CHAPTER VI - THE STRANGERS’ HOUSE
During my brief journeys through the streets earlier in the day I had been too conscious of my surprise and perplexity to examine my surroundings with any concentration of mind. Now, standing on the middle platform of what seemed to be one of the principal streets and traveled at a speed of about eight miles an hour, I looked about me with increasing astonishment. I do not know which attracted my attention more, the crowds or the buildings. I asked David for information as we proceeded, stating that I was unable to read the signs, as I was acquainted only with the old alphabet. Seeing his incredulity, I added:
“When you are willing, I shall be glad to tell you my history, though I shall hardly hope to be believed. For the present, let me say that I know nothing at all of your modern civilization.”
“But surely in Russia—” David began, and checked himself. Thereafter he seemed to admit the possibility that I was not dissembling, and to consider me as a bona fide traveler from some interior Russian province.
“Our writing is syllabic,” he said. “We have gone the round of the circle and now make the syllable the unit instead of the letter, as the Assyrians did, and the Chinese.”
“And what is the purpose of this blue paint on the buildings?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the dazzling, blue-white luster.
“Blue?” repeated David in surprise.
“There—and there.”
“Why, that is glow, of course,” he answered. “Surely you are not color-blind, Arnold? Or can it be that in—where you came from they have only the old seven colors in the spectrum?”
“From red to violet.”
He shook his head and looked at me whimsically. “We have had nine for at least twenty years,” he said. “Mull, below red, and glow, above violet; what our ancestors called ultra-violet and believed to be invisible, though it was staring them in the face everywhere all the time. There used to be a theory that the color sense has developed with civilization. Don’t make any reference to that color-blindness of yours, Arnold,” he continued, after a brief pause.
It occurred to me that he had not explained the choice of this color, though he had named it.
“Here is the Bureau of Statistics,” he went on, as we traveled past another of the interminable buildings. “This is the Bureau of Prints and Indexes; there are more than a thousand million records within. This is the Bureau of Economics; this of Pedigrees and Relationships; this of Defective Germ-Plasm; and this is our Sixth District School.”
The streets were scrupulously clean; they occupied only the central part of the space between the fronts of the buildings, that which would have been called the pavement formerly, being used as resting and lounging places.
“Here is our district store,” he added. “Would you like to look inside?”
I assented, and we stepped off the moving portion of the street into an open space surrounded by telephone funnels, at which small groups of men and women were listening. As he halted, a loud voice began calling:
“Latest news! Rain is expected. Don’t forget Freedom Day! Muster for your amusement in Picnic Park, or the Council will make it hot for you! The escaped defectives all caught and sent to the leathers. A foreign spy captured this morning after a desperate resistance and now under guard. The miserable defective has confessed, involving numerous others. He is a low-class brach and a filthy degenerate. Boss Lembken is on the job. Praise him!”
“Hurrah!” shouted the mob.
“Come,” said David, plucking me by the sleeve.
It was only then I realized that the reference was to me. I must have uttered an indignant exclamation, for he drew me away hurriedly.
“Hush! You must keep your tongue guarded in public,” he whispered. “One can hear at both ends of the telephone.”
“But it is a lie!” I said indignantly. “Who can spread such news as that, and why?”
I noticed that one or two people were watching me curiously. Then, glancing up, I was amazed to see my face outlined upon a screen beneath a hood that formed a dark circle around it. It was an execrable caricature, designed to arouse hate and contempt; and yet the likeness was plainly discernible.
Somehow David got me away. “It will be all right,” he kept repeating. “It doesn’t mean anything. See, here is our store.”
Bewildered, I allowed him to lead me toward the entrance of a large building, before which a woman sat within a cage of crystal.
“Change pieces!” she cried at intervals, in a high-pitched voice. “Change pieces or show brasses!”
“We change our money here,” David explained. “Purchases of more than half a hektone are made on the credit system. Our brasses are identification checks. The district clearing-house keeps the complete record of each citizen’s financial status.”
I had expected to see all the products of the world spread out within. I found, instead, only a single sample of each kind of merchandise, the goods themselves being stored in warehouses. Seeing an excellent blue overcoat of fine cheviot, I paid thirty ones for it, and David ordered a similar coat to be sent to me at the Strangers’ House.
“Watch the street!” he said, as we emerged.
I perceived the passengers scrambling off the moving portion of the roadway. A moment later the track began to travel in the opposite direction.
“We reverse our streets according to the stream of travel,” said David. “The mechanism is controlled by solar power, transmitted from the Vosges.”
We journeyed for some five and twenty minutes by the new reckoning—what would have been a quarter of an hour. We changed streets frequently, and it seemed to me, although I could not be sure of it, that David purposely selected a roundabout route. At length, we stopped in front of a large building of the uniform height and style. Upon the front was sculptured a man in a laborer’s blouse with a protecting hand laid upon the head of one who cowered before him—presumably the stranger.
“I shall take you in by the basement and internal elevator,” said David, “so as to give you a glimpse of our traffic system.”
We had passed numbers of subway entrances, with gentle ramps descending into clean, white-walled passages, along which I had seen an endless series of trucks proceeding on single rails. Beneath the Strangers’ House I saw the termination of a branch line; and, as we stood watching, a porter in blue seized a small truck which had detached itself from the rail, and, with a slight push, sent it spinning into a goods elevator.
“Gyroscopic action,” explained David. “Above this is the House kitchen, connecting with the district sub-kitchen by means of a two-foot tube.”
And every now and then he would stop in the midst of his explanations and cast that searching look at me, as if to inquire whether I could be ignorant of all this.
We stepped into an elevator, David pressed a button, and the cage shot up to the top story. Opposite us was a door with a bell at the side, as in the old-fashioned apartment. David rang, and the door opened, revealing a girl about eighteen years of age, who looked at me with parted lips and an expression that was unmistakably fear.
“Arnold, this is my daughter Elizabeth,” said David, kissing her. “Arnold is under our special care,” he continued. “He comes from a very distant city outside the Federation, and is waiting to be ascribed. He knows no more about civilization than if he had just awakened after a sleep of a century.”
The girl shot a quick, dubious, searching glance at me. I met it steadily, and she turned her eyes away. Again she looked at me, and my gaze apparently reassured her, for she gave me her hand in a very unaffected manner, and we went through a living-room into a simply furnished dining-room. It much resembled one of my own century, except that the furniture was in good taste; the curves and spirals and volutes of our machine-carved chairs and tables were gone; the wall was of a plain gray, without paper or pictures; the carpet was plain, and the absence of curls and twists even on the handles of the cutlery was extraordinarily restful. Between the two rooms was a small enclosed space containing a telephone funnel with knobs and levers disposed about it, and a dumb-waiter. The table linen was of a peculiar lusterless black. Looking out of the window, I saw that the uppermost street ran past it, and occasionally the hatless head of a pedestrian appeared.
“Anything new to you, Arnold?” inquired my host, as we took our places at the table.
“Principally the color of the table linen,” I answered. “Black seems strange to me.”
“Black! Do you call that black?” asked David in surprise. “Why, that is mull, and not at all like black to me. For my part I prefer the old-fashioned white, but two years ago, when the plans to dress us in mull instead of blue were rescinded, the Wool and Linen bosses had accumulated a large quantity of mull goods in the warehouses on speculation, the loss of which would have hurt them badly—so we were asked to use mull-colored table linen.”
“Do you like chicken?” inquired Elizabeth. “It is of last year’s freezing, and I got it as a special favor, for the supply for 34–5 is not yet exhausted, and they are supposed not to draw on the new cellars. If father had told me that he was going to bring home a guest—”
“But I didn’t know it myself,” said David. “Of course, I could have telephoned, but—”
“Never do that!” exclaimed Elizabeth impetuously; and I saw the look of fear upon her face again.
A bell sounded, the shaft door clicked open, and a tray lay in the orifice. Elizabeth carried it to the table, and a well-cooked meal was smoking before us.
“You may be surprised to know that this tea was made two miles away,” said David, “in the district sub-kitchen. It came to us at seventy miles an hour. Before we had the gyroscopic attachments, fluids were occasionally spilled.”
“And how do you clean the apartment?” I asked Elizabeth.
“In the old-fashioned way,” she answered, smiling. “I am an expert with the solar vacuum and duster.”
“I believe our friend is accustomed to the existence of a servant class,” said David, laughing at me.
But there was a subdued melancholy about him, as well as about Elizabeth. The sense of it, and the constraint it bred, grew on me momentarily. After dinner the dishes were sent down the shaft, and David handed me a typical twentieth-century cigar.
“In a sense, this is one of our compromises,” he said, as we sat down in the adjoining room. “Doctor Sanson wants to forbid the use of nicotine as impairing the productive efficiency of the race. But the Council thinks the narcotic has a restraining influence—”
He broke off as Elizabeth looked at him rather significantly.
“I understand, then, that the old tendencies toward the illogical and the unnecessary have not been entirely conquered?” I asked.
“No, no!” said David emphatically. “Private apartments, for instance, instead of the phalanstery. And then the tabloid floods! The human stomach still demands bulk as well as nutriment. Still, it is claimed that with education—”
“Do you remember the legend of the man who educated his ass to live on a single straw a day?” asked Elizabeth.
We laughed; but I was still conscious of the restraint.
“Then, of course, people are too lazy, when hungry, to weigh their food and calculate it in calories,” David continued. “Doctor Sanson is fighting the abuse of protein. He claims that its decrease will set free more workers to apply themselves to more productive labor instead of food-raising, and will also lengthen the productive life of the individual. But we are still protein gluttons.”
“The chicken—” interposed Elizabeth.
It seemed to me that the girl had some serious purpose in her interruptions. I was beginning to realize that she still feared me; I wondered why.
“And you may have observed that the eternal feminine has baffled Doctor Sanson’s desire to abolish the skirt,” continued David. “In fact, human nature seems to flow on in much the same old way beneath the surface of civilization. I am inclined to think that our economic changes have not seriously amended it.”
“Father, if you are going to talk like a heretic, I shall leave you!” exclaimed Elizabeth, rising.
She left the room, and David followed her. Presently he came back alone.
“Arnold,” he began, seating himself and knocking the ashes from his cigar, “my daughter is troubled about my frankness with you. You know there is a period of necessary restraint just now, owing to the final adjustment being incomplete. Some of the oldest men remember the former régime. The Council is strict, and—in short, Arnold, I am putting my own safety in your hands because I trust you, and also because—” He broke off in confusion. “You need to know so much before you face the Council,” he resumed. “Arnold, some time I will receive your confidence, and then—well, this misunderstanding will be cleared away.”
I shook his hand warmly. “I suppose I am not permitted to leave the apartment?” I asked.
“By all means. Go where you will. Your gray uniform shows you to be an unascribed stranger, and every policeman has your photograph in his thumb-book by now. Only, remember that you must decline to enter into conversation with anyone who may accost you. Please remember this point scrupulously, for your own sake. But, Arnold, do you know, I think you can spend the rest of your day very profitably in learning to read.”
“Learn in a day?”
“To some extent. There are only thirty-five principal characters, and all the sub-characters are readily discernible as coming under these heads. I believe Elizabeth has an old spelling-book, and she will be delighted to instruct you.”
The idea aroused his enthusiasm, and a few minutes later Elizabeth had begun to give me my lesson. By supper time I had already mastered the elements, and we continued to study in the evening under the soft solar light, which, issuing from small, shaded, glass-covered apertures in the walls, made the room as bright as day.
Soon after dinner the dumb-waiter shaft clicked open and a package lay there. Inside was my overcoat.
At least, it was meant for me. But instead of the fine cheviot, I discovered a wretched mixture of cotton and shoddy. I was indignant.
David advised me to do nothing. “A stranger sometimes gets poor service,” he explained.
“It is a deliberate fraud, then?” I demanded.
He placed his hand restrainingly on my arm. “Is it worth while quarreling with the Wool Boss before you go to the Council?” he asked.
He went on to explain that each industry was autonomous, and had its own boss, elected annually by the workers, in theory, but for life in practice. The Wool Boss, like the other bosses, received one per cent upon the value of every article made by his department.
“At present our social organization is a little upset,” he explained again. “When the Russian troubles are ended we shall resume our normal life. There will be more spaciousness, more freedom ... liberty will be enlarged....”
We went to bed early. I was grateful to discover ´that the old-fashioned bed had not been sent into limbo. But then the bed, of course, antedates history.
David apologized for mentioning bedtime.
“Nine is the curfew hour,” he explained. “At nine-half the solar light goes out. It is only a temporary restriction until—” Again he checked himself.
I mused so long that the solar light, which flooded the bedroom within and made London a vivid picture in a black frame without, was suddenly turned off, leaving me to grope my way into bed in the darkness. I lay thinking of Esther, who had died so long ago, and I knew that when the first bewilderment of the new life had passed away my loss would seem as unbearable as before. I was as helpless as a savage in this fantastic city. It seemed incredible that I had been groping in the cellar that same morning.
I thought of Elizabeth and the terrified look in her eyes; I heard a city clock strike ten, and, an hour later, one, and it was long before I remembered that ten was midnight; my last resolve was to try to forget my former life and fling myself with all my power into the new. At last I fell asleep, to be awakened by the sun shining into my eyes along a canyon that stretched between the high buildings as far as I could see.
CHAPTER VII - HIDDEN THINGS
It was not until a week had passed that the first stimulus of the amazing life into which I had been plunged abated, leaving me a prey to melancholy reflections. The memory of Esther, which I had tried so hard to put away, began to recur incessantly. I felt shut off from humanity, a survival from a generation whose memory, even, had become legendary.
They seemed to understand my feelings, although they could not know their cause, and tried to keep me from brooding. By tacit understanding no references were made to my past. They accepted me as a stranger, and yet there was the same latent suspicion on Elizabeth’s part. And I could not help seeing that some heavy grief or apprehension hung over them. And I felt that I was an intruder upon it. At night I would hear David pacing his room for hours, and sometimes a groan would break from his lips.
He gave me to understand that the summons to appear before the Council might be delayed for days or weeks. It was always presented unexpectedly, and always peremptory, he said. During the week following my arrival at the Strangers’ House I never went out alone. Whenever I made the suggestion, David either volunteered to accompany me or found some excuse to detain me. In particular, he requested me to stay within doors during the four hours when he was at the Bureau, in the morning.
Finally I became almost exasperated. “You have told me that I am free,” I protested.
“And you are free, Arnold,” he answered. “It is for your own sake that I make this request of you. There are hidden things, shadows against the sunlight of our civilization, and transitory, I hope, which you would hardly understand. You must learn them by degrees, Arnold. To me they have seemed necessary in this transitional epoch; but they are hard, Arnold; hard to endure.”
And he sighed in so melancholy a fashion that I suspected one of those shadows rested on his own home.
Yes, there were hidden things, and I got no nearer the heart of them, although I had hints as to their nature. For instance, there was the Animal Vivisection Bureau. I wondered why David spoke of the Animal Vivisection Bureau, and not of the Vivisection Bureau.
I never had realized before how large a share animals played in our lives. The horse, I was told, had not existed in the British Province for a generation. Cats disappeared when the rodent virus was invented, and were now only to be found in a wild state in the woods. There seemed to be no dogs, and I did not ask David about them.
There was no social life at all. The other inmates of the Strangers’ House were lodged on the different floors and ate in common, living under the watchful care of the deputies, who occasionally came to David for advice or instructions. Our only neighbor on the top floor was a little woman with two children who had come from a northern city and intended to return as soon as passes for leaving London, which had been stopped, were again issued. Inspectors from the Children’s Bureau visited her nearly every day, always leaving her in a condition of terror, as I inferred from a remark dropped by Elizabeth. Her husband had dropped dead in the street two months before. David told me that these sudden deaths were common, and were considered a triumph for medical science.
And yet I knew that David had visitors after the solar lights went out. My room was at the end of the apartment near the street; but I heard strangers tiptoe along the passage, and whispered colloquies in David’s room. My host would appear abstracted the next morning, and watch me very thoughtfully. At such times I felt more than ever an intruder in the household.
Yes, it was a world Lazaroff would have appreciated, could he have had his wish fulfilled, to be born into it. Would his viewpoint have changed, I wondered? It was a world from which all the amenities and charities of life seemed to have been banished. I tried to lead up to that subject in my talks with David, but he appeared unable to understand me.
Was it an atheistic world? I had not ventured to question David about this. But I knew that there was no Sunday upon the calendar, and that the tenth day was the civil holiday. That day had fallen already, and endless crowds had marched through the streets, to the music of bands, to play-places in waste spots outside London. The Council supervised the games, which were compulsory. Of all the paternal regulations of the Council, this seemed to me the most arbitrary and oppressive.
“We have to keep the people under discipline,” David explained. “Once they were allowed to wander at will; but they tore up the trees and flowers and strewed paper and broken bottles everywhere.”
That was true. I remembered the public fields of my own age. I recalled how one writer had seen in them a complete indictment of democracy itself.
I was amazed and alarmed increasingly by what I saw in my journeys about the town with David: the large brass tags that gave each person his label, the occupation badges, the insolence of the whites, passing with bodyguards of blues who elbowed all out of their way. And once there came a frantic scramble to make a passage for a tall, black-bearded man in a dark-blue uniform, who passed in the midst of his retinue with clanking sword.
I had noticed these men in uniform about the streets. They strode like conquerors amid a servile populace. I learned that the tall man was Mehemet, a Turk in command of an international force, the bodyguard of Sanson, and devoted to him.
Perhaps it was as well that, before my enlightenment came, I completed a cursory survey of the new civilization. At my request David took me to one of the public schools. I was astonished to discover that no history prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. So great had been the progress in knowledge that, on opening some of the text-books, I discovered that I was quite unable to understand them.
I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the distinctive stamp of character that they produced. To prevent tutors of personality from imparting to their pupils the elements of humane tradition, David told me, the text-books were so written as to eliminate entirely the personal element in instruction, a reform that the prophet Wells had urged rather furiously, and perhaps invidiously, in his own century.
“The Council shapes each citizen’s education from the cradle to the workshop,” said David. “It is very anxious to secure precision of knowledge. For instance, it is a criminal offense for mothers to teach their children fairy stories. It is the duty of the inspectors to question children rigorously, in order to ascertain whether they are acquainted with any of this unscientific, heretical folk-lore.”
“Which has doubtless all perished,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he answered, “an immense quantity of it has come down to us, practically unchanged, through all the revolutions of the past century, and not only that but new tales have arisen. The authorities are at their wits’ end to discover who is responsible for the existence of this masonic secret among the younger generation.”
From the school we went to the workshop. On the way home we stopped at one of the open-air moving picture shows, and saw two or three dramatized versions of public affairs. Ingenious mechanism synchronized the movements of the figures upon the screen, which were in stereoscopic relief, with speeches made through the telephone funnels. These, David said, took the place of newspapers when the socialized State destroyed the printed news-sheet by the simple process of killing the advertising.
We also looked inside the district art gallery. None of the pictures antedated the year 1978, and each illustrated some phase of the new civilization in an educational way. I must not forget to say that later I found a novel in David’s home, which Elizabeth must have read in her schoolgirl days. The scene was laid in the early twentieth century, and the story dealt with the adventures of a young man of property, depicting the romance of his care-free life. A moral at the end, and copious footnotes, inserted by the Council’s order, drew attention to the improvement in the human lot since that barbarous period.
So, day by day, I waited, and my eyes were opened more and more to my environment. Daily I expected the Council summons that did not come, and daily the constraint grew. I was thinking of suggesting to David that I should be located among the other strangers in place of continuing to accept his hospitality; but before I could decide to approach him an incident occurred which revealed to me the existence of conditions which, unintelligible though they were, made me decide to approach David again with a view to a mutual understanding.
David was at the Strangers’ Bureau and would not return for at least two hours. Under Elizabeth’s instruction I had made swift progress in understanding the combinations of syllables that make up the written language. I had just begun, in fact, to master the ingenious Brebœuf system, whereby the simpler of the syllables have been combined to form the written speech of four of the five Provinces. David had told me that the Council’s inability to enforce the invented language Spekezi as the universal tongue, had been one of the severest shocks that the new civilization had received. Then came Brebœuf with his universal syllabic symbols.
Now, if the written language were merely pictorial, it could have been used to represent all the languages on earth. But since it is syllabic, and therefore depicts words instead of ideas, it was a supreme achievement to have invented a written language adapted to four tongues. The Brebœuf system is based, of course, upon the common Latin and Sanskrit elements. Brebœuf, who was one of the last of the classical scholars, was rewarded, as is well known, by being freed from the defectives’ art factories in his old age, and pensioned.
However, it was not my purpose to touch upon this matter. My interest was beginning to flag, and I was paying more attention to Elizabeth than to the lesson. I was trying to trace in her features some elusive resemblance to Esther. I was wondering whether I could ever become a normal citizen of this strange world. Suddenly the telephone funnel shouted Elizabeth’s name.
She sprang from her chair and rushed into her bedroom, which was next to the external elevator shaft. Her expression and gestures alarmed me so greatly that I ran after her. When I reached her door I saw her standing in the middle of the room, deathly white, and clenched in her hand was a knife, which she was aiming at her heart.
I ran into the room and wrested the weapon from her grasp. She fell upon the floor unconscious. All the while this was happening the funnel was shouting stridently, “Elizabeth!” “Elizabeth!” together with the string of letters and figures that completed her nomenclature.
I went to the funnel and lied to the voice. “She is not here,” I said.
“Then tell her, when she returns, that the price of the dress will be five units more, on account of the new wool schedule,” the voice responded.
Such was the half-comic ending of what had nearly been a tragedy. I revived the girl and explained the matter to her, but for some time she remained in a condition approaching collapse. When she began to regain consciousness she wept hysterically.
It was only the fear of causing David anxiety that enabled her to resume her accustomed demeanor by the time he returned. She begged me to make no mention of the matter to him, and I agreed on condition that she would never use the knife except in the last extremity. But I was working in the dark, for, though she consented to the bargain, when I begged her to tell me what it was she feared, she remained mute, shaking her head and closing her mouth obstinately.
“Will you not trust me, Elizabeth?” I pleaded.
Then, to my surprise, she looked accusingly at me. “Will you trust me?” she asked. “Will you not trust my father and me? Haven’t you news of Paul?” Her expression was indescribably beseeching.
“We don’t know who you are,” she went on rapidly. “My father trusts everybody. But I know your assumed ignorance is impossible. You don’t trust us, Arnold, and you are playing with us. You have been here three weeks and the Council has not sent for you. If you were what you claim to be you would know your danger. Trust us, and, if you are what we hoped you were, tell me about Paul. Is he safe? Is he well?”
“I never heard of him,” I stammered. “I—”
She looked at me with reproach and glided quietly away. I heard her sigh mournfully. And still I groped in a fog of mystery and could learn nothing.
