By Christopher Isherwood 5 страница. green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.

green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.

 

"What was it you wanted to get, sir?"

 

"Well, nothing, actually."

 

"You mean, you walked all the way down here just to keep me

company?"

 

"Sure. Why not?"

 

Kenny seems sincerely surprised and pleased. "Well, I think you

deserve something for that! Here, sir, take one of these. It's on me."

 

"Oh, but--well, thank you!" George is actually blushing a little. It's as

if he has been offered a rose. He chooses a yellow sharpener.

 

Kenny grins. "I kind of expected you'd pick blue."

 

"Why?"

 

"Isn't blue supposed to be spiritual?"

 

"What makes you think I want to be spiritual? And how come you

picked red?"

 

"What's red stand for?"

 

"Rage and lust."

 

"No kidding?"

 

They remain silent, grinning almost intimately. George feels that,

even if all this doubletalk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding

each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes,

is in itself a kind of intimacy. Then Kenny pays for the pencil sharpeners and

waves his hand with a gesture which implies casual, undeferential dismissal.

"I'll see you around."

 

He strolls away. George lingers on in the bookshop for a few minutes,

lest he should seem to be following him.

 

 

IF eating is regarded as a sacrament, then the faculty dining room must be

compared to the bleakest and barest of Quaker meetinghouses. No

concession here to the ritualism of food served snugly and appetizingly in

togetherness. This room is an anti-restaurant. It is much too clean, with its

chromium-and-plastic tables; much too tidy, with its brown metal

wastebaskets for soiled paper napkins and used paper cups; and, in contrast

to the vast human rattle of the students' dining room, much too quiet. Its

quietness is listless, embarrassed, self-conscious. And the room isn't even

made venerable or at least formidable, like an Oxford or Cambridge high

table, by the age of its occupants. Most of these people are relatively young;

George is one of the eldest.

 

Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces--young ones

particularly--a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their

lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the

commercial sense. Sure, they can't enjoy the bliss of mingling with

corporation executives. But isn't it any consolation to be with students who

are still three-quarters alive? Isn't it some tiny satisfaction to be of use,

instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn't it something to

know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which

isn't hopelessly corrupt?

 

For these glum ones, apparently not. They would like out, if they

dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job, and now they have

got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should

have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off

from the majority--the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters--by

laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge--discredited, that is

to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the

middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These

professors are suckers, he says. What's the use of knowing something if you

don't make money out of it? Ant the glum ones more than half agree with

him and fee privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.

 

George goes through into the serving room. On the counter are

steaming casseroles from which the waitresses dish you out stew, vegetables

or soup. Or you can have salad or fruit pie or a strange deadly-looking jelly

which is semitransparent, with veins of brilliant green. Gazing at one of

these jellies with a kind of unwilling fascination, as though it were

something behind glass in a reptile house, is Grant Lefanu, the young

physics professor who writes poetry. Grant is the very opposite of glum, and

he couldn't be less de-feated; George rather loves him. He is small and thin,

and has glasses and large teeth and the maddish smile of genuine intellectual

 

passion. You can easily imagine him as one of the terrorists back in Czarist

Russia a hundred years ago. Given the opportunity, he would be that kind of

fanatic hero who follows an idea, without the least hesitation and as a matter

of course, straight through to its expression in action. The talk of pale,

burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in

a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the

literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of

the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still

smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad. On Grant's face you often see

such a smile--of embarrassment, almost, at having had to express his

meaning so crudely. He is like a shy mumbler who suddenly in desperation

speaks much too loud.

 

As a matter of fact, Grant has recently performed at least one act of

minor heroism. He has appeared in court as a defense witness for a

bookseller caught peddling some grand old sex classic of the twenties; it

used to be obtainable only in the lands of the Latins, but now, through a

series of test cases, it is fighting for its right to be devoured by American

youth. (George can't be absolutely sure if this is the same book he himself

read as a young man, during a trip to Paris. At all events, he remembers

throwing this, or some other hook just like it, into the wastebasket, in the

middle of the big screwing scene. Not that one isn't broadminded, of course;

let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it

who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit

distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple

wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?)

 

Grant Lefanu's heroism on this occasion consisted in his defense of

the book at the risk of his academic neck. For a very important and senior

member of the STSC faculty had previously appeared as a witness for the

prosecution and had guaranteed the book dirty, degenerate and dangerous.

When Grant was called to the stand and cross-examined by the prosecuting

attorney, he begged, with his shy smile, to differ from his colleague. At

length, after some needling and after having been cautioned three times to

speak up, he blurted out a statement to the effect that it wasn't the book, but

its attackers, who deserved the three adjectives. To make matters worse, one

of the local liberal columnists gleefully reported all of this, casting the senior

faculty member as a reactionary old ass and Grant as a bright young

upholder of civil liberty, and twisting his testimony into a personal insult. So

now the question is, Will Grant get his tenure prolonged at the end of the

academic year?

 

 

Grant treats George as a fellow subverter, a compliment which

George hardly deserves, since, with his seniority, his license to play the

British eccentric, and, in the last resort, his little private income, he can

afford to say pretty much anything he likes on campus. Whereas poor Grant

has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

 

"What's new?" George asks him, implying, What has the Enemy been

up to?

 

"You know those courses for police students? Toda a special man

from Washington is addressing them on twenty ways to spot a Commie."

 

"You're kidding!"

 

"Want to go? We might ask him some awkward questions."

 

"What time is it?"

 

"Four-thirty."

 

"Can't. I've got to be downtown in an hour."

 

"Too bad."

 

"Too bad," George agrees, relieved. He isn't absolutely sure if this was

a bona fide dare or not, however. Various other times, in the same half-

serious tone, Grant has suggested that they go and heckle a John Birch

Society meeting, smoke pot in Watts with the best unknown poet in

America, meet someone high up in the Black Muslim movement. George

doesn't seriously suspect Grant of trying to test him. No doubt Grant really

does do such things now and then, and it simply does not occur to him that

George might be scared. He probably thinks George excuses himself from

these outings for fear of being bored.

 

As they move down the counter, ending up with only coffee and

salad--George watches his weight and Grant has an appetite as slender as his

build--Grant tells about a man he knows who has been talking to some

experts at a big firm which makes computers. These experts say that it

doesn't really matter if there's a war, because enough people will survive to

run the country with. Of course, the people who survive will tend to be those

with money and influence, because they'll have the better type of shelter, not

the leaky death traps which a lot of crooks have been offering at bargain

prices. When you get your shelter built, say the experts, you should go to at

least three different contractors, so nobody will know what it is you're

building; because if the word gets around that you have a better type shelter,

you'll be mobbed at the first emergency. For the same reason, you ought to

be realistic and buy a submachine gun. This is no time for false sentiment.

 

George laughs in an appropriately sardonic manner, since this is what

Grant expects of him. But this gallows humor sickens his heart. In all those

old crises if the twenties, the thirties, the war--each one of them has left its

 

traces upon George, like an illness--what was terrible was the fear of

annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of

survival. Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will be quite natural for Mr.

Strunk to gun down Grant and his wife and three children, because Grant has

neglected to lay in sufficient stores of food and they are starving and may

therefore possibly become dangerous and this is no time for sentiment.

 

"There's Cynthia," Grant says, as they re-enter the dining room. "Want

to join her?"

 

"Do we have to?"

 

"I guess so." Grant giggles nervously. "She's seen us."

 

And, indeed, Cynthia Leach is waving to them. She is a handsome

young New Yorker, Sarah Lawrence-trained, the daughter of a rich family.

Maybe it was partly to annoy them that she recently married Leach, who

teaches history here. But their marriage seems to work quite well. Though

Andy is slim and white-skinned, he is no weakling; his dark eyes sparkle

sexily and he has the unaggressive litheness of one who takes a great deal of

exercise in bed. He is somewhat out of his league socially, but no doubt he

enjoys the extra effort required to keep up with Cynthia. They give parties to

which everyone comes because the food and drink are lavish, thanks to

Cynthia's money, and Andy is popular anyhow, and Cynthia isn't that bad.

Her only trouble is that she thinks of herself as an Eastern aristocrat

slumming; she tries to be patrician and is merely patronizing.

 

"Andy stood me up," Cynthia tells them. "Talk to me." Then, as they

sit down at her table, she turns to Grant. "Your wife's never going to forgive

me."

 

"Oh?" Grant laughs with quite extraordinary violence.

 

"She didn't tell you about it?"

 

"Not a word!"

 

"She didn't?" Cynthia is disappointed. Then she brightens. "Oh, but

she must be mad at me! I was telling her how hideously they dress the

children here."

 

"But she agreed with you, I'm sure. She's always talking about it."

 

"They're being cheated out of their childhood," Cynthia says, ignoring

this, "They're being turned into junior consumers! All those dreadful dainty

little crea-tures, wearing lipstick! I was down in Mexico last month. It was

like a breath of fresh air. Oh, I can't tell you! Their children are so real. No

anxiety. No other-direction. They just bloom."

 

"The only question is--" Grant begins. Obviously be is starting not to

agree with Cynthia. For this very reason, he mumbles, he can barely be

heard. Cynthia chooses not to hear him.

 

 

"And then that night we came back across the border! Shall I ever

forget it? I said to myself, Either these people are insane or I am. They all

seemed to be running, the way they do in the old silent newsreels. And the

hostess in the restaurant--it had never struck me before how truly sinister it

is to call them that. The way she smiled at us! And those enormous menus,

with nothing on them that was really edible. And those weird zombie

busboys, bringing nothing but glasses of water and simply refusing to speak

to you! I just could not believe my own eyes. Oh, and then we stayed the

night at one of these ghastly new motels. I had the feeling that it had only

just been brought from someplace else, some factory, and set up exactly one

minute before we arrived. It didn't belong anywhere. I mean--after all those

marvelous old hotels in Mexico--each one of them is really a place--but this

was just utterly unreal--"

 

Again, Grant seems about to attempt some kind of a protest. But this

time his mumbling is still lower. Even George can't understand him. George

takes a big drink of his coffee, feels the kick of it in his nearly empty

stomach, and finds himself suddenly high. "Really, Cynthia, my dear!" he

hears himself exclaim. "How can you talk such incredible nonsense?"

 

Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather

pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the

itch of her aggression.

 

"Honestly! Are you out of your mind?" George feels himself racing

down the runway, becoming smoothly, exhilaratingly airborne. "My God,

you sound like some dreary French intellectual who's just set foot in New

York for the first time! That's exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American

motels are unreal! My good girl--you know and I know that our motels are

deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the

very simple reason that an American motel room isn't a room in an hotel, it's

the room, definitively, period. There is only one: The Room. And it's a

symbol--an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like--for our way of

life. And what's our way of life? A building code which demands certain

measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more

and no less. Everything else you've got to supply for yourself. But just try

telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. The truth is, our way of

life is far too austere for them. We've reduced the things of the material

plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential

first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its

proper place, the mind can't ever be truly free. One would think that was

obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the

Europeans call us inhuman--or they prefer to say immature, which sounds

 

ruder--because we've flounced their world of individual differences and r"-

mantic inefficiency and objects-for-the-sake-of-object All that dead old cult

of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines.

Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment,

with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we'll be done

for. That's the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee

ought to be investigating. The Europeans hate us because we've retired to

live inside our advertisements, hermits going into caves to contemplate. We

sleep symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained--

and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they

can never understand it. They keep yelling out, 'These people are zombies!'

They've got to make themselves belies that, because the alternative is to

break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because,

actually, they're a far, far more advanced culture--five hundred, maybe a

thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter.

Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That" why

we're completely at home with symbols like the American motel room.

Whereas the European has horror of symbols because he's such a groveling

little materialist...."

 

Some moments before the end of this wild word-flight, George has

seen, as it were from a great altitude, Andy Leach enter the dining room.

Which is in-deed a lucky deliverance, for already George has felt his engines

cut out, felt himself losing thrust. So now, with the skill of a veteran pilot, he

swoops down to a perfect landing. And the beauty of it is, he appears to stop

talking out of mere politeness, because Andy has reached their table.

 

"Did I miss something?" Andy asks, grinning.

 

A performer at the circus has no theater curtain to come down and

hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high

on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star

indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed by spotlights, yet

plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him--they are all watching the

clowns--he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds

him any more. Very few spare him a single glance.

 

Together with this anonymity, George feels a fatigue come over him

which is not disagreeable. The tide of his vitality is ebbing fast, and he ebbs

with it, content. This is a way of resting. All of a sudden he is much, much

older. On his way out to the parking lot he walks differently, with less

elasticity, moving his arms and his shoulders stiffly. He slows down. Now

and then his steps actually shuffle. His head is bowed. His mouth loosens

and the muscles of his cheeks sag. His face takes on a dull dreamy placid

 

look. He hums queerly to himself, with a sound like bees around a hive.

From time to time, as he walks, he emits quite loud, prolonged farts.

 

THE hospital stands tall on a sleepy bypassed hill rising from steep lawns

and flowering bushes, within sight of the freeway itself. A tall reminder to

the passing motorists--this is the end of the road, folks--it ha" a pleasant

aspect, nevertheless. It stands open to all breezes, and there must be many of

its windows from which you can see the ocean and the Palos Verde headland

and even Catalina Island, in the clear winter weather.

 

The nurses at the reception desk are pleasant, too. They don't fuss you

with a lot of questions. If you know the number of the room you want to

visit, you don't even have to ask for their permission; you can go right up.

 

George works the elevator himself. At the second floor it is stopped,

and a colored male nurse wheels in a prone patient. She is for surgery, he

tells George, so they must descend again to the ground floor where the

operating rooms are. George offers respectfully to get off the elevator but the

young nurse (who has very sexy muscular arms) says, "You don't have to";

so there he stands, like a spectator at the funeral of a stranger, furtively

peeking at the patient. She appears to be fully conscious, but it would be a

kind of sacrilege to speak to her, for already she is the dedicated, the ritually

prepared victim. She seems to know this and consent to it; to be entirely

relaxed in her consent. Her gray hair looks so pretty; it must have been

recently waved.

 

This is the gate, George says to himself.

 

Must I pass through here, too?

 

Ah, how the poor body recoils with its every nerve from the sight, the

smell, the feel of this place! Blindly ii shies, rears, struggles to escape. That

it should ever he brought here--stupefied by their drugs, pricked by their

needles, cut by their little knives--what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh!

Even if they were to cure and release it, it could never forget, never forgive.

Nothing would be the same any more. It would have lost all faith in itself.

 

Jim used to moan and complain and raise hell over a head cold, a cut

finger, a pile. But Jim was lucky at the end--the only time when luck really

counts. The truck hit his car just right; he never felt it. And they never got

him into a place like this one. His smashed leavings were of no use to them

for their rituals.

 

Doris's room is on the top floor. The hallway is deserted, for the

moment, and the door stands open, with a screen hiding the bed. George

 

peeps over the top of the screen before going in. Doris is lying with her face

toward the window.

 

George has gotten quite accustomed by now to the way she looks. It

isn't even horrible to him any more, because he has lost his sense of a

transformation. Doris no longer seems changed. She is a different creature

altogether--this yellow shriveled mannequin with its sticks of arms and legs,

withered flesh and hollow belly, making angular outlines under the sheet.

What has it to do with that big arrogant animal of a girl? With that body

which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand, underneath

Jim's naked body? Gross in-sucking vulva, sly ruthless greedy flesh, in all

the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth, demanding that

George shall step aside, bow down and yield to the female prerogative, hide

his unnatural head in shame. I am Doris. I am Woman. I am Bitch-Mother

Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support me. I claim

my biological rights. I demand Jim.

 

George has sometimes asked himself, Would I ever, even in those

days, have wished this on her?

 

The answer is No. Not because George would be incapable of such

fiendishness; but because Doris, then, was infinitely more than Doris, was

Woman the Enemy, claiming Jim for herself. No use destroying Doris, or ten

thousand Dorises, as long as Woman triumphs. Woman could only be fought

by yielding, by letting Jim go away with her on that trip to Mexico. By

urging him to satisfy all his curiosity and flattered vanity and lust (vanity,

mostly) on the gamble that he would return (as he did) saying, She's

disgusting, saying, Never again.

 

And wouldn't you be twice as disgusted, Jim, if you could see her

now? Wouldn't you feel a crawling horror to think that maybe, even then,

her body you fon-dled and kissed hungrily and entered with your aroused

flesh already held seeds of this rottenness? You used to bathe the sores on

cats so gently and you never minded the stink of old diseased dogs; yet you

had a horror, in spite of yourself, of human sickness and people who were

crippled. I know something, Jim. I feel certain of it. You'd refuse absolutely

to visit her here. You wouldn't be able to force yourself to do it.

 

George walks around the screen and into the room, making just the

necessary amount of noise. Doris turns her head and sees him, seemingly

without surprise. Probably, for her, the line between reality and hallucination

is getting very thin. Figures keep appearing, disappearing. If one of them

sticks you with a needle, then you can be sure it actually is a nurse. George

may be George or, again, he may not. For convenience she will treat him as

George. Why not? What does it matter either way?

 

 

"Hello," she says. Her eyes are a wild brilliant blue in her sick yellow

face.

 

"Hello, Doris."

 

A good while since, George has stopped bringing her flowers or other

gifts. There is nothing of any significance he can bring into this room from

the outside now; not even himself. Everything that matters to her is now

right here in this room, where she is absorbed in the business of dying. Her

preoccupation doesn't seem egotistic, however; it does not exclude George

or anyone else who cares to share in it. This preoccupation is with each, and

we can all share in that, at any time, at any age, well or ill.

 

George sits down beside her now and takes her hand. If he had done

this even two months ago, it would have been loathsomely false. (One of his

most bitterly shameful memories is of a time he kissed her cheek--Was it

aggression, masochism? Oh, damn all such words!--right after he found out

she'd been to bed with Jim. Jim was there when it happened. When George

moved toward her to kiss her, Jim's eyes looked startled and scared, as if he

feared George was about to bite her like a snake.) But now taking Doris'

hand isn't false, isn't even an act of compassion. It is necessary--he has

discovered this on previous visits--in order to establish even partial contact.

And holding her hand he feels less embarrassed by her sickness; for the

gesture means, We are on the same road, I shall follow you soon. He is thus

excused from having to ask those ghastly sickroom questions, How are you,

how's it going, how do you feel?

 

Doris smiles faintly. Is it because she's pleased that he has come?

 

No. She is smiling with amusement, it seems. Speaking low but very

distinctly, she says, "I made such a noise, yesterday."

 

George smiles too, waiting for the joke.

 

"Was it yesterday?" This is in the same tone, but addressed to herself.

Her eyes no longer see him; they look bewildered and a bit scared. Time

must have become a very odd kind of mirror-maze for her now; and mazes

can change at any instant from being funny to being frightening.

 

But now the eyes are aware of him again; the bewilderment has

passed. "I was screaming. They heard me clear down the hall. They had to

fetch the doctor." Doris smiles. This, apparently, is the joke. "Was it your

back?" George asks. The effort to keep sympathy out of his voice makes him