It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Since my arrest has given me an opportunity of speaking to higher apes for the first time in my life, I will speak what (perhaps unknown to you), has been in the minds of us who are lower in the tree for hundreds of years. We think that there is no greater evil than the vast fruit slaughters. Now there could be no slaughter if our teeth and claws were not sharp, and they would not be sharp if we were not perpetually engaged in struggle. We believe that a crucial time has arrived in the evolution,” (we pricked up our ears at that word) “of the ape. Our tails, that used to swirl us (as they waved above our heads) into blood-thirsty states of mind, are shortening; we have not shortened them ourselves by any act of will. If we apes will work to order our lives in a new way, the struggle will cease, no more great fruit slaughters will be necessary and everyone will have all the fruit he needs and can eat in peace in his appropriate place in the tree. For we do not think that even you in the higher branches for whom unconsciously we labour, really benefit by the great slaughters. Some of you are killed as thousands of us are, many of you are maimed and carry unbeautiful scars. From what we below hear of your private lives and talk in the upper branches, your privileges do not make you either sensible or happy.”

  We were ready to fall upon him after this blasphemous speech, but our oldest ape, steeped in the wisdom and slyness of his great age, silenced us. “And when there is a shortage of fruit for everyone in the tree, high and low alike?” he asked. “If our teeth and claws are not sharpened,” replied the new ape, “we shall not want to attack other trees but, when we need fruit, we shall go to the others and instead of tearing them apart we shall talk to them, stroke them and persuade them. They, seeing how gentle our hands are, will like being stroked and will smile and coo in their pleasure; for, as all of us apes know from intimate experience, there is nothing more delightful than a gentle tickling and scratching—and then they will share their fruit with us.”—“What a hope!” we laughed. And some cried with disgust, “That ape’s a pansy!” But a shout went up from the lower branches where a mass of his supporters were gathered. “You’d better do as he says,” the cry came “or soon there will be none of us left to bring you your fruit.” “Yes,” said the leader, “another fruit robbery and there will be no more workers for you to steal from.”

  “Now,” we whispered to our oldest ape on the highest branch, “now let us kill him.”

  “Remember,” said the old one, “that he has followers. They are too many for us and we are unprepared.”

  This was true, so, reluctantly, we let the leader go and swing back down the branches to his own people.

  After he had gone we gathered in conference in the upper branches. When we were seated our oldest ape said, “No doubt to you there seems to be something new, startling and dangerous in the speech you have just heard. I expect you think it the speech of a revolutionary. So it is—but there’s nothing new in that. From the beginning of time there have been revolutions and what difference do they make? None whatever. Everything goes on afterwards exactly as it went on before. Do not worry therefore about revolutionaries. I have seen dozens of such people and with a little art they can be made to die very comfortably of their own enthusiasm. And, in one way, I agree with what that strange ape said. He said that violence is wasteful. It is—for to exterminate our own workers would mean that we would be without food or would have to go down out of our comfortable places in the tree and get it for ourselves. That would indeed be a calamity. No, I think if we wish to remove the danger from this particular movement we should support it.”

  “Support blasphemy and treachery!” we cried with indignation.

  “Ah!” exclaimed the old ape wistfully. “There speaks the honest warrior. But I am old and political and it would seem to me a mistake to let all that enthusiasm get out of our hands. After our last great fruit robbery we are rather tired, you know, and enthusiasm is not easily come by again.”

  “But our tails!” we shouted.

  “Your honour and your tails!” said our weary and ancient one. “I guarantee to show you such a display of tails wagging, curling, prehensile and triumphant as you have never seen before.”

  “Well, if your plan will safeguard our sacred tails and preserve us from evolution,” we said, “there may be something in it. Tell us what it is.”

  “It is very simple,” he said. “First of all we shall announce the end of all fruit robbery …”

  “Impossible,” we interrupted.

  “It is never impossible to announce anything,” he said. “I repeat we shall announce the end of all fruit robbery. But the lower ape is an emotional creature. It is useless to argue with him—indeed we know that the free interchange of ideas in open argument, is extremely dangerous, for the lower apes are hungry and hunger sharpens the mind, just as it sharpens the claws. No, we must appeal to his emotions, for it is here that he is untrained and inexperienced. So when we announce the end of all fruit robbery we must perform an act which shall symbolize our intention. That is easy. Almost anything would do. The best, I think, would be merely to alter the date of the commemoration of our last robbery from the anniversary of its call to battle, to the day on which it ended and when peace was declared. I’ll lay you a hundred to one in pomegranates that you will see the tails wag on that day.”

  We who listened were doubtful of the success of a trick so simple and, moreover, we were disappointed not to have the opportunity of killing the rebel ape. But when we heard the enthusiasm in the lower branches, we realized that our oldest ape had judged rightly. Those short-tailed evolutionists were so diddled that they shouted for joy. “Peace!” “The end of all fruit robberies,” “To each according to his needs”—we above heard their delirious cries and winked. And when the inquisitive pterodactyl came down to see what it was all about, we slapped him on the back and pulled his wings about merrily and nearly choked him with pomegranate seeds which do not agree with him. “Cheer up, you’re not extinct yet,” we said. And even that cheerless reptile, though he said his nerves couldn’t stand monkey tricks any more, had to smile.

  And the ceremony took place. We appointed the day, and just before noon the yelling ceased and all the struggling and climbing. Just where they were, on whatever twig or branch, our apes coiled their tails and squatted in silence. The only movement was the blinking of our eyes, thousands of eyes in the hot rays of the sun. I do not know if you have ever seen a tree full of apes squatting in silence on their haunches. It is an impressive sight. There was our oldest ape on the topmost branch; a little beneath him was our circle of privileged ones, and below, thick in the descending hierarchy, were the others.

  And then, before a minute had gone by, an event occurred, which filled us with horror. The lengths to which blasphemy will go were revealed to us. Taking advantage of the stillness of the multitude, an ape leapt up the tree, from back to back, from branch to branch and burst through our unprepared ranks at the top. It was the leader to whom we had spoken.

  “This is a fraud,” he shouted. “You are pretending to commemorate peace when all the time you are planning greater robberies. You are not even silent. Listen to the grinding and sharpening of your claws and teeth.”

  It was, of course, our habit. We do it unconsciously.

  Too startled for a moment to act, we hesitated. Then: “Lynch him. Kill him,” cried the crowd with a sudden roar. We hesitated no more and at least a score of us leapt upon him. You would think we had an easy task. But there was extraordinary strength in that creature. He fought like a god, skil-fully, and he had laid out half of our number with a science and ferocity such as we had never seen before our numbers over-whelmed him. Some spirit must have been in him and we still wonder, not without apprehension, if that spirit is lying asleep in his followers. However that may be, we threw him down at last upon the branch. Our oldest ape came down to look upon the panting creature and then what we saw made us gasp. He was lying on his face. There was a backside bare and hairless—he had no tail. No tail at all.r />
  “It is man!” we cried. And our stomachs turned.

  THE CLERK’S TALE

  There were two railway stations in the town where I lived when I was a boy, the Junction and the East Station, and from both of them the surburban trains went up to London. It was during the War, when I was sixteen, that I last used that line. I used to go from the East station and the trains were very crowded. We all sat or stood, jammed against each other, and people rarely talked.

  There was, nevertheless, one talker, if what he said can be called talk. He started with us at the East station. The moment he got into the compartment he would begin. “Must we have that window open?” he would say. Or, “Will you kindly move up and give me more room. Five passengers are allowed each side.” Or, “Kindly sit on the opposite side, your smoke is annoying me.” Or, if a woman opened the door, he would say, “This is a smoking compartment. Can’t you go to the special compartment for ladies?” He hated women. All these things he planked down like a man throwing aside a spade in a temper. And after he said them he took off his glasses, showed his large, cold, snail-grey naked eyes, jerked back his shoulders and spread his fingers as if preparing to slap someone hard on the face. He was a hard-chinned, grey-haired man of fifty. People turned away to the window, raised their papers, looked more closely at their books and said nothing.

  One day somebody said to me, “You should be sorry for that man. You should not mock him. One of his sons has been killed in the war. And the other has been wounded.” I was silent. This conveyed little to me. I was sixteen. The world, the war—I hardly saw or heard of them. The mark of the war on that train meant nothing. I lived in a different world. I lived in a dream. Looking out of the carriage window, sunk in some book, watching the slow clock in the warehouse where I worked, I lived only for one thing in those days: that time should be urged on and the week pass.

  So that it would be Sunday once more. For on Sunday, during one hour on Sunday morning, I saw Isabel Hertz. She was in my class at Sunday School, a girl who was half-Swedish, with hair as yellow as thick sunflowers and candid eyes like blue pebbles of ice. Her throat, her lips which broke apart in piety when she sang the hymns, and her silk legs, intoxicated me. Once I fell down the Sunday School stairs when I heard her voice in the doorway below. When she spoke I thought of a crystal of snow falling on a warm hand and instantly melting; a particle of herself melted away with every word and passed with a sigh to Heaven. There, ardent but purified by her purity, I joined her in melodious, fleshless and speechless union. In one of those northern landscapes of snow, perhaps, where time is frozen in the sky, where sleigh-bells ring and there is the dry mutter of skates saying, “Inevitable, for ever. Inevitable, for ever,” like our love, over iron lakes of ice.

  It was a very small incident which had started my love for Isabel Hertz. It occurred one Sunday at the school. With her Bible on her lap she was sitting opposite to me, for I was afraid to sit next to her.

  “Isabel, dear,” the teacher said, “what is God?” Isabel, who always held her head a little to one side as if her small ears were listening to the spring sky, turned her head. She hesitated, as if waiting for the voice of Heaven; then she replied, “God is love.”

  I was looking at her, waiting for her to speak, and she caught my eye and smiled. A pain like hunger pinched my throat.

  All that day, I could eat nothing, but my mouth seemed to drink and eat the air because she, miles away, was breathing it. There was a laburnum tree in our garden, and I cut her initials, I.H. on the trunk and went to have a look at them every hour. I even went out after dark before I went to bed and struck a match to see them. I told my parents I had dropped a pencil there and was looking for it. I was awake all night and horses seemed to be galloping over my heart.

  I longed to dream at night about Isabel Hertz, but this never happened. I was dreaming about her all day; but when the next Sunday and the next came I felt my body was covered with the garish tattoo of guilt and I could not speak. I never spoke to her. Once when she spoke to me, I choked.

  Man cannot live by the spirit alone. It was about this time that, thinking always of the face and walk of Isabel Hertz, I started imagining things I could do with girls with round shoulders and protruding upper teeth. The uglier the better. I used to follow them. There was a girl who got into the train at the next station one morning. She carried a small cardboard attaché case which had the initials D.O.M. on it. At the London station, some nights after, I saw her again. The fact that I had now seen her twice, by accident, overruled everything. I dropped all other girls with protruding teeth and followed D.O.M. Her teeth stuck out like tusks.

  D.O.M. was a dark, shabby, stumpy girl with thin legs and high scared shoulders. Her hollowed, sparrow-brown eyes and those teeth which spread her lips and left her mouth open, gave her an expression of craving and hunger. The thing about her that moved me was the sad wideness of her white forehead. She was always with a tall friend and as they walked up the platform they bumped their hips against each other or pushed and pinched. They were always laughing and made people stare.

  I used to follow in the evenings. My technique was like this. I got out at her station and gave her about 50 yards start and then I went after her. She and her friend went first down the station road; then they turned to the left and went up a long street of small villas. At the two corners I used to put on speed when she and her friend were out of sight; but when, racing round the corner, I found I was only ten yards behind them, I eased off and let them go ahead. At last they would turn inside a side street where, I supposed, she lived. There I left her and went on home. The idea of knowing exactly where D.O.M. lived was repugnant.

  At first there was excitement in this pursuit; then dead but obliged boredom and finally the humiliation of secrecy. For the more I saw of D.O.M. the more I disliked her. I shuddered at the worn fur collar of her coat, her bad complexion, her giggle, the silly way in which she was always bumping into her friend, her bad, scraping walk which turned over the heel of her left shoe. All these things gave me a horror which I could not resist for I felt in my own mouth the hunger which I saw in hers. But once she had gone, there were freedom, weariness and relief. I went home exhausted. Once more I could dream freely about Isabel Hertz.

  This went on into the summer. It was a bondage. I believed that D.O.M. did not know I followed her. But one evening towards the end of September something did happen which changed the situation and altered my life. Just as we were all at the end of the long straight road of villas and D.O.M. was about to turn into her street and set me free, she gave a sudden twist to her shoulders, as a pomeranian does when it starts prancing and yapping, opened her mouth wide and put her tongue out at me three or four times. After this she put her hand to her throat and pretended to be sick. She knew. She had known all the time. I felt deep shame and anger. But this soon gave place to a decisive bombast and brutality. The next time I saw her I was determined to speak.

  The following evening I walked past the barrier on to the platform of the London station and searched for D.O.M. She was at her usual place near the indicator. I was late in getting there and I had not reached it when the train came in. I saw her get into a compartment and I was going to join her but, at the last moment, I was afraid. I pretended to myself I would be more subtle. I would get into the next compartment. I opened the door and got in and, as I did so, I heard a voice shout: “Full up here.” I saw the violent man. He was wearing a light grey pistol-coloured suit.