in the crook of
his arm. Sighing happily, she opens her
eyes, looks up at him and smiles with an expression of tenderness, to which the
dimples add a ravishingly incongruous hint of mischief.
‘That is what I’ve always dreamed of.’
‘Is it?’
‘But it never happened – it never could happen. Not till you came….’ She strokes his cheek. ‘I wish your beard didn’t have to grow,’ she
adds. ‘You’ll look like the other
fellows then. But you aren’t like them,
you’re quite different.’
‘Not so different as all that,’ says
Dr. Poole.
He bends down and kisses her on the eyelids, on the throat, on
the mouth – then draws back and looks down at her with an expression of
triumphant masculinity.
‘Not different in that
way,’ she qualifies. ‘But different in this way.’ She pats his cheek again. ‘You and I sitting together
and talking about being happy because you’re you and I’m me. It doesn’t happen here. Except … except …’ She
breaks off. Her face darkens. ‘Do you know what happens to people who are
Hots?’ she whispers.
This time it is Dr. Poole’s turn to protest against thinking
too much. He backs up his words with
action.
Close shot of the embrace.
Then cut to the two Postulants, staring disgustedly at the
spectacle. As they spit, another
Postulant enters the shot.
‘Orders from His Eminence,’ he says, making the sign of the
horns. ‘This assignment’s over. You’re to report back to Headquarters.’
Dissolve to the
‘Morphine,’ he says to his orderly. ‘Then we’ll get her down to the surgery as
quick as we can….’
Meanwhile there has been a shouting of orders and suddenly we
hear the noise of the donkey engine and the clanking of the anchor chain as it is
wound round the capstan.
Ethel Hook opens her eyes and look around her. An expression of distress appears on her pale
face.
‘You’re not going to sail away and leave him?’ she says. ‘But you can’t, you can’t!’ She makes an effort to raise herself from the
stretcher; but the movement causes so much pain that she falls back again, with
a groan.
‘Quiet, quiet,’ says the doctor soothingly, as he swabs her
arm with alcohol.
‘But he may still be alive,’ she feebly protests. ‘They can’t desert him; they can’t just wash
their hands of him.’
‘Hold still,’ says the doctor, and, taking the syringe from
his orderly, he drives the needle into the flesh.
The clanking of the anchor chain rises to a crescendo as we
dissolve to Loola and Dr. Poole.
‘I’m hungry,’ says Loola, sitting up.
Reaching for her knapsack, she takes out what is left of the
bread, breaks it in two, hands the larger fragment to Dr. Poole and sinks her
teeth into the other. She finishes her
mouthful and is about to start on another, when she changes her mind. Turning to her companion, she takes his hand
and kisses it.
‘What’s that for?’ he asks.
Loola shrugs her shoulders.
‘I don’t know. I just
suddenly felt like that.’ She eats some
more bread, then, after a ruminative silence, turns to him with the air of one
who has just made an important and unexpected discovery.
‘Alfie,’ she announces, ‘I believe I shall never want to say
Yes to anyone except you.’
Greatly moved, Dr. Poole leans forward, and takes her hand and
presses it to his heart.
‘I feel I’ve only just discovered what life’s all about,’ he
says.
‘Me too.’
She leans against him, and like a miser irresistibly drawn to
count his treasure once more, Dr. Poole runs his fingers through her hair,
separating lock from thick lock, lifting a curl and letting it fall back
noiselessly into its place.
NARRATOR
And so, by the dialectic of sentiment, these two have
rediscovered for themselves that synthesis of the chemical and the personal to
which we give the names of monogamy and romantic love. In her case it was the hormone that excluded
the person; in his, the person that could not come to terms with the
hormone. But now there is the beginning
of a larger wholeness.
Dr. Poole reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little volume
which he rescued yesterday from the furnace.
He opens it, turns the pages and begins to read aloud:
‘Warm
fragrance seems to fall from her light dress
And
her loose hair; and where some heavy trees
The
air of her own speed has disentwined,
The
sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And
in the soul a wild odour is felt
Beyond
the sense, like fiery dews that melt
Into the bosom of a frozen bud.’
‘What’s that?’ Loola asks.
‘You!’ He bends down and kisses her hair. ‘“And in the soul,”’ he whispers, ‘“a wild
odour is felt beyond the sense.”’ ‘In
the soul,’ he repeats.
‘What’s the soul?’ Loola asks.
‘Well …’ He hesitates; then, deciding to let Shelley give the
answer, he resumes his reading:
‘See
where she stands, a mortal shape indued
With
love and life and light and deity,
And
motion which may change, but never die,
An
imagine of some bright Eternity,
A
shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving
the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection
of the eternal Moon of Love …’
‘But I don’t understand a word of it,’ Loola complains.
‘And until today,’ says Dr. Poole, smiling down at her, ‘until
today, neither did I.’
We dissolve to the exterior of the Unholy of Unholies, two
weeks later. Several hundreds of bearded
men and slatternly women are queued up, in double life, awaiting their turn to
enter the shrine. The Camera passes down
the long line of dull and dirty faces, then holds on
Loola and Dr. Poole, who are in the act of passing through the sliding doors.
Within, all is gloom and silence. Two by two the nymphs and prancing satyrs of
a few short days ago shuffle despondently past an altar, whose mighty candle is
now eclipsed by a tin extinguisher. At
the foot of the Arch-Vicar’s empty throne lies the heap of discarded Seventh
Commandments. As the
procession slowly passes, the Archimandrite in charge of Public Morals hands
out to every male an apron and to every female an apron and four round patches.
‘Out through the side door,’ he repeats to each recipient.
And out through the side door, when their turn comes, Loola
and Dr. Poole duly go. There, in the
sunshine, a score of Postulants are busily at work, with thread and needle,
stitching aprons to waistbands, patches to trouser seats and shirt fronts.
The Camera holds on Loola.
Three young seminarists in Toggenberg cassocks
accost her as she emerges into the open air.
She hands her apron to the first, a patch to each of the
others. All three set to work
simultaneously and with extraordinary rapidity. NO, NO and NO.
‘Turn around, please.’
Handing over her last patches, she obeys; and while the apron
specialist moves away to attend to Dr. Poole, the others ply their needles so
diligently that, in half a minute, she is no less forbidding from behind than
when seen in front.
‘There!’
‘And there!’
The two clerical tailors step aside and reveal a close shot of
their handiwork. NO
NO. Cut back to the Postulants, who
express their sentiments by spitting in unison, then turn towards the door of
the shrine.
‘Next lady, please.’
Wearing a look of extreme dejection, the two inseparable
mulatto girls step forward together.
Cut to Dr. Poole.
Aproned, and bearded with a fortnight’s growth of hair, he walks over to
where Loola is waiting for him.
‘This way, please,’ says a shrill voice.
In silence they take their places at the end of yet another
queue. Resignedly, two or three hundred
persons are waiting to be assigned their tasks by the Grand Inquisitor’s Chief
Assistant in charge of Public Works.
Three-horned and robed impressively in a white Saanen soutane, the great
man is sitting with a couple of two-horned Familiars at a large table, on which
stand several steel filing-cabinets salvaged from the offices of the
Providential Life Insurance Company.
A series of montage shots exhibits, in twenty seconds, the
slow, hour-long advance of Loola and Dr. Poole towards the wellspring of
Authority. And now at last they have
reached their destination. Close shot of
the Grand Inquisitor’s Special Assistant as he tells Dr. Poole to report to the
Director of Food Production at his office in the ruins of the
‘Up to four labourers,’ the prelate repeats. ‘Though at ordinary times …’
Unauthorized, Loola breaks into the
conversation.
‘Oh, let me be one of the labourers,’ she begs. ‘Please.’
The Grand Inquisitor’s Special Assistant gives her a long
withering look, then turns to his Familiars.
‘And who, pray, is this young vessel of the Unholy Spirit?’ he
asks.
One of the Familiars extracts Loola’s card from the file and
provides the relevant information. Aged
eighteen and hitherto sterile, the vessel in question is reported to have
associated during one off-season with a notorious Hot, who was later liquidated
while trying to resist arrest. Nothing,
however, was ever proved against the said vessel and its conduct has been
generally satisfactory. Said vessel has
been employed, for the past year, as a miner of cemeteries and is to be
similarly employed during the coming season.
‘But I want to work with Alfie,’ she protests.
‘You seem to forget,’ says the First Familiar, ‘that this is a
Democracy …’
‘A Democracy,’ adds his colleague, ‘in which every proletarian
enjoys perfect freedom.’
‘True
freedom.’
‘Freely doing the will of the Proletariat.’
‘And vox proletariatus,
vox Diaboli.’
‘While, of course, vox Diaboli, vox Ecclesiae.’
‘And so here are the Church’s representatives.’
‘So you see.’
‘But I’m tired of cemeteries,’ the girl insists. ‘I’d like to dig up live things for a
change.’
There is a brief silence.
Then the Grand Inquisitor’s Special Assistant bends down and, from under
his chair, produces a very large consecrated bull’s pizzle, which he lays on
the table before him. Then he turns to
his subordinates.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he says. ‘But my impression is that any vessel
rejecting proletarian liberty is liable to twenty-five lashes for each and
every such offence.’
There is another silence.
Pale and wide-eyed, Loola stares at the instrument of torture, then
looks away, makes an effort to speak, finds herself voiceless and, swallowing
hard, tries again.
‘I won’t resist,’ she manages to bring out. ‘I really want
to be free.’
‘Free to go on mining cemeteries?’
She nods affirmatively.
‘There’s a good vessel!’ says the Special Assistant.
Loola turns to Dr. Poole, and for a few seconds they look into
one another’s eyes without speaking.
‘Goodbye, Alfie,’ she whispers at last.
‘Goodbye, Loola.’
Two more seconds pass; then she drops her eyes and walks away.
‘And now,’ says the Special Assistant to Dr. Poole, ‘we can
get back to business. At ordinary times,
as I was saying, you would be expected to make use of not more than two
labourers. Do I make myself clear?’
Dr. Poole inclines his head.
We dissolve to a laboratory in which the sophomores of the
The door opens and Dr. Poole enters, followed by the Director
of Food Production, an elderly, grey-bearded man wearing homespun trousers, the
standard apron and a cut-away coat that must have once belonged to the English
butler of some twentieth-century motion-picture executive.
‘A little messy, I’m afraid,’ says the Director
apologetically. ‘But I’ll have the bones
cleared out this afternoon and tomorrow the charvessels can dust off the tables
and wash the floors.’
‘Quite,’ says Dr. Poole, ‘quite.’
Dissolve to the same room a week later. The skeletons have been removed and, thanks
to the charvessels, the floors, walls and furniture are almost clean. Dr. Poole has three distinguished visitors.
Wearing his four horns and the brown, Anglo-Nubian habit of the Society of
Moloch, the Arch-Vicar is seated beside the Chief, who is dressed in the
much-bemedalled uniform of a Rear-Admiral of the United States Navy, recently
disinterred from Forest Lawn. At a
respectful distance behind and to one side of the two Heads of Church and State
sits the Director of Food Production, still disguised as a butler. Facing them, in the posture of a French
Academician preparing to read his latest production to some choice and
privileged audience, sits Dr. Poole.
‘Shall I begin?’ he asks.
The Heads of Church and State exchange glances; then turn to
Dr. Poole and simultaneously nod their assent.
He opens his notebook and adjusts his spectacles.
‘Notes on Soil Erosion and Plant Pathology in
As he reads, we dissolve to a slope among the foothills of the
Over the shot we hear the sonorous drone of Dr. Poole’s voice:
‘In true symbiosis,’ he is saying, ‘there is a mutually
beneficial relationship between two associated organisms. The distinguishing mark of parasitism, on the
other hand, is that one organism lives at the expense of another. In the end this one-sided relationship proves
fatal to both parties; for the death of the host cannot but result in the death
of the parasite by which it has been killed.
The relationship between modern man and the planet, of which, until so
recently, he regarded himself as the master, has been that, not of symbiotic
partners, but of tapeworm and infested dog, of fungus and blighted potato.’
Cut back to the Chief.
Within its nest of curly black beard the red-lipped mouth has opened
into an enormous yawn. Over the shot Dr.
Poole reads on:
‘Ignoring the obvious fact that his devastation of natural
resources would, in the long run, result in the ruin of his civilization and
even in the extinction of his species, modern man continued, generation after
generation, to exploit the earth in such a way that …’
‘Couldn’t you make it a bit snappier?’ asks the Chief.
Dr. Poole begins by looking offended. Then he remembers that he is a condemned
captive on probation among savages, and forces a nervous smile.
‘Perhaps it might be best,’ he says, ‘if we passed without
more ado to the section on Plant Pathology.’
‘I don’t care,’ says the Chief, ‘so long as you make it
snappy.
‘Impatience,’ pipes the Arch-Vicar sententiously, ‘is one of
Belial’s favourite vices.’
Dr. Poole, meanwhile, has turned over three or four pages and
is ready to start again.
‘Given the existing state of the soil, yield per acre would be
abnormally low, even if the principal food plants were completely healthy. But they are not healthy. After viewing crops in the field, after
inspecting grains, fruits and tubers in storage, after examining botanical
specimens under an almost undamaged pre-Thing microscope, I feel certain that
there is only one explanation for the number and variety of plant diseases now
rampant in the area – namely, deliberate infection of the crops by means of
fungus bombs, bacteria-bearing aerosols and the release of many species of
virus-carrying aphides and other insects.
Otherwise, how account for the prevalence and extensive virulence of Giberalla Saubinetti and Puccinia graminis? Of Phytophthora infestans and Synchitrium
endobioticum? Of all the mosaic diseases due to viruses? Of Bacillus
amylovorus, Bacillus carotovorus,
Pseudomonas citri, Pseudomonas tumefaciens, Bacterium ...’
Cutting short his recitation almost before it has begun, the Arch-Vicar interrupts him.
‘And you still maintain,’ he says, ‘that
these people weren’t possessed by Belial!’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s
incredible how prejudice can blind even the most intelligent, the most highly
educated …’
‘Yes, yes, we all know that,’ says the Chief impatiently. ‘But now let’s cut all the cackle and get
down to practical business. What can you
do about all this?’
Dr. Poole clears his throat.
‘The task,’ he says impressively, ‘will be long-drawn and
extremely arduous.’
‘But I want more food now,’
says the Chief imperiously. ‘I’ve got to
have it this very year.’
Somewhat apprehensively Dr. Poole is forced to tell him that
disease-resisting varieties of plants cannot be bred and tested in under ten or
twelve years. And meanwhile there is the
question of the land; the erosion is destroying the land, erosion must be
checked at all costs. But the labour of
terracing and draining and composting is enormous and must go on unremittingly,
year after year. Even in the old days,
when manpower and machinery were plentiful, people had failed to do what was
necessary to preserve the fertility of the soil.
‘It wasn’t because they couldn’t,’ puts in the
Arch-Vicar. ‘It was because they didn’t
want to. Between World War II and World
War III they had all the time and all the equipment they needed. But they preferred to amuse themselves with
power politics; and what were the consequences?’ He counts off the answers on his thick fingers. ‘Worse malnutrition for
more people. More
political unrest, resulting in more aggressive nationalism and imperialism. And finally the Thing. And why did they choose to destroy
themselves? Because that was what Belial
wanted them to do, because He had taken possession….’
The Chief holds up his hand.
‘Please, please,’ he protests.
‘This isn’t a course in Apologetics or Natural Diabology. We’re trying to do something.’
‘And unfortunately the doing will take a long time,’ says Dr.
Poole.
‘How long?’
‘Well, in five years you might find yourself holding your own
against erosion. In ten years there’d be
a perceptible improvement. In twenty
years, some of your land might be back to as much as seventy percent of its
original fertility. In fifty years …’
‘In fifty years,’ puts in the Arch-Vicar, ‘the deformity rate
will be double what it is at present.
And in a hundred years the triumph of Belial will be complete. But complete!’ he repeats with a child-like
giggle. He makes the sign of the horns
and gets up from his chair. ‘But
meanwhile I’m all for this gentleman doing everything he can.’
Dissolve to the
Medium close shot of the statue of Hedda
Boddy. The Camera drops from the
figure to the pedestal and the description:
‘… affectionately known as Public Sweetheart Number One. “Hitch your wagon to a Star.”’
Over the shot we hear the sound of a spade being thrust into
the ground, then the rattle of sand and gravel as the
earth is tossed aside.
The Camera pulls back, and we see Loola standing in a
three-foot hole, wearily digging.
The sound of footsteps makes her look up. Flossie, the plump girl of the earlier sequence,
enters the shot.
‘Getting on all right?’ she asks.
Loola nods without speaking and wipes her forehead with the
back of her hand.
‘When you hit the pay dirt,’ the plump girl goes on, ‘come and
report to us.’
‘It’ll take at least an hour more,’ says Loola gloomily.
‘Well, keep at it, kid,’ says Flossie in the maddeningly
hearty tones of a person delivering a pep talk.
‘Put your back into it. Prove to
them that a vessel can do as much as a man!
If you work well,’ she goes on encouragingly, ‘maybe the Superintendent
will let you keep the Nylons. Look at
the pair I got this morning!’
She pulls the coveted trophies from her pocket. Except for a greenish discoloration around
the toes, the stockings are in perfect condition.
‘Oh!’ cries Loola in envious admiration.
‘But we didn’t have any luck with the jewellery,’ says
Flossie, as she puts the stockings away again.
‘Just the wedding ring and a rotten little bracelet. Let’s hope this one won’t let us down.’
She pats the Parian stomach of Public Sweetheart Number One.
‘Well, I must get back,’ she continues. ‘We’re digging for the vessel who’s buried
under that red stone cross – you know, the big one, near the north gate.’
Loola nods.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I make a strike,’ she says.
Whistling the tune of ‘When I survey the Wondrous Horns,’ the
plump girls walks out of the shot. Loola sighs, and resumes her digging.
Very softly, a voice pronounces her name.
She starts violently and turns in the direction from which the
sound has come.
Medium shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole advancing
cautiously from behind the tomb of Rudolph Valentino.
Cut back to Loola.
She flushes, then turns deathly pale. Her hand goes to her heart.
‘Alfie,’ she whispers.
He enters the shot, jumps into the grave beside her and,
without a word, takes her in his arms. The kiss is passionate. Then she hides her face against his shoulder.
‘I thought I should never see you any more,’ she says in a
breaking voice.
‘What did you take me for?’
He kisses her again, then holds her at arm’s length and looks
into her face.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asks.
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You’re lovlier than I remembered.’
She shakes her head, unable to speak.
‘Smile,’ he commands.
‘I can’t.’
‘Smile, smile. I want to see them again.’
‘See what?’
‘Smile!’
With an effort, but full of a passionate tenderness, Loola
smiles up at him.
In her cheeks the dimples emerge from the long hibernation of
her sorrow.
‘There they are,’ he cries in delight, ‘there they are!’
‘Delicately, like a blind man reading Herrick in Braille, he
passes a finger across her cheek. Loola
smiles more effortlessly, the dimple deepens under his touch. He laughs with pleasure.
At the same moment the whistled tune of ‘When I survey the Wondrous
Horns’ swells from a distant pianissimo
through piano to mezzo forte.
An expression of terror appears on Loola’s face.
‘Quick, quick!’ she whispers.
With astonishing agility Dr. Poole scrambles out of the grave.
By the time the plump girl re-enters the shot he is leaning in
a studiedly casual attitude against the monument to Public Sweetheart Number
One. Below him, in the pit, Loola is
digging like mad.
‘I forgot to tell you that we’re knocking off for lunch in
half an hour,’ Flossie begins.
Then, catching sight of Dr. Poole, she utters an exclamation
of surprise.
‘Good morning,’ says Dr. Poole politely.
There is a silence.
Flossie looks from Dr. Poole to Loola, and from
Loola back to Dr. Poole.
‘What are you doing
here?’ she asks suspiciously.
‘I’m on my way to
‘You’ve chosen a very funny way to get to
‘I was looking for the Chief,’ Dr. Poole explains.
‘Well, he’s not here,’ says the plump girl.
There is another silence.
‘In that case,’ says Dr. Poole, ‘I’d better be trotting
along. Mustn’t keep either of you young
ladies from your duties,’ he adds with an artificial and entirely unconvincing
brightness. ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’
He bows to the two girls, then, assuming an air of easy
nonchalance, walks away.
Flossie looks after him in silence, then
turns severely to Loola.
‘Now listen, kid,’ she begins.
Loola stops digging and looks up from the grave.
‘What is it, Flossie?’ she asks with an expression of
uncomprehending innocence.
‘What is it?’ the other echoes derisively. ‘Tell me, what’s
written on your apron?’
Loola looks down at her apron, then back at Flossie. Her face reddens with embarrassment.
‘What’s written on it?’ the plump girl insists.
‘“No!”’
‘And what’s written on those patches?’
‘“No!”’ Loola repeats.
‘And on the other ones, when you turn
round?’
‘“No!”’
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ says the plump girl emphatically. ‘And when the Law says no, it means no. You know that as well as I do, don’t you?’
Loola nods her head without speaking.
‘Say you know it,’ the other insists. ‘Say it.’
‘Yes, I know it,’ Loola brings out at last in a barely audible
voice.
‘Good. Then don’t
pretend you haven’t been warned. And if
that foreign Hot ever comes prowling round you again, just let me know. I’ll
see to him.’
We dissolve to the interior of
In the body of the church some fifty Toggenberg-robed
seminarists – with Dr. Poole incongruously bearded and in tweeds, in the middle
of the front row – are sitting with bowed heads while, from the pulpit, the
Arch-Vicar pronounces the final words of his lecture.
‘For as in the Order of Things all might, if they had so
desired, have lived, so also in Belial all have been, or inevitably shall be,
made to die. Amen.’
There is a long silence.
Then the Master of Novices rises.
With a great rustling of fur, the seminarists follow suit and start to
walk, two by two, and with the most perfect decorum, towards the west door.
Dr. Poole is about to follow them, when he hears a high,
childish voice calling his name.
Turning, he sees the Arch-Vicar beckoning from the steps of
the pulpit.
‘Well, what did you think of the
lecture?’ squeaks the great man as Dr. Poole approaches.
‘Very fine.’
‘Without flattery?’
‘Really and truly.’
The Arch-Vicar smiles with pleasure.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he says.
‘I specially liked what you said about religion in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the retreat from Jeremiah to the Book of Judges,
from the personal and therefore the universal to the national and therefore the
internecine.’
The Arch-Vicar nods.
‘Yes, it was a pretty close shave,’ he says. ‘If they’d stuck to the personal and the
universal, they’d have been in harmony with the Order of Things, and the Lord
of Flies would have been done for. But
fortunately Belial had plenty of allies – the nations, the churches, the
political parties. He used their
prejudices. He exploited their
ideologies. By the time they’d developed
the atomic bomb he had people back in the state of mind they were in before 900
B.C.’
‘And then,’ says Dr. Poole, ‘I liked what you said about the
contacts between East and West – how He persuaded each side to take only the
worst the other had to offer. So the
East takes Western nationalism, Western armaments, Western movies and Western
Marxism; the West takes Eastern despotism, Eastern superstitions and Eastern
indifference to individual life. In a
word, He saw to it that mankind should make the worst of both worlds.’
‘Just think if they’d made the best!’ squeaks the
Arch-Vicar. ‘Eastern
mysticism making sure that Western science should be properly used; the Eastern
art of living refining Western energy; Western individualism tempering Eastern
totalitarianism.’ He shakes his
head in pious horror. ‘Why, it would
have been the kingdom of heaven. Happily
the grace of Belial was stronger than the Other One’s grace.’
He chuckles shrilly; then, laying a hand on Dr. Poole’s
shoulder, he starts to walk with him towards the vestry.
‘You know,
Dr. Poole mumbles his embarrassed
acknowledgements.
‘You’re intelligent, you’re well educated, you
know all kinds of things that we’ve never learned. You could be very useful to me and, on my
side, I could be very useful to you – that is,’ he adds, ‘if you were to become
one of us.’
‘One of you?’ Dr. Poole repeats
doubtfully.
‘Yes, one of us.’
Comprehension dawns on an expressive close-up of Dr. Poole’s
face. He utters a dismayed ‘Oh!’
‘I won’t disguise from you,’ says the Arch-Vicar, ‘that the
surgery involved is not entirely painless, nor wholly without danger. But the advantages to be gained by entering
the priesthood would be so great as to outweigh any trifling risk or
discomfort. Nor must we forget …’
‘But, Your Eminence …’ Dr. Poole protests.
The Arch-Vicar holds up a plump, damp hand.
‘One moment, please,’ he says severely.
His expression is so forbidding that Dr. Poole hastens to
apologize.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Granted, my dear
Once again the Arch-Vicar is all amiability and condescension.
‘Well, as I was saying,’ he goes on, ‘we must not forget that,
if you were to undergo what I may call a physiological conversion, you would be
delivered from all the temptations to which, as an unmutated male, you will
most certainly be exposed.’
‘Quite, quite,’ Dr. Poole agrees. ‘But I can assure you …’
‘Where temptations are concerned,’ says the Arch-Vicar
sententiously, ‘nobody can assure anyone of anything.’
Dr. Poole remembers his recent interview with Lola in the
cemetery, and feels himself blushing.
‘Isn’t that rather a sweeping statement?’ he says, without too
much conviction.
The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.
‘In these matters,’ he says, ‘one can never be too
sweeping. And let me remind you of what
happens to those who succumb to such temptations. The bulls’ pizzles and the burying squad are
always in readiness. And that is why, in
your own interest, for your future happiness and peace of mind, I advise you –
nay, I beg and implore you – to join our Order.’
There is a silence. Dr.
Poole swallows hard.
‘I should like to be able to think it over,’ he says at last.
‘Of course, of course,’ the Arch-Vicar agrees. ‘Take your time. Take a week.’
‘A week? I don’t think I could decide in a week.’
‘Take two weeks,’ says the Arch-Vicar, and when Dr. Poole
still shakes his head, ‘take four,’ he adds, ‘take six, if you like. I’m in no hurry. I’m only concerned about you.’ He pats Dr. Poole on the shoulder. ‘Yes, my dear fellow, about you.’
Dissolve to Dr. Poole at work in his experimental garden,
planting out tomato seedlings. Nearly
six weeks have passed. His brown beard
is considerably more luxuriant, his tweed coat and flannel trousers
considerably dirtier, than when we saw him last. He wears a grey homespun shirt and moccasins
of local manufacture.
When the last of his seedlings is in the ground, he
straightens himself up, stretches, rubs his aching back, then walks slowly to
the end of the garden and stands there motionless, looking out at the view.
In a long shot we see, as it were through his eyes, a wide
prospect of deserted factories and crumbling houses, backed in the distance by
a range of mountains that recedes, fold after fold, towards the east. The shadows are gulfs of indigo, and in the
richly golden lights the far-off details stand out distinct and small and
perfect, like the images of things in a convex mirror. In the foreground, delicately chased and
stippled by the almost horizontal light, even the baldest patches of parched
earth reveal an unsuspected sumptuousness of texture.
NARRATOR
There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems
purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly
chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality
that underlies all appearances.
Dr. Poole’s lips move and we catch the low murmur of his
words:
‘For
love and beauty and delight
There
is no death nor change; their might
Exceed
our organs, which endure
No
light, being themselves obscure.’
He turns and walks back towards the entrance to the
garden. Before opening the gate, he
looks cautiously around him. There is no
sign of an unfriendly observer. Reassured,
he slips out and almost immediately turns into a winding path between sand
dunes. Once again his lips move:
‘I
am the Earth,
Thy
mother; she within whose stony veins
To
the last fibre of the loftiest tree,
Whose
thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,
Joy
ran, as blood within a living frame,
When
thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of
glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy.’
From the footpath Dr. Poole emerges into a street flanked by
small houses, each with its garage and each surrounded by the barren space that
was once a plot of grass and flowers.
‘“A spirit of keen joy,”’ he repeats, and then sighs and
shakes his head.
NARRATOR
Joy? But joy was
murdered long ago. All that survives is
the laughter of demons about the whipping-posts, the howling of the possessed
as they couple in the darkness. Joy is
only for those whose life accords with the given Order of the world. For you there, the clever ones who think you
can improve upon that Order, for you, the angry ones, the rebellious, the
disobedient, joy is fast becoming a stranger.
Those who are doomed to reap the consequences of your fantastic tricks
will never so much as suspect its existence.
Love, Joy and Peace – these are the fruits of the spirit that is your
essence and the essence of the world.
But the fruits of the ape-mind, the fruits of the monkey’s presumption
and revolt, are hate and unceasing restlessness and a chronic misery tempered
only by frenzies more horrible than itself.
Dr. Poole, meanwhile, continues on his way.
‘The
world is full of woodmen,’ he says to
himself,
‘The world is full of woodmen, who expel
Love’s
gentle dryads from the trees of life
And
vex the nightingales in every dell.’
NARRATOR
Woodmen with axes, dryad-killers with
knives, nightingale-vexers with scalpels and surgical scissors.
Dr. Poole shudders and, like a man who feels himself dogged by
some malevolent presence, quickens his pace.
Suddenly he halts and once more looks about him.
NARRATOR
In a city of two and a half million skeletons the presence of
a few thousands of the living is hardly perceptible. Nothing stirs. The silence is total and, in the midst of all
these cosy little bourgeois ruins, seems conscious and in some sort
conspiratorial.
His pulses quickened by hope and the fear of
disappointment, Dr. Poole turns off the road and hurries along the drive
that leads to the garage of Number 1993.
Sagging on their rusted hinges, the double doors stand ajar. He slips between them into a musty
twilight. Through a hole in the west
wall of the garage a thick pencil of late afternoon sunshine reveals the left
front wheel of a Super de Luxe Four-Door Chevrolet Sedan and, on the ground
beside it, two skulls, one an adult’s, the other evidently a child’s. Dr. Poole opens the only one of the four
doors which is not jammed and peers into the darkness within.
‘Loola!’
He climbs into the car, sits down beside her on the
disintegrated upholstery of the back seat, and takes her hand in both of his.
‘Darling!’
She looks at him without speaking. In her eyes there is an expression almost of
terror.
‘So you were able to get away, after all?’
‘But Flossie still suspects something.’
Damn Flossie!’ says Dr. Poole in a tone that is intended to be
carefree and reassuring.
‘She kept asking questions,’ Loola goes on. ‘I told her I was going out to forage for
needles and cutlery.’
‘But all you’ve found is me.’
He smiles at her tenderly and raises her hand to his lips; but
Loola shakes her head.
‘Alfie – please!’
Her tone is a supplication.
He lowers her hand without kissing it.
‘And yet you do love me, don’t you?’
She looks at him with eyes that are wide with a frightened
bewilderment, then turns away.
‘I don’t know, Alfie, I don’t know.’
‘Well, I know,’ says
Dr. Poole decidedly. ‘I know I love
you. I know I want to be with you. Always. Till death do us part,’ he adds with all the
fervour of an introverted sexualist suddenly converted to objectivity and
monogamy.
Loola shakes her head again.
‘All I know is that I oughtn’t to be here.’
‘But that’s nonsense!’
‘No, it isn’t. I
oughtn’t to be here now. I oughtn’t to
have come those other times. It’s
against the Law. It’s against everything
that people think. It’s against Him,’
she adds after a moment’s pause. An
expression of agonized distress appears on her face. ‘But then why did He make me so that I could
feel this way about you? Why did He make
me like those – like those - ?’ She cannot bring herself to utter the abhorred
word. ‘I used to know one of them,’ she
goes on in a low voice. ‘He was sweet –
almost as sweet as you are. And then
they killed him.’
‘What’s the good of thinking about other people?’ says Dr.
Poole. ‘Let’s think about
ourselves. Let’s think how happy we
could be, how happy we actually were two months ago. Do you remember? The moonlight … And how dark it was in the
shadows! “And in the soul a wild odour
is felt beyond the sense …!”’
‘But we weren’t doing wrong then.’
‘We’re not doing wrong now.’
‘No, no, it’s quite different now.’
‘It isn’t different,’ he insists. ‘I don’t feel any different from what I did
then. And neither do you.’
‘I do,’ she protests – too loudly to carry conviction.
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t. You’ve just
said it. You’re not like these other
people – thank God!’
‘Alfie!’
She makes a propitiatory sign of the horns.
‘They’ve been turned into animals,’ he goes on. ‘You haven’t.
You’re still a human being – a normal human being with normal human
feelings.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘It isn’t true,’ she wails.
‘It isn’t true.’
She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry.
‘He’ll kill me,’ she sobs.
‘Who’ll kill you?’
Loola raises her head and looks apprehensively over her
shoulder, through the rear window of the car.
‘He will. He knows everything we do, everything we even
think or feel.’
‘Maybe He does,’ says Dr. Poole, whose Liberal-Protestant
views about the Devil have been considerably modified during the past few
weeks. ‘But if we feel and think and do
the right thing, He can’t hurt us.’
‘But what is the
right thing?’ she asks.
For a second or two he smiles at her without speaking.
‘Here and now,’ he says at last, ‘the right thing is this.’
He slips an arm about her shoulders and draws her towards him.
‘No, Alfie, no!’
Panic-stricken, she tries to free herself; but he holds her
tight.
‘This is the right thing,’ he repeats. ‘It mightn’t always and everywhere be the
right thing. But here and now it is –
definitely.’
He speaks with the force and authority of complete
conviction. Never in all his uncertain
and divided life has he thought so clearly or acted so decisively.
Loola suddenly ceases to struggle.
‘Alfie, are you sure
it’s all right? Are you absolutely
sure?’
‘Absolutely sure,’ he replies from the depths of his new,
self-validating experience. Very gently
he strokes her hair.
‘“A mortal shape,”’ he whispers, ‘“indued with love and life
and light and deity. A Metaphor of Spring
and Youth and Morning, a Vision like incarnate April.”’
‘Go on,’ she whispers.
Her eyelids are closed, her face
wears that look of supernatural serenity which one sees upon the faces of the
dead.
Dr. Poole begins again:
‘And
we will talk, until thought’s melody
Become
too sweet for utterance, and it die
In
words, to live again in looks, which dart
With
thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our
breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And
our veins beat together, and our lips
With
other eloquence than words, eclipse
The
soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which
boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The
fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused
in Passion’s golden purity;
As
mountain springs under the morning sun,
We
shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit
within two frames, oh! wherefore two?’
There is a long silence.
Suddenly Loola opens her eyes, looks at him intently for a few seconds,
then throws her arms round his neck and kisses him passionately on the
mouth. But even as he clasps her more
closely she breaks away from him and retreats to her end of the seat.
He tries to approach, but she holds him at arm’s length.
‘It can’t be right,’ she says.
‘But it is right.’
She shakes her head.
‘It’s too good to be right, I should be too happy if it
were. He doesn’t want us to be
happy.’ There is a pause. ‘Why do you say He can’t hurt us?’
‘Because there’s something stronger than He
is.’
‘Something stronger?’ She shakes her head. ‘That was what He was always fighting against
– and He won.’
‘Only because people helped Him to win. But they don’t have to help Him. And, remember, He can never win for good.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because He can never resist the temptation
of carrying evil to the limit.
And whenever evil is carried to the limit, it always destroys
itself. After which the Order of Things
comes to the surface again.’
‘But that’s far away in the future.’
‘For the whole world, yes. But not for single
individuals, not for you or me, for example. Whatever Belial may have done with the rest
of the world, you and I can always work with the Order of Things, not against
it.’
There is another silence.
‘I don’t think I understand what you mean,’ she says at last,
‘and I don’t care.’ She moves back
towards him and leans her head against his shoulder. ‘I don’t care about anything,’ she goes
on. ‘He can kill me if He wants to. It doesn’t matter. Not now.’
She raises her face towards his and, as he bends down to kiss
her, the image on the screen fades into the darkness of a moonless night.
NARRATOR
L’ombre était nuptiale,
auguste et solennelle. But this time it is a nuptial darkness whose
solemnity is marred by no caterwaulings, no Liebestods, no saxophones pleading for
detumescence. The music with which this
night is charged is clear, but undescriptive; precise and definite, but about
realities that have no name; all-embracingly liquid, but never viscous, without
the slightest tendency to stick possessively (like blood or sperm, like treacle
or excrement) to what it touches and comprehends. A music with the spirit of
Mozart’s, delicately gay among the constant implications of tragedy; a music
akin to Weber’s, aristocratic and refined, and yet capable of the most reckless
joy and the completest realization of the world’s agony. And is there perhaps a hint of that which, in
the Ave Verum Corpus, in the G-minor Quintet, lies beyond the world
of Don Giovanni? Is there a hint already of what (in Bach,
sometimes, and in Beethoven, in that final wholeness of art which is analogous
to holiness) transcends the Romantic integration of the tragic and the joyful,
the human and the daemonic? And when, in
the darkness, the lover’s voice whispers again of
a mortal shape indued
With
love and life and light and deity,
is there already the beginning of an
understanding that beyond Epipsychidion
there is Adonais, and beyond Adonais the wordless doctrine of the
Pure in Heart?
Dissolve to Dr. Poole’s laboratory. Sunlight pours through the tall windows, and
is dazzlingly reflected from the stainless steel barrel of the microscope on
the worktable. The room is empty.
Suddenly the silence is broken by the sound of approaching
footsteps; the door is opened and, still a butler in moccasins, the Director of
Food Production looks in.
‘
He breaks off and an expression of astonishment appears on his
face.
‘He isn’t here,’ he says to the Arch-Vicar, who now follows
him into the room.
The great man turns to the two Familiars in attendance on him.
‘Go and see if Dr. Poole is in the experimental garden,’ he
orders.
The Familiars bow, squeak ‘Yes, Your Eminence,’ in unison, and
go out.
The Arch-Vicar sits down and graciously motions to the
Director to follow his example.
‘I don’t think I told you,’ he says; ‘I’m trying to persuade
our friend here to enter religion.’
‘I hope Your Eminence doesn’t mean to deprive us of his
invaluable help in the field of food production,’ says the Director anxiously.
The Arch-Vicar reassures him.
‘I’ll see that he always has time to give you the advice you
need. But meanwhile I want to make sure
that the Church shall benefit by his talents and …’
The Familiars re-enter the room and bow.
‘Well?’
‘He isn’t in the garden, Your Eminence.’
The Arch-Vicar frowns angrily at the Director, who quails
under his look.
‘I thought you said this was the day he worked in the
laboratory?’
‘It is, Your Eminence.’
‘Then why is he out?’
‘I can’t imagine, Your Eminence. I’ve never known him to change his schedule
without telling me.’
There is a silence.
‘I don’t like it,’ the Arch-Vicar says at last. ‘I don’t like it at all.’ He turns to the Familiars. ‘Run back to Headquarters and have
half-a-dozen men ride out on horseback to find him.’
The Familiars bow, squeak simultaneously, and vanish.
‘And as for you,’ says the Arch-Vicar, turning on the pale and
abject figure of the Director, ‘if anything should have happened,
you’ll have to answer for it.’
He rises in majestic wrath and stalks towards the door.
Dissolve to a series of montage shots.
Loola with her leather knapsack and Dr. Poole with a pre-Thing
army pack on his back are climbing over a landslide that blocks one of those superbly
engineered highways whose remains still scar the flanks of the
We cut to a windswept crest.
The two fugitives are looking down over the enormous expanse of the
Next we find ourselves in a pine forest on the northern slope
of the range. It is night. In a patch of moonlight between the trees,
Dr. Poole and Loola lie sleeping under the same homespun blanket.
Cut to a rocky canyon, at the bottom of which flows a
stream. The lovers have halted to drink
and fill their water-bottles.
And now we are in the foothills above the floor of the
desert. Between the clumps of sagebrush,
the yuccas and the juniper bushes, the walking is easy. Dr. Poole and Loola enter the shot, and the
Camera trucks them as they come striding down the slope.
‘Feet sore?’ he asks solicitously.
‘Not too bad.’
She gives him a brave smile, and shakes her head.
‘I think we’d better stop pretty soon and eat something.’
‘Just as you think best, Alfie.’
He pulls an antique map out of his pocket and studies it as he
walks along.
‘We’re still a good thirty miles from
‘And how far shall we get tomorrow?’ Loola asks.
‘A little beyond Mojave. And after that I reckon it’ll take us at
least two days to cross the Tehachapis and get to
‘Thank Bel … I mean, thank God,’ says Loola.
There is another silence.
Suddenly Loola comes to a halt.
‘Look! What’s that?’
She points, and from their viewpoint we see at the foot of a
very tall Joshua-tree a slab of weathered concrete, standing crookedly at the
head of an ancient grave, overgrown with bunchgrass and buckwheat.
‘Somebody must have been buried here,’ says Dr. Poole.
They approach, and in a close shot of the slab we see, while
Dr. Poole’s voice reads aloud, the following inscription:
‘WILLIAM TALLIS
1882-1948
Why
linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy
hopes are gone before: from all things here
They
have departed, thou shouldst now depart!’
Cut back to the two lovers.
‘He must have been a very sad man,’ says Loola.
‘Perhaps not quite so sad as you imagine,’ says Dr. Poole, as
he slips off his heavy pack and sits down beside the grave.
And while Loola opens her knapsack and takes out bread and
fruit and eggs and strips of dried meat, he turns over the pages of his
duodecimo Shelley.
‘That
Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That
Beauty in which all things work and move,
That
Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse
Of
birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By
man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns
bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The
fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’
There is a silence.
Then Loola hands him a hard-boiled egg.
He cracks it on the headstone and, as he peels it, scatters the white
fragments of the shell over the grave.
APE AND ESSENCE (polychrome version)