The Great Fog (15 page)

And when Dr. Charles took over, the second act was not less surprising, not less incongruous with that attitude which she had built up and taken as Basic Realism. The child emerged, as all children have always emerged, with more outrageous assault on the decencies of every one of the five senses than a massacre could make. But that was not the final shock. That was psychological, not physical. That was Adelaide's reaction. She lay gasping, sweating, swabbed. The billowing smell of chloroform gave a final wash of nausea to the rank farm odors that lay heavily about the room. And, sunken in all this, Adelaide, the neat, the repressed, lay sprawled. Her body might well be out of kilter after such an extraction. It was not the physical sprawl that hit Miss Potts. It was the idiotic, loose amiability on Adelaide's face; it had become all unstitched, unupholstered.

Dr. Charles was tidying up. After sending Miss Potts to call for a nurse and hearing that none could be along for an hour or more, he said ritually, turning to the patient, “The little chap is doing fine and you're all right, my girl.”

Adelaide, who had never seen the doctor before, nodded, smiled sheepishly, and goggled.

“Miss Potts,” he said, “give her the boy.”

She picked up the object wrapped in a piece of wool, looking, she thought, rather like a large bandaged thumb, and which, a few moments before, she had been ridding of the really quite terrible, natural traveling wrap in which it had arrived. The bath had uncovered an unutterably ancient and wrinkled little fellow: not young, but also not weak. He looked as tough as well-cured rubber and, heavens, he needed to be, considering what she had just seen him go through. He was cross, of course, cross as hell, but he gave a curious sense of vitality and of a settled determination to endure this outrageous experience.

She carried him over to his mother. Adelaide's sagged and damp face—like an energetic washerwoman's held too long over scalding suds—broke into subrational delight. She folded the stirring lump of terra-cotta flesh into her neck. In Miss Potts, only two emotions remained. One expressed itself in the words she whispered to herself, “So this is life, real life—it just doesn't care a damn for meaning—it cares so much that it knows meaning doesn't matter.” The other was too strong, too outrageous for words. She felt herself bent over the two creatures who at teatime had still been one; and now one of them would go on into a world she would never know, in which she'd be only the faintest of fading memories at best.

“Goo, goo,” she said, “goo, goo.”

It was several days before Miss Potts had the use of her sitting room, since Adelaide couldn't be moved to the hospital earlier. Now, “mother and child were doing finely,” and, with that bulletin fixed, life and the crisis and the ritual reply-to-the-crisis must be resumed.

Sure enough, the crisis was still there. News continued to be bad; just steadily getting graver; another country had gone under. But, still, the denouement was postponed. It's just like the Arabian Nights, thought Miss Potts. She stood by the window. She ought to be making a survey of the village street (part of the ritual). You could see it beautifully today. She noticed that the trees were in leaf again, as full as when “time officially stopped” last year.

A whole year … “a Thousand-and-One-Nights,” the famous title came into her mind. So Scheherazade had gained a thousand-and-one reprieves. Three years, she thought. And that started another old, mental echo: “Three years, or the duration of the war.” That was the old enlistment term of the last war. That had seemed to last forever, and no one seemed likely to survive it or, if they did, to find any life worth living at the end of it. But now all that was getting on for a quarter of a century ago. People thought about it mainly now, as her parents did about the Crimean war.… And in the end Scheherazade was reprieved “for good,” indefinitely, and married the monster and gave him a son.…

Her mind hopped over to Adelaide. The boy had a name now, Franklin … the scientist … the explorer … the president. He was a registered person. He was growing, too, every day. It was absurd but undeniable; and absurd and undeniable, it was far more interesting than the war news.

She had moved to her washstand and, by routine, had taken the soap dish, removed the soap from its strainer, put the dish on the floor, knelt, poured the water, and then felt in her pocket for the bottle. Of course, she remembered, while Dr. Charles was about, she had locked it up. She did not want his keen nose smelling out that telltale almond scent. She found the key and went to the drawer in her desk. Then she paused.

How long would she go on with this if nothing happened; or, rather, if the zero hour refused to strike though everything else struck and crashed? How long would she wait about, arrested, while Life and Death inexhaustibly dealt out fresh cards in their endless game? Her tongue went to that small bicuspid cavity. Yes, it was twice the size, and the tip of her tongue, like a finger on an electric bell, could start a trill of pain when she pressed in. Was she going to loose that tooth? Here was a small sharp question. She could decide that; she must; she alone would pay if she didn't. After all, death by dental neglect would hardly be realism, and it would be very uncomfortable and slow.

Philosophers had endured prison, but Shakespeare said even they bowed to toothache. If only things would run on schedule. If only the invasion had been tried and failed—or had come off. But just as it was—with some people dying and others being born just as though the war was not the final thing, and the war always failing to go according to timetable.…

Could it be true that just facing things wasn't enough? Might true wisdom be, even, to refuse to face things, to refuse all plans, all large provisions? How could you plan if you couldn't really foresee?

She had thought the actual Gospels pretty soft stuff. They kept her from joining the Church, even when she saw that Christianity in its time, had picked up a lot of psychological knowledge useful enough to stranded individuals. But the Sermon on the Mount; all that sentiment about easygoing lilies and careless little birds …! What was the actual phrase in which all that poetry ended?

As a matter of fact, she remarked to herself as she recalled the passage, it doesn't conclude that everything is sweet fun. The deduced proposition is “Sufficient unto the day is the
evil
thereof.” That would mean that one is meant to take life in the actual, swallowable, daily doses as they come.

What had all of them been going through? They had been trying to stop the present and to live in what they had concluded was a certain future. They had been “doing time,” as convicts say. But what time? “The indeterminate sentence.” She smiled wryly as that phrase, beloved of progressive penologists, came to her lips. But the meaning of the indeterminate sentence was to give back the initiative to the convict. He could rewin his liberty by doing something, even while doing time. Time, even in prison, waited on you, on your good conduct. No, they had not been going through a progressive, indeterminate sentence—quite the reverse. Something quite different from you and your terms, ultimata, and demands, “controlled the stretch,” played the music slow or fast.

Something she'd read in her old college days, when she'd met a Theosophist, floated into her mind. “Time is all,” it ran, “Pain and Pleasure, Sorrow and Happiness, Disaster and Prosperity: they are the same thing felt at a different Tempo.” Well, she'd heard the psychophysiologists say something of that sort about pain. Her tongue gingerly felt around the back of the bicuspid. You could make the pain go from half-pleasure to quite-pain.

The highbrow hymn went on: “The sum of pain is ever the same. Man calls it happiness when the vast Wheel moves too slowly for him to perceive it. Brahman accelerates the beat and man cries out ‘Disaster.' But it is only and always the Wheel.” That was probably true, too. Hadn't she often read in animal psychology that most creatures can't notice movement if it is below a certain pace. The Wheel—a pleasant stretch at the pace we are accustomed to but breaking us if it goes any faster. Wasn't that as near the actual truth, “real realism,” as one could get, and weren't Christ's practical epigrams the deduced behavior based on such an insight?

After all, everyone does die, whatever you may do; and if life had no sense in itself, it didn't have any more at eighty than at eighteen. Just managing to live long doesn't prove anything. To die an imbecile at eighty or of cancer at seventy, though one might do it in a fine white ward all by oneself—was that a better demonstration of worth-whileness than dying all together, all under forty, in a blind hot belief that Right, our Right, was winning? But we just don't notice the one-by-one erosion. It's the sudden slump of a mass that startles us. We don't notice anything that steals on us.

She had moved back to the window. So out of time had she become that she'd neglected the second part of her ritual; after looking down to the village she should have closed the window. As she raised her free hand to the sash, her eye was caught by something moving very slowly in the undergrowth of the coppice which here came right up to the house.

Yes, it was a cat moving like a shadow. It was stalking, stalking that bird which was picking up worms under the cake of old leaves. The beast stole out of cover, but so steadily that, though the bird between pecks gave its involuntary look around, its eye passed over this quietly changing blur.

She was watching the cat. Now it had ceased to move at all. She could see its shoulder muscles gently folding and mounting under its black fur. The cat was ready to spring. Miss Potts involuntarily flung at it the object in her hand. The cat leaped wildly. The bird squawked away into safety. The bottle had disappeared, but Miss Potts could see the glass stopper gleaming among some leaves.

The damp woodland, she thought, will suck up that bit of poison paste. Perhaps a few grubs will die, and, in consequence, a few saplings will grow better.

She left the window open, picked up the soap dish as she passed it, and replaced it. There were still five minutes before her next class. She'd have time to ring up the dentist and make an appointment.

THE SWAP

“Let's try!”

“What nonsense!”

“Well, if it's nonsense, no harm's done by trying. Besides, it takes only a few minutes anyhow.”

“It's too silly—all this Indian pretense.”

“But it
isn't
Yoga; it's Sufi. And it's quite plain and experimental. If it doesn't work, we'll know it in five or ten minutes; that isn't much time to lose.”

“And if it does?”

“Oh, you own it might!”

“I don't own anything—I mean, I don't allow anything. It's you who want to make this absurd experiment. All I ask is: If such a grotesque thing should actually happen, does your mumbo-jumbo tell you how to un-mumbo-jumbo again?”

“Yes, all you have to do is to repeat the process from the other end, or side, and there you are, back again.”

Jones, who was urging the experiment, was a large, enthusiastic man. He had asked Mather, a smaller, more accurate colleague, to come around. He was always asking Mather around. Mather usually came, usually punctured the blister of speculation which had risen in Jones's easily inflamed mind. They generally parted with the mutual feeling of having wasted time and the mutual, if not spoken, resolve not to meet again. But they did. Perhaps, in some odd way, they needed each other. More and more those we have thought to be enemies have, at least in natural history, proved to be widely reciprocating partners; those we took to be obvious parasites and victim-hosts, closer inspection has shown to be symbiots—partners who interchange essential services.

Mather was a fairly conservative psychologist. Jones held a newly invented chair of Historical Anthropology. The crank businessman who had founded their small college had insisted that, among the standard conventional faculties, there should be this odd study. That he had chosen also to endow this professorship with one thousand dollars a year more than the endowment of any of the other chairs didn't make the position of Jones, his appointee, any easier.

But Jones was not the kind of man to care. His ebullient indifference to his conservative colleagues' envy-tinged disapproval he called “the anthropological outlook.”

“We're all savages,” he used to announce airily at the high table, “all, mentally, guinea pigs to be tested and studied, unless we're anthropologists.” Then he would add what he called the anthropological approach: “And, of course, the anthropologist himself is only a rarer form of savage than another anthropologist, and so on ad infinitum.”

“Then you have no datum of objectivity,” Wilkins, the philosopher, would challenge.

“Well, there can't be—unless you could really get inside someone else.”

“That wouldn't be enough,” cut in Mather. “It would, to be precise, be going only halfway. To complete the process and bring it to an adequate conclusion, from the premise you have postulated, you would have not only to get inside someone else; simultaneously he would have to get inside you. Then each would have to return and compare notes.”

“Yes,” said Jones agreeably, “yes, that, at last, would be real experimental anthropology.”

His mind floated off in speculation. The rest of the high-table discussion fell to its normal level: the food presented, the football prospects, and the local gossip.

This contribution from Mather recurred to Jones, however, a fortnight later. It and Jones's own pachydermatous good nature and eupeptic hopefulness—his digestion was never his weak spot—quite prepared him for another snub. After all, the instructions actually seemed to point to Mather.

Jones, in pursuit of his odd assignment—for his colleagues had to own that he worked as hard at his silly job and with more enthusiasm than they did at their proper ones—had been reading up on Sufi esoteric practices. One in particular had interested him. It was called “How the rainbow which circles the spray of the Fountain of Light (The Nor) may, by heart-contact, be thrown to link with another such rainbow.” There followed quite unmistakable instructions as to how this rainbow interchange was to be effected.