The Magus - John Fowles [94]
61
I rewound my watch; and in precisely twenty minutes the same three Germans in their "uniforms" came back into the cell. The black clothes made them look more aggressive, more fascist, than they were; there was nothing particularly brutal about their faces. Adam stood in front of me; in his hand he carried an incongruous small grip. "Please... not fight." He set the grip on the table and fished inside it; came up with two pairs of handcuffs. I held out my wrists contemptuously and allowed myself to be linked to the other two beside me. Now he produced a curious black rubber mouthmask; concave, with a thick projection that one had to bite. "Please... I put this on. No hurt." We both hesitated a moment. I had determined that I wouldn't fight, that it would be better to keep cool and wait until a time when I could hurt someone I really wanted to hurt. He cautiously held out the rubber gag, and I shrugged. I took its black tongue between my teeth; a taste of disinfectant. Adam expertly fastened the straps behind. Then he went back to the case for some wide black adhesive, and taped the edges of the gag against my skin. I began to wish I had shaved. The next move took me by surprise. They made me sit on the bed. Adam pushed my right trouser leg up to above the knee, and fastened it there with an elastic garter. Then I was made to stand again. With a warning gesture that I was not to be alarmed, he pulled my sweater back over my head and forced it down till it hung from my wrists behind me. Then he unbuttoned my shirt to the bottom and forced the left side back until the shoulder was bare. Next he produced two inch-wide white ribbons, each with a bloodred rosette attached, from the grip. He tied one round the top of my right calf, another under my armpit and over the bare shoulder. Next, a black circle, some two inches in diameter and cut in adhesive tape, was fixed like a huge patch on the middle of my forehead. Finally with one last domesticating gesture he put a close-fitting, excellently fitting, mask over my eyes. I wryly remembered that early incident, when Conchis had measured my head; even then. I was more and more inclined to struggle; but I had missed my chance. We moved off. We marched along the cistern. They stopped me at the end and Adam said, "Slow, we go up stairs." I wondered if "up stairs" meant "into the house"; or was just bad English. I toed forward and we climbed into the sun. I could feel it on my bare skin, though the blindfolding mask occluded all but the thinnest glints of light. We must have walked some two or three hundred yards. I thought I could smell the sea, I wasn't sure. I half expected to feel a wall against my back, to find myself facing a firing squad. But then once again they halted me and a voice said, "Down stairs now." They gave me plenty of time to manoeuvre the steps; more than those leading to my cell, and the air grew cool. We went round a corner and down yet more steps and then I could hear by the resonance of the sounds we made that we had entered a large room. There was also a mysterious, ominous smell of burning wood and acrid tar. I was stopped, someone fiddled with the mask. I could see. I had expected to see people. But I and my three guards were alone. We were at one end of a huge underground room, the kind of enormous cistern, the size of a small church, that is found under some of the old Venetian-Turkish castles that are crumbling away in the Peloponnesus. I remembered having seen one very like it that winter at Pylos. I looked up and saw two telltale chimneylike openings; they would be the blocked-off necks at ground level. At the far end there was a small dais and on the dais a throne. Facing the throne was a table, or rather three long tables put end to end in a fiat crescent and draped in black cloth. Behind the table were twelve black chairs with an empty thirteenth place in the middle. The walls had been whitewashed up to a height of fifteen feet or so, and over the throne was painted an eight-spoked wheel. Between table and throne, against the wall to the right, was a small tiered bank of benches, like a jury box. There was one completely incongruous thing in this strange courtroom. The light I saw it by came from a series of brands that were burning along the sidewalls. But in each of the corners behind the throne was a battery of projectors trained on the crescent-shaped table. They were not on; but their cables and serried lenses added a vaguely reassuring air of the film studio to the otherwise alarming Ku Klux Klan ambience. It did not look like a court of justice; but a court of injustice; a Star Chamber, an inquisitorial committee. I was made to go forward. We marched down one side of the room, past the crescent table and up towards the throne. I suddenly realised that I was to sit there. They paused for me to step up onto the dais. There were four or five steps leading to a little platform at the top, on which stood the throne. Like the roughly carpentered dais, it was not a real throne, simply a bit of stage property, painted black, with armrests, a pointed back and columns on either side. In the middle of the solid black panel was a white eye, like those that Mediterranean fishermen paint on the bows of their boats to ward off evil. A fiat crimson cushion; I was made to sit. As soon as I had done so, my guards' ends of the handcuffs were unlocked, then immediately snapped onto the armrests. I looked down. The throne was secured to the dais by strong brackets. I mumbled through the gag, but Adam shook his head. I was to watch, not to speak. The other two guards took up positions behind the throne, on the lowest step of the dais, against the wall. Adam, like some mad valet, checked the handcuffs, pulled down the shirt I had tried to shrug back onto my left shoulder, then went down the steps to the ground. There he turned, as if to the altar in a church, and made a slight bow; after which he went round the table and out through the door at the end. I was left sitting with the silent pair behind me and the faint crackle of the burning torches. I looked round the room; forced myself to observe it dispassionately. There were other cabbalistic emblems. On the wall to my right a black cross--not the Christian cross, because the top of the upright was swollen, an inverted pear shape; to the left, facing the cross, was a deep red rose, the only patch of colour in the black and white room. At the far end, over the one large door, was painted in black a huge left hand cut off at the wrist, with the forefinger and little finger pointing up and the two middle fingers holding down the thumb. The room stank of ritual; and I have always loathed rituals of any kind. I kept repeating the same phrase to myself: keep dignity, keep dignity, keep dignity. I knew I must _look_ ridiculous with the black cyclops eye on my forehead and the white ribbons and the rosettes. But I somehow had to contrive not to be ridiculous. Then my heart jolted. A terrifying figure. Suddenly and silently in the doorway at the far end, Herne the Hunter. A neolithic god; a spirit of darkness, of northern forest, of a time before kings, as black and chilling as the touch of iron. A man with the head of a stag that filled the arched door, who stood silhouetted, giant, unforgettable image, against the dimly lit whitewashed wall of the corridor behind. The antlers were enormous, as black as almond branches, many-tined. And the man was in black from head to foot, with only the eyes and the nostril ends marked in white. He imposed his presence on me, then came slowly down the room to the table; stood centrally and regally behind it for another long moment, then moved to the extreme left end. By that time I had noted the black gloves, the black shoes beneath the narrow _soutane_-like smock he wore; that he had to move slowly because the mask was slightly precarious, being so large. The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself. Another figure appeared, and paused, as they were all to do, in the archway. This time it was a woman. She was dressed in traditional English witch costume; a brimmed black-peaked hat, long white hair, red apron, black cloak, and a malevolent mask; a beaked nose. She hobbled, bentbacked, to the right end of the table and set the cat she was carrying on it. It was dead, stuffed in a sitting position. The cat's glass eyes were on me. Her black and white eyes. And the stagman's. Another startling figure: a man in a crocodile head--a bizarre maned mask that projected forwards, more Negroid than anything else, with ferocious white teeth and bulging eyes. He hardly paused, but came swiftly to his place beside the stag, as if the wearer was uncomfortable in costume; unused to such scenes. A shorter male figure came next: an abnormally large head in which white cube teeth reached in a savage grin from ear to ear. His eyes seemed buried in deep black sockets. Round the top of his head there rose a great iguana frill. This man was dressed in a black poncho, and looked Mexican; Aztec. He moved to his place beside the witch. Another woman figure appeared. I felt sure ft was Lily. She was the winged vampire, an eared bat head in black fur, two long white fangs; below her waist she wore a black skirt, black stockings, black shoes. Slim legs. She went quickly to her place beside the crocodile, the clawed wings held rigidly out, bellying a little in the air, uncanny in the torchlight; a great flickering shadow that darkened the cross and the rose. The next figure was African, a folk horror, a corn-doll bundle of black strips of rag that hung down to the ground in a series of skirted flounces. Even the head mask was made of these rags; with a topknot of three white feathers and two huge saucer eyes. It appeared armless and legless, and indeed sexless, some ultimate childish nightmare. It shuffled forward to its place beside the vampire; added to the chorus of outrageous stares. Then came a squat succubus with a Bosch-like snout. The following man was by contrast mainly white, a macabre Pierrot-skeleton; echo of the figure on the wall of my cell. His mask was a skull. The outline of the pelvis had been cleverly exaggerated; and the wearer had a stiff, bony walk. Then an even more bizarre personage. It was a woman, and I began to doubt whether, after all, the vampire was Lily. The front of her stiffened skirt had the form of a stylized fishtail, which swelled up into a heavy pregnant belly; and then that in turn, above the breasts, became an up-pointed bird's head. This figure walked forward slowly, left hand supporting the swollen eight-months' belly, right hand between the breasts. The beaked white head with its almond-shaped eyes seemed to stare up towards the ceiling. It was beautiful, this fish-woman-bird, strangely tender after the morbidity and threat of the other figures. In its upstretched throat I could see two small holes, apertures for the eyes of the real person beneath. Four more places remained. The next figure was almost an old friend. Anubis the jackal head, alert and vicious. He strode lithely to his place, a Negro walk. A man in a black cloak on which were various astrological and alchemical symbols in white. On his head he wore a hat with a peak a yard high and a wide nefarious brim; a kind of black neck-covering hung from behind it. Black gloves, and a long white staff surmounted by a circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth. Over the face there was no more than a deep mask in black. I knew who it was. I could see the gleaming eyes and the implacable mouth. Two more places at the centre. There was a pause. The rank of figures behind the table stared up at me, unmoving, in total silence. I looked round at my guards, who stared ahead, like soldiers; and I shrugged. I wished I could have yawned, to put them all in their place; and to help me in mine. Four men appeared in the white corridor. They were carrying a black sedan chair, so narrow that it looked almost like an upright coffin. I could see closed curtains at its sides, and in front. On the front panel was painted in white the same emblem as the one above my throne--an eight-spoked wheel. On the roof of the sedan was a kind of black tiara, each of whose teeth ended in a white meniscus, a ring of new moons. The four porters were black-smocked. On their heads they had grotesque masks--witch-doctor faces in white and black and then rising from the crown of each head enormous vertical crosses a yard or more high. Instead of breaking off cleanly the ends of the arms and the upright of these crosses burst out in black mops of rag or raffia, so that they seemed to be burning with black flame. They did not come directly to the centre of the table, but as if it was some host, some purifying relic, carried their coffin-sedan round the room, up the left side, round in front of my throne, between me and the table, so that I could see the white crescent moons, the symbols of Artemis-Diana, on the side-panels, then on down the right side to the door again and then finally back to the table. The poles were slipped out of the brackets, and the box was lifted forward to the central empty place. Throughout, the other figures remained staring at me. The black porters went and stood by the brands, three of which were almost extinguished. The light was getting dim. Then the thirteenth figure appeared. In contrast to the others he was in a long white smock or alb that reached to the ground; whose only decoration consisted of two black bands round the end of the loose sleeves. He carried a black staff in red-gloved hands. The head was that of a pure black goat; a real goat's head, worn as a kind of cap, so that it stood high off the shoulders of the person beneath, whose real face must have lain behind the shaggy black beard. Huge backswept horns, left their natural colours; amber glass eyes; the only ornament, a fat blood-red candle that had been fixed between the horns and lit. I wished I could speak, for I badly needed to shout something debunking, something adolescent and healthy and English; a "Doctor Crowley, I presume." But all I could do was to cross my knees and look what I was not--unimpressed. The goat figure, his satanic majesty, came forward with an archidiabolical dignity and I braced myself for the next development: a black mass seemed likely. Perhaps the table was to be the altar. I realised that he was lampooning the traditional Christ figure; the staff was the pastoral crook, the black beard Christ's brown one, the blood-red candle some sort of blasphemous parody of the halo. He came to his place, the long line of black-carnival puppets stared at me from the floor. I stared down the line: the stag-devil, the crocodile-devil, the vampire, the succubus, the birdwoman, the magician, the coffin-sedan, the goat-devil, the jackal-devil, the Pierrot-skeleton, the corn doll, the Aztec, the witch. I found myself swallowing, looking round again at my inscrutable guards. The gag was beginning to hurt. In the end I found it more comfortable to stare down at the foot of the dais. Perhaps a minute passed like that. Another of the brands stopped flaming. The goat figure raised his staff, held it up a moment, then made to lay it on the table in front of him; but he must have got it caught in something because there was a comforting little hitch in the stage business. As soon as he had managed it, he raised both hands sacerdotally, but fingers devil-horned, and pointed at the corners behind me. My two guards went to the projectors. Suddenly the room was flooded with light; and, after a moment of total stillness, flooded with movement. Like actors suddenly offstage, the row of figures in front of me began removing their masks and cloaks. The cross-headed men by the brands turned and took the torches and filed out towards the door. But they had to wait there, because a group of twenty or so young people appeared. They came in loosely, in ordinary clothes, without any attempt at order. Some of them had files and books. They were silent, and quickly took their places on the tiered side benches to my right. The men with the torches disappeared. I looked at the newcomers--German or Scandinavian, intelligent faces, students' faces, one or two older people among them, and three girls, but with an average age in the early twenties. Several of the men I recognised from the incident of the ridge. All this time the row of figures behind the table were disrobing. Adam and my two guards moved about helping them. Adam laid cardboard folders with white labels in each place. The stuffed cat was removed, and the staffs, all the paraphernalia. It was done swiftly, well rehearsed. I kept flashing looks down the line, as one person after another was revealed. The last arrival, the goathead, was an old man with a clipped white beard, dark grey-blue eyes; a resemblance to Smuts. Like all the others he studiously avoided looking at me, but I saw him smile at Conchis, the astrologer-magician beside him. Next to Conchis appeared, from behind the birdliead and pregnant belly, a slim middleaged woman. She was wearing a dark grey suit; a headmistress or a business woman. The jackal head, Joe, was dressed in a dark blue suit. Anton came, surprisingly, from behind the Pierrot-skeleton costume. The succubus from Bosch revealed another elderly man with a mild face and pince-nez. The corn doll was Maria. The Atzec head was the German colonel, the pseudo Wimmel of the ridge incident. The vampire was not Lily, but her sister; a scarless wrist. A white blouse, and the black skirt. The crocodile was a man in his late twenties. He had a thin artistic looking beard; a Greek or an Italian. He too was wearing a suit. The stag head was another man I did not know; a very tall Jewish looking intellectual of about forty, deeply tanned and slightly balding. That left the witch on the extreme right of the table. It was Lily, in a long-sleeved high-necked white woollen dress. I watched her pat her severely chignoned hair and then put on a pair of spectacles. She bent to hear something that the "colonel" next to her whispered in her ear. She nodded, then opened the file in front of her. Only one person was not revealed: whoever was in the coffin-sedan. I sat facing a long table of perfectly normal-looking people, who were all sitting and consulting their files and beginning to look at me. Their faces showed interest, but no sympathy. I stared at Rose, but she stared back without expression, as if I were a waxwork. I waited above all for Lily to look at me, but when she did there was nothing in her eyes. She behaved like, and her position at the end of the table suggested, a minor member of a team, of a selection board. At last the old man with the clipped white beard rose to his feet and a faint murmuring that had begun among the audience stopped. The other members of the "board" looked towards him. I saw some, but not many, of the "students" with open notebooks on their laps, ready to write. The old man with the white beard gazed up at me through his gold-rimmed glasses, smiled, and bowed. "Mr. Urfe, you must long ago have come to the conclusion that you have fallen into the hands of madmen. Worse than that, of sadistic madmen. And I think my first task is to introduce you to the sadistic madmen." Some of the others gave little smiles. His English was excellent, though it retained clear traces of a German accent. "But first we must return you, as we have returned ourselves, to normality." He signed quietly to my two guards, who had come back beside me. Deftly they untied the rosetted white ribbons, pulled my clothes back to their normal position, peeled off the black forehead patch, turned back my pullover, even brushed my hair back; but left the gag. "Good. Now... if I may be allowed I shall first introduce myself. I am Dr. Friedrich Kretschmer, formerly of Stuttgart, now director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Idaho in America. On my right you have Dr. Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne, whom you know." Conchis rose and bowed briefly to me. I glared at him. "On his right, Dr. Mary Marcus, now of Edinburgh University, formerly of the William Alanson White Foundation in New York." The professional-looking woman inclined her head. "On her right, Professor Mario Ciardi of Milan." He stood up and bowed, a mild little frog of a man. "Beyond him you have our charming and very gifted young costume designer, Miss Moira Maxwell." "Rose" gave me a minute brittle smile. "On the right of Miss Maxwell you see Mr. Yanni Kottopoulos. He has been our stage manager." The man with the beard bowed; and then the tall Jew stood. "And bowing to you now you see Arne Halberstedt of the Queen's Theatre, Stockholm, our dramatizer and director, to whom, together with Miss Maxwell and Mr. Kottopoulos we mere amateurs in the new drama all owe a great deal for the successful outcome and aesthetic beauty of our... enterprise." First Conchis, then the other members of the "board," then the students, began to clap. Even the guards behind me joined in. The old man turned. "Now--on my left--you see an empty box. But we like to think that there is a goddess inside. A virgin goddess whom none of us has ever seen, nor will ever see. We call her Ashtaroth the Unseen. Your training in literature will permit you, I am sure, to guess at her meaning. And through her at our, us humble scientists', meaning." He cleared his throat. "Beyond the box you have Dr. Joseph Harrison of my department at Idaho, and of whose brilliant study of characteristic urban Negro neuroses, _Black and White Minds_, you may have heard." Joe got up and raised his hand casually. "Beyond him, Dr. Anton Mayer, at present working in Vienna. Beyond him, Madame Maurice Conchis, whom many of us know better as the gifted investigator of the effects of wartime traumata on refugee children. I speak, of course, of Dr. Annette Kazanian of the Chicago Institute." I refused to be surprised, which was more than could be said of some of the "audience," who murmured and leant forward to look at "Maria." "Beyond Madame Conchis, you see Privatdocent Thorvald Jorgensen of Aalborg University." The "colonel" stood up briskly and bowed. "Beyond him you have Dr. Vanessa Maxwell." Lily looked briefly up at me, bespectacled, absolutely without expression. I flicked my eyes back to the old man; he looked at his colleagues. "I think that we all feel the success of the clinical side of our enterprise this summer is very largely due to Dr. Maxwell. Dr. Marcus had akeady told me what to expect when her most gifted pupil came to us at Idaho. But I should like to say that never have my expectations been so completely fulfilled. I am sometimes accused of putting too much stress on the role of women in our profession. Let me say that Dr. Maxwell, my charming young colleague Vanessa, confirms what I have always believed: that one day all our great practising, as opposed to our theoretical, psychiatrists will be of the sex of Eve." There was applause. Lily stared down at the table in front of her and then, when the clapping had died down, she glanced at the old man and murmured, "Thank you." He turned back to me. "The students you see are Austrian and Danish research students from Dr. Mayer's laboratory and from Aalborg. I think we all speak English?" Some said, yes. He smiled benignly at them and sipped a glass of water. "Well, so, Mr. Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honour, by reason of seniority simply"--two or three shook their heads in disagreement--"to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behaviour, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will--when you can recollect in tranquillity--find yourself able to deduce at least part of our cause from our effects." There were smiles all around. "Now. We have had you, these last three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run." The whole lot of them stood and applauded me. I could not keep control any longer. I saw Lily and Conchis clapping, and the students. I cocked my wrists around and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned to ask Conchis what it meant. The clapping died down. Conchis turned to the supposed woman doctor from Edinburgh. She spoke in a strong American voice. "The sign is a visual equivalent of some verbalization like 'Bugger you' or 'Up your arse.'" This seemed to interest the old man. He repeated the gesture, watching his own hand. "But did not Mr. Churchill..." Lily spoke, leaning forward. "It is the upward movement that carries the signal, Dr. Kretschmer. Mr. Churchill's victory sign was with the hand reversed and static. I mentioned it in connection with my paper on 'Direct Anal-Erotic Metaphor in Classical Literature." "Ah. Yes. I recall. _Ja, ja_." Conchis spoke to Lily. "_Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathici et cinaedi Furi?_" Lily: "Precisely." Wimmel-Jorgensen leant forward; a strong accent. "Is there no doubt a connection with the cuckold gesture?" He put finger horns on his head. "I did suggest," said Lily, "that we may suppose a castration motive in the insult, a desire to degrade and humiliate the male rival which would of course be finally identifiable with the relevant stage of infantile fixation and the accompanying phobias." I flexed muscles, rubbed my legs together, forced myself to stay sane, to deduce what reason I could get out of all this unreason. I did not, could not believe that they were psychologists; they would never risk giving me their names. On the other hand they must be brilliant at improvising the right jargon, since my gesture had come without warning. Or had it? I thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one I hadn't used for years. But I remembered having heard that one could make people do things after hypnosis, on a pre-suggested signal. It would have been easy. When I was applauded, I felt forced to give the sign. I must be on my guard; do nothing without thinking. The old man quietened further discussion. "Mr. Urfe, your significant gesture brings me to our purpose in all meeting you here. We are naturally aware that you are filled with deep feelings of anger and hatred towards at least some of us. Some of the repressed material we have discovered reveals a different state of affairs, but as my colleague Dr. Harrison would say, 'It is what we _believe_ we live with that chiefly concerns us.' We have therefore gathered here today to allow you to judge us in your turn. This is why we have placed you in the judge's seat. We have silenced you because justice should be mute until the time for sentencing comes. But before we hear your judgment on us, you must permit us to give some additional evidence _against_ ourselves. Our real justification is scientific, but we are all agreed, as I have explained, that the requirements of good clinical practice forbid us to make such an excuse. Now I call on Dr. Marcus to read out that part of our report on you which deals with you not as a subject for experiment, but as an ordinary human being. Dr. Marcus." The woman from Edinburgh got up. She was about fifty, with greying hair cut boyishly short; no lipstick, a hard, intelligent quasi-lesbian face that looked as if it had singularly little patience with fools. She began to read in a belligerent transatlantic monotone. The subject of our 1953 experiment belongs to a familiar category of semi-intellectual introversion. Although excellent for our purposes his personality pattern is without subsidiary interest. The most significant feature of his life style is negative: its lack of social content. The motives for this attitude spring from an only partly resolved Oedipal complex. The subject shows characteristic symptoms of mingled fear and resentment of authority, especially male authority and the usual accompanying basic syndrome: an ambivalent attitude towards women, in which they are seen both as desired objects and as objects which have betrayed him, and therefore merit his revenge and counterbetrayal. Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject's specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he has evolved are so frequent among so-called intellectuals that we may posit with certainty a troubled period of separation from the maternal breast, possibly due to the exigences of the military career of the subject's father, and a very early identification of the father, or male, as separator--a role which Dr. Conchis adopted in our experiment. The subject has then never been able to accept the initial loss of oral gratification and maternal protection and this has given him his auto-erotic approach to emotional problems and life in general. The subject also conforms to the Adlerian descriptions of siblingless personality traits. The subject has preyed sexually and emotionally on a number of young women. His method, according to Dr. Maxwell, is to stress and exhibit his loneliness and unhappiness--in short, to play the little boy in search of the lost mother. He thereby arouses repressed maternal instincts in his victims which he then proceeds to exploit with the semi-incestuous ruthlessness of this type. In the usual way the subject identifies God with the father figure, aggressively rejecting any belief in him. He has careerwise continually placed himself in situations of isolation. His solution of his fundamental separation anxiety requires him to cast himself as the rebel and outsider. His unconscious intention in seeking this isolation is to find a justification for his preying on women and also for his withdrawal from any community orientated in directions hostile to his fundamental needs of self-gratification. The subject's family, caste and national background has not helped in the resolution of his problems. He comes of a military family, in which there were a large number of taboos resulting from a strongly authoritarian paternal regime. His caste in his own country, that of the professional middle class, Zwiemarm's _technobourgeoisie_, is of course marked by an obsessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Dr. Maxwell the subject reported that "All through my adolescence I had to lead two lives." This is a good layman's description of environment-motivated and finally consciously induced paraschizophrenia--"madness as lubricant," in Karen Homey's famous phrase. On leaving university the subject put himself in the one environment he would not be able to tolerate--that of an expensive private school, the social transmitter of all those paternalistic and authoritarian traits the subject hates. Predictably he then felt himself forced both out of the school and out of his country, and adopted the role of expatriate, though he insured himself against any valid adjustment by once again choosing an environment--the school on Phraxos--which was certain to provide him with the required elements of hostility. His work there is academically barely adequate and his relationship with his colleagues and students poor. To sum up, he is behaviorally the victim of a repetition compulsion that he has failed to understand. In every environment he looks for those elements that allow him to feel isolated, that allow him to justify his withdrawal from meaningful social responsibilities and relationships and his consequent regression into the infantile state of frustrated self-gratification. At present this autistic regression takes the form mentioned above, of affaires with young women. Although previous attempts at an artistic resolution have apparently failed, we may predict that further such attempts will be made and that there will be the normal cultural life-pattern of the type: excessive respect for iconoclastic _avant-garde_ art, contempt for tradition, paranosic sympathy with fellow rebels and nonconformers in conflict with frequent depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships. As Dr. Conchis has observed in his _The Midcentury Predicament_: "The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such a personality is reduced to mere wax, a mere receiver of impressions; and this condition is the very negation of the basic drive in him--to rebel. It is no wonder that in middle age many such failed rebels, rebels turned self-conscious drones, aware of their susceptibility to intellectual vogues, adopt a mask of cynicism that cannot hide their more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life." While she had been speaking the others at the table listened in their various ways, some looking at her, others sunk in contemplation of the table. Lily was one of the most attentive. The "students" scribbled notes. I spent all my time staring at the woman, who never once looked at me. I felt full of spleen, of hatred of all of them. There was some truth in what she was saying. But I knew nothing could justify such a public analysis, even if it were true; just as nothing could justify Lily's behaviour--because most of the "material" this analysis was based on must have come from her. I stared at her, but she would not look up. I knew who had written the report. There were too many echoes of Conchis. I was not misled by the new mask. He was still the master of ceremonies, the man behind it all; at web centre. The American woman sipped water from a glass. There was silence; evidently the report was not finished. She began to read on. "There are two appendices, or footnotes. One comes from Professor Ciardi, and is as follows: 'I dissent from the view that the subject is without significance outside the matter of our experiment. In my view one may anticipate in twenty years' time a period of considerable and today almost unimaginable prosperity in the West. I repeat my assertion that the threat of a nuclear catastrophe will have a healthy effect on Western Europe and America. It will firstly stimulate economic production; it will secondly ensure that there is peace; it will thirdly provide a constant sense of real danger behind every moment of living, which was in my opinion missing before the last war and so contributed to it. Although this threat of war may do something to counteract the otherwise dominating role that the female sex must play in a peacetime society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, I predict that breast-fixated men like the subject will become the norm. We are entering an amoral and permissive era in which self-gratification in the form of high wages and a wide range of consumer goods obtained and obtainable against a background of apparently imminent universal doom will be available, if not to all, then to an increasingly large majority. In such an age the characteristic personality type must inevitably become auto-erotic and, clinically, auto-psychotic. Such a person will be for economic reasons isolated, as for personal ones the subject is today, from direct contact with the evils of human life, such as starvation, poverty, inadequate living conditions, and the rest. Western _homo sapiens_ will become _homo solitarius_. Though I have little sympathy as a fellow human being for the subject, his predicament interests me as a social psychologist, since he has developed precisely as I would expect a man of moderate intelligence but little analytical power, and virtually no science, to develop in our age. If nothing else he proves the total inadequacy of the confused value judgments and pseudo-statements of art to equip modem man for his evolutionary role.'" The woman laid down the paper and picked up another. "This second note comes from Dr. Maxwell, who of course has had the closest personal contact with the subject. She says: 'In my view the subject's selfishness and social inadequacy have been determined by his past, and any report which we communicate to him should make it clear that his personality deficiencies are due to circumstances outside his command. The subject may not understand that we are making clinical descriptions, and not, at least in my own case, with any association of moral blame. If anything our attitude should be one of pity towards a personality that has to cover its deficiencies under so many conscious and unconscious lies. We must always remember that the subject has been launched into the world with no training in self-analysis and self-orientation; and that almost all the education he has received is positively harmful to him. He was, so to speak, born short-sighted by nature and has been further blinded by his environments. It is small wonder that he cannot find his way.'" The American woman sat down. The old man in the white beard nodded, as if pleased with what had been said. He looked at me, then at Lily. "I think, Dr. Maxwell, that it would be fair to the subject if you repeated what you said to me last night in connection with him." Lily bowed her head, then stood up and spoke to the others. She glanced at me briefly, as if I was a diagram on a blackboard. "During my relationship with the subject I of course experienced a certain degree of countertransference. I have analysed this with the help of Dr. Marcus and we think that this emotional attachment can be broken into two components. One originated in a physical attraction for him, artificially exaggerated by the role I had to play. The second component was empathetic in nature. The subject's self-pity is projected so strongly on his environment that one becomes contaminated by it. I thought this was of interest in view of Professor Ciardi's comment." I didn't; I knew it was simply another turn of the screw of humiliation. The old man nodded. "Thank you." She sat down. He looked up at me. "All this may seem cruel to you. But we wish to hide nothing." He looked at Lily. "As regards the first component of your attachment, sexual attraction, would you describe to the subject and to us your present feelings?" "I consider that the subject would make a very inadequate husband except as a sexual partner." Ice-cold; she looked at me, then back to the old man. Dr. Marcus intervened. "He has basic marriage-destructive drives?" "Yes." "Specifically?" "Infidelity. Selfishness. Inconsiderateness in everyday routines. Possibly, homosexual tendencies." The old man: "Would the situation be altered if he had analysis?" "In my opinion, no." The old man turned. "Maurice?" Conchis spoke, staring at me. "I think we are all agreed that he has been an admirable subject for our purposes, but he has masochistic traits that will get pleasure even out of our discussion of his faults. In my opinion our further interest in him is now both harmful to him and unnecessary." The old man looked up at me. "Under narcosis it was discovered that you are still strongly attached to Dr. Maxwell. Some of us have been concerned about the effect that the loss of the young Australian girl, for which, I may also tell you, you feel deeply guilty in your unconscious, and now the second loss of the mythical figure you know as Lily, may have on you. I refer to the possibility of suicide. Our conclusion has been this: that your attachment to self-gratification is too deep to make any other than a hysterical attempt at suicide likely. And against this we advise you to guard." I gave a sarcastic bow of thanks. Dignity, keep some remnant of dignity. "Now... does anyone wish to say anything more?" He looked both ways down the table. They all shook their heads. "Very well. We have come to the end of our experiment." He gestured for the "board" to stand, which they did. The "audience" remained sitting. He looked at me. "We have not concealed our real opinion of you; and since this is a trial we have of course been acting as witnesses against ourselves. You are, I remind you once again, the judge, and the time has now come for you to judge us. We have, first of all, selected a _pharmakos_. A scapegoat." He looked to his left. Lily took off her glasses, stepped round the table and came and stood at the foot of the dais in front of me, with a bowed head; the white woollen dress, a penitential. Even then I was so stupid that I saw some fantastic new development; a mock wedding, some absurd happy ending... and I thought grimly what I would do if they dared try that on. "She is your prisoner, but you cannot do what you like with her, because the code of medical justice under which we exist specifies a precise type of punishment for the crime of destroying all power of forgiveness in the subject of our experiments." He turned round to Adam, who stood near the archway. "The apparatus." Adam called something. The other people behind the table stood to one side; in a compact group, facing the "students," with the old man at their head. Four black-uniformed men came in. They quickly moved the sedan-coffin and two of the tables, so that the centre of the room was left free. The third table was lifted in front of me, beside Lily. Then two of the men left and returned carrying a heavy wooden frame, like a door frame, on bracketed legs. Six or seven feet up, at the top of the uprights, were iron rings. Lily turned and walked to where they set it, some halfway down the room. She stood in front of it and held up her arms. Adam handcuffed her wrists to the rings, so that she was crucified against it, with her back to me. Then a kind of stiffened leather helmet, with a down-projecting back piece that covered the nape of her neck, was put on her head; a protector. It was a flogging frame. Adam then left; returned in two seconds. I could not see what he was holding at first, but he swung it loose as he came towards me. And I understood; I understood the incredible last trick they were playing. It was a stiff black handle ending in a long skein of knotted lashes. Adam unravelled two or three that were tangled, then laid the foul thing on the table, handle towards me. Then he went back to Lily--everything was carefully planned to be in this sequence--and pulled down the zip in the back of her dress to her waist. He even unhooked the bra, then folded it and the dress carefully aside, so that her bare back was fully exposed. I could see the pink lines on her skin where the strap had crossed. I was the Eumenides, the merciless Furies. My hands began to sweat. Once again I felt hopelessly out of my depth. Always with Conchis one went down, and it seemed one could go no further; but at the end another way went even lower. The Smuts-like old man came forward again and stood in front of me. "You see the scapegoat and you see the instrument of punishment. You are now both judge and executioner. We are all here haters of unnecessary suffering; as you must try to understand when you come to think over these events. But we are all agreed that there must be a point in our experiment when you, the subject, have absolute freedom to choose whether to inflict pain on us--and a pain abhorrent to all of us--in your turn. We have chosen Dr. Maxwell because she best symbolises what we are to you. Now we ask you to do as the Roman emperors did and to raise or lower your right thumb. If you lower it, you will be released and free to carry out the punishment as severely and brutally as you wish, up to ten strokes. That is sufficient to ensure the most atrocious suffering, and permanent disfigurement. If you raise your thumb in the sign of mercy, you will, apart from one last short process of disintoxication, be free of us forevermore. You will equally be free if you choose to punish, which will also demonstrate the satisfactory completion of your disintoxication. Now I ask one last thing of you: that you think carefully before you choose." At some unseen signal the "students" all rose. Everyone in the room stared at me. I was aware that I wanted to make a right choice; something that would make them all remember me, that would prove them all wrong. The charade, the masque, had become a situation in which I was fully involved. I knew I was judge only in name. Like all judges, I was finally the judged; to be judged by my own judgment. I saw at once that the choice they were offering me was absurd. Everything was fixed to make it impossible for me to punish Lily. The only punishment I wanted to inflict on her was to make her cry forgiveness; not cry pain. In any case I knew that even if I put my thumb down, they would find some way of stopping me. The whole situation, with all all its gratuitously sadistic undertones, was a trap; a false dilemma. Even then, through all my seething resentment and anger at being so mercilessly exposed in the village stocks, I had a feeling that was certainly not forgiveness of them, even less gratitude, but a recrudescence of that amazement I had felt so often before: that all this could be mounted for me, could happen to me. Not without hesitation, thinking, gauging whether I was free to choose, and feeling sure that this was not a preconditioning, I turned my thumb down. The old man signed to the guards and then went back to the group. My wrists were freed. I stood up and rubbed them, then tore the gag off. The tape ripped at the stubble on my chin, and for a moment all I could do was blink foolishly with pain. The guards made no move. I rubbed the skin round my mouth, and looked round the room. Silence. They expected me to speak; so I would not speak. I went down the wooden steps and picked up the cat. It was surprisingly heavy. The handle, of plaited leather over wood; a knop end. The thongs were worn, the knots as hard as bullets. The thing looked old, a genuine Royal Navy antique from the Napoleonic wars. As I handled it, I calculated. The most likely solution was that they would put the lights out; there would be a scuffle. The four men and Adam were by the door and it would be impossible to escape. Without warning I picked up the cat and swung it down on the table. A savage hiss. The thrash of the lashes on the deal tabletop sounded like a gun. I began to walk towards where Lily was. I never expected to get to her. But I did. No one moved, I was suddenly within hitting range and the nearest person was thirty feet away. I stood as if measuring my distance, first with my right foot forward, then with my left. I even gave the beastly thing a little shake, so that the thongs touched the middle of her back. Her face was hidden by the head protector. I swung the cat back over my shoulder, as if I was going to swing it down with all my force on that white back. I half expected a shout to ring out, to see or hear someone dash for me. But no one moved and I knew, as they must have known, that it would have been too late. Only a bullet could have stopped me. I looked round, half expecting to see a gun. But the eleven, the guards, the "students," all stood immobile. I looked back at Lily. There was a devil in me, an evil marquis, that wanted to strike, to see the wet red weals traverse the delicate skin; not so much to hurt her as to shock them, to bring them to a sense of the enormity of what they were doing; almost of the enormity of making her risk so much. Anton had said it: _Very brave_. I knew they must be absolutely certain of my decency, my stupid English decency; in spite of all they had said, all the _bandillera_ they had planted in my selfesteem, absolutely sure that not once in a hundred thousand years would I bring that cat down. I did bring it down then, but very slowly, as if making sure of my distance again, then took it back. I tried to determine whether once again I was preconditioned not to do it, by Conchis; but I knew I had absolute freedom of choice. I could do it if I wanted. Then suddenly. I understood what I had misunderstood. I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern. I was in a sunlit square and in my hands I held a German submachine gun. And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost. Whatever they thought of me; even though it would seem, as they had foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated; their dupe. That eighty other parts of me must die. All Conchis's manoeuvrings had been to bring me to this; all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the guerrilla, unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are strange times for the calling in of old debts, and even stranger prices to pay. I lowered the cat. The group of eleven, standing by the wall; standing with the sedan half-hidden in their centre, as if they were guarding it from me. I saw Rose, who had the grace not to meet my eyes. I realised that she was frightened; she for one had not been sure. The white back. I walked towards them, towards Conchis. I saw Anton, who was standing beside him, tilt forward infinitesimally. I knew he was getting onto the balls of his feet ready to spring. Joe was watching me like a hawk, too. I stood in front of Conchis and handed him the cat, handle first. He took it, but he never moved his eyes from mine. We stared at each other for a long moment; that same old stare, simianly observing. He expected me to speak; to say the word. But I would not speak. I looked round the faces of the group. I knew they were only actors and actresses but that even the best of their profession cannot in silence act certain human qualities, like intelligence, experience, intellectual honesty; and they had their share of that. Nor could they take part in such a scene without more inducement than money; however much money Conchis offered. I sensed a moment of comprehension between all of us, a strange sort of mutual respect; on their side perhaps no more than a relief that I was as they secretly believed me to be, behind all the mysteries and the humiliations; on my side, a dim conviction of having entered some deeper, wiser esoteric society than I could without danger speak in. As I stood there, close to their eleven silences, their faces without hostility yet without concession, faces dissociated from my anger, as close-remote and oblique as the faces in a Flemish Adoration, I felt myself almost physically dwindling; as one dwindles before certain works of art, certain truths, seeing one's smallness, narrow-mindedness, insufficiency in their dimension and value. I could see it in Conchis's eyes; something besides _eleutheria_ had been proved. And I was the only person there who did not know what it was. I looked for it in his eyes; but that was like looking into the darkest night. A hundred things trembled on my lips, in my mind; and died there. No answer; no movement. Abruptly I went back to the "throne." I watched the "students" go out, I watched Lily being unfastened. Rose helped her dress, and they rejoined the others. The frame was removed. Finally only the group of twelve remained. Once again, as drilled as a Sophoclean chorus, they bowed, then turned and walked out. The men stood aside for the women to lead the way at the arch and Lily was the first to disappear. But when the last of the men had gone, she came back for a moment in the archway, staring at me as I stared at her, her face without expression, without gratitude, leaving a dozen reasons in the air as to why she might have given me this last glimpse; or herself this last glimpse of me.