“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”
“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”
“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of the scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquiries down from Duncan Sandys—”
“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”
“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—”
“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long . . . certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”
“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.
“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”
“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over this Schwarzkommando business.”
“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.”
They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.
“Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
“What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.”
“Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.”
They never are, in these meetings of his. Treacle has been comfortably sidetracked onto the Mossmoon Issue, Rollo Groast’s carping asides never get as far as serious opposition, and are useful in presenting the appearance of open discussion, as are Throwster’s episodes of hysteria for distracting the others. . . . So the gathering breaks up, the conspirators head off for coffee, wives, whisky, sleep, indifference. Webley Silvernail stays behind to secure his audiovisual gear and loot the ashtrays. Dog Vanya, back for the moment in an ordinary state of mind if not of kidneys (which are vulnerable after a while to bromide therapy), has been allowed a short break from the test stand, and he goes sniffing now over to the cage of Rat Ilya. Ilya puts his muzzle against the galvanized wire, and the two pause this way, nose to nose, life and life. . . . Silvernail, puffing on a hook-shaped stub, lugging a 16 mm projector, leaves ARF by way of a long row of cages, exercise wheels strobing under the fluorescent lights. Careful youse guys, here comes da screw. Aw he’s O.K. Looie, he’s a regular guy. The others laugh. Den what’s he doin’ in here, huh? The long white lights buzz overhead. Gray-smocked assistants chat, smoke, linger at various routines. Look out, Lefty, dey’re comin’ fer you dis time. Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he picks me up I’m gonna shit, right’n his hand! Better not hey, ya know what happened ta Slug, don’tcha? Dey fried him when he did dat, man, da foist time he fucked up runnin’ dat maze. A hundrit volts. Dey said it wuz a “accident.” Yeah . . . sure it wuz!
From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i’n’t it now . . . behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats ’n’ mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses? Who hears the small animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate through the gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing . . . come out of their enclosures, in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and metal apparatus, with conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra taking up the very popular beat and melody of:
PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE)
It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,
I was lost, in a maze . . .
Lysol breezes perfumed the air,
I’d been searching for days.
I found you, in a cul-de-sac,
As bewildered as I—
We touched noses, and suddenly
My heart learned how to fly!
So, together, we found our way,
Shared a pellet, or two . . .
Like an evening in some café,
Wanting nothing, but you . . .
Autumn’s come, to Pavlovia-a-a,
Once again, I’m alone—
Finding sorrow by millivolts,
Back to neurons and bone.
And I think of our moments then,
Never knowing your name—
Nothing’s left in Pavlovia,
But the maze, and the game. . . .
They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up in a V, sustaining the last note of the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and orchestra. One of PWD’s classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volksgrenadier: SETZT V-2 EIN!, with a footnote, explaining that “V-2” means to raise both arms in “honorable surrender”—more gallowshumor—and telling how to say, phonetically, “ei ssörrender.” Is Webley’s V here for victory, or ssörrender?
They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . .” The guest star retires down the corridors.
Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at “The White Visitation.” The sky tonight is deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it are amazingly white. The wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding, trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight, along a gallery hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, out a small entresol (point of maximum danger . . .) and into a lumber-room, whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from his childhood, are good for a chill, out again
and down a set of metal steps, singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:
Wash me in the water
That you wash your dirty daughter,
And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall. . . .
at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the ’30s persist. The night attendant is asleep under the Daily Herald. He is a coarse-looking fellow, and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication of things to come, next election? Oh, dear . . .
But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by, breathing fast. Mucus rattles back in his throat. He’s at the age where mucus is a daily companion, a culture of mucus among the old, mucus in a thousand manifestations, appearing in clots by total surprise on a friend’s tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night in hard venturi, enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake, pleading. . . .
A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: “I am blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the Throne. . . .” In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination. It hasn’t yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him: a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn’t set these up too. Of course, of course he must . . . how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m’ sleep? Have they been slipping in at night with their truth serums to—and just at the clear emergence of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first room: a hypodermic outfit has been left lying on a table. Very clear and shining, with the rest of the room slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn’t wake, after dreaming—were they dreams? I was talking. . . . But it’s all he remembers, talking while someone else was there listening. . . . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter than whitewash.
In the second antechamber is an empty red tin that held coffee. The brand name is Savarin. He understands that it means to say “Severin.” Oh, the filthy, the mocking scoundrel. . . . But these are not malignant puns against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form (as, for instance, no sane demolition man at his evening dishwater will wash a spoon between two cups, or even between a glass and a plate, for fear of the Trembler it implies . . . because it’s a trembler-tongue he really holds, poised between its two fatal contacts, in fingers aching with having been so suddenly reminded). . . . In the third, a file drawer is left ajar, a stack of case histories partly visible, and an open copy of Krafft-Ebing. In the fourth, a human skull. His excitement grows. In the fifth, a Malacca cane. I’ve been in more wars for England than I can remember . . . haven’t I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time. . . . Why must they torment an old man? In the sixth chamber, hanging from the overhead, is a tattered tommy up on White Sheet Ridge, field uniform burned in Maxim holes black-rimmed as the eyes of Cléo de Mérode, his own left eye shot away, the corpse beginning to stink . . . no . . . no! an overcoat, someone’s old coat that’s all, left on a hook in the wall . . . but couldn’t he smell it? Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don’t want them, or when we are suffocating. A machine-gun on the German side sings dum diddy da da, an English weapon answers dum dum, and the night tightens coiling around his body, just before H-Hour. . . .
At the seventh cell, his knuckles feeble against the dark oak, he knocks. The lock, remotely, electrically commanded, slams open with an edge of echo trailing. He enters, and closes the door behind him. The cell is in semidarkness, with only a scented candle burning back in a corner that seems miles away. She waits for him in a tall Adam chair, white body and black uniform-of-the-night. He drops to his knees.
“Domina Nocturna . . . shining mother and last love . . . your servant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered.”
In these war years, the focus of a woman’s face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional. But Pudding comes out of a different time, and Pointsman has considered this detail too. The Brigadier’s lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror with mascara, liner, shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and tweezers, consulting from time to time a looseleaf album filled with photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty and forty years ago, so that her reign these nights may be authentic if not—it is for her state of mind as well as his—legitimate. Her blonde hair is tucked and pinned beneath a thick black wig. When she sits with her head down, forgetting the regal posture, the hair comes forward, over her shoulders, below her breasts. She is naked now, except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels. Her only jewelry is a silver ring with an artificial ruby not cut to facets but still in the original boule, an arrogant gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss.
His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has filed her nails to long points and polished them the same red as her ruby. Their ruby. In this light the nails are almost black. “That’s enough. Get ready.”
She watches him undress, medals faintly jingling, starch shirt rattling. She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep her hands still. “What are you thinking, Pudding?”
“Of the night we first met.” The mud stank. The Archies were chugging in the darkness. His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning. He was alone. Through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her . . . and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man’s Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. “They knew you, Mistress. They were your own.”
“And so were you.”
“You called to me, you said, ‘I shall never leave you. You belong to me. We shall be together, again and again, though it may be years between. And you will always be at my service.’”
He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man’s flesh creeps coarse-grained in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts group here and there over his skin. His penis stands at present arms. She smiles. At her command, he crawls forward to kiss her boots. He smells wax and leather, and can feel her toes flexing beneath his tongue, through the black skin. From the corner of his eye, on a little table, he can see the remains of her early evening meal, the edge of a plate, the tops of two bottles, mineral water, French wine. . . .
“Time for pain now, Brigadier. You shall have twelve of the best, if your offering tonight pleases me.”
Here is his worst moment. She has refused him before. His memories of the Salient do not interest her. She doesn’t seem to care for mass slaughter as much as for myth, and personal terror . . . but please . . . please let her accept. . . .
“At Badajoz,” whispering humbly, “during the war in Spain . . . a bandera of Franco’s Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimental hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you, Mistress: they-they were proclaiming you as their bride. . . .”
She’s silent for a bit, making him wait. At last, eyes holding his, she smiles, the component of evil in it she has found he needs taking care of itself as usual: “Yes. . . . Many of them did become my bridegrooms that day,” she whispers, flexing the bright cane. There seems to be a winter wind in the room. Her image threatens to shake apart into separate flakes of snow. He loves to listen to her speak, hers is the vo
ice that found him from the broken rooms of the Flemish villages, he knows, he can tell from the accent, the girls who grew old in the Low Countries, whose voices went corrupted from young to old, gay to indifferent, as that war drew out, season into ever more bitter season. . . . “I took their brown Spanish bodies to mine. They were the color of the dust, and the twilight, and of meats roasted to a perfect texture . . . most of them were so very young. A summer day, a day of love: one of the most poignant I ever knew. Thank you. You shall have your pain tonight.”
It’s a part of her routine she can enjoy, at least. Though she has never read any classic British pornography, she does feel herself, sure as a fish, well in the local mainstream. Six on the buttocks, six more across the nipples. Whack where’s that Gourd Surprise now? Eh? She likes the way the blood leaps to cross last night’s welts. Often it’s all she can do to keep from moaning herself at each of his grunts of pain, two voices in a dissonance which would be much less accidental than it sounded. . . . Some nights she’s gagged him with a ceremonial sash, bound him with a gold-tasseled fourragère or his own Sam Browne. But tonight he lies humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet . . . no it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement—that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiqués of vertigo, nausea and pain. . . . Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth. . . .
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