“Yes, you know my voice. You have known it since you were a child. But—do you know him, Emily?”
She obeyed his pointed finger and looked at the Man who Listens. She started violently. She shrank back until the seat of the chair struck the back of her knees, and she fell involuntarily into the chair. But now she could only look at the Man in the alcove.
“Do not be afraid,” said the stranger in his mocking kindness. “As you see, it is only an Image. It was always only an Image to people like you, Emily, and so always it will be, a dream, a myth, or a subject for scorn and contempt, for denial and rejection, for heaped derision and accusation, to all men. Do you understand what I am saying, you uncouth and wicked young wretch, or are you lost again in your drugged fantasies?”
“I understand,” she whispered. But still she did not look at him. She gazed only at the Man in the alcove. “That is why I came here, in the first place.”
“And you knew what you would see?”
“No. Not really.” Was that disappointment in her voice, or suffering? “I—I thought perhaps he was—”
“A doctor whom you could persuade to give you more of your drugs?”
She was small and desperately emaciated, with a narrow face blotched at the cheekbones with a raw and unhealthy color. The eyes were enormous in that sunken oval, the nostrils distended. Her lips appeared of no tint at all, but only a dry line of half-opened torment. However, her clothing was good and her small hands were delicate and well-kept. Her disordered brown hair flowed long and straight over her thin shoulders and had no lustre.
“I,” she said, and swallowed, “I don’t know what I expected. Help, perhaps.” The mad eyes shifted, dulled, fell.
“Help in what way?” His voice was harsh now, and she shrank. “Answer me, Emily, and answer truly. You cannot lie to me, for I know lies at once. You see, I invented them.”
“I—I thought things—could be different for me, if somebody listened and told me what to do.”
“But your parents, and your teachers, have been telling you all your life. Have they not?”
She wrung her fingers together and stared at them.
“They did not hate you, Emily. They loved you. Nothing of any importance was denied to you, though your parents are not rich and are only kind and simple people. Your teachers believed you were extraordinarily intelligent; they, too, gave you all they had to give. What excuse have you, Emily, for what you have done to your body, your mind and your soul?”
She continued to wring her fingers, over and over, until they reddened.
“You have no excuse, no excuse that you were orphaned or abandoned or unloved, or rejected, that you were deprived of simple necessities, that you were the object of cruelty and hate. You were given too much, until you were surfeited, until you believed you were important and deserved even more. You became discontented, and discontent leads to arrogance and to demand. Your father went into debt to give you foolish toys. Your mother denied herself to give you the clothing you desired. Your teachers strained their tired bodies to polish that fine mind of yours. But always, you wanted more and more, and were frustrated when it was not possible for anyone to give you more. What did you consider yourself, Emily? A princess with a world at her feet, as so many stupid millions of your generation, your pampered and worthless generation, also think of themselves?”
She did not speak, but slowly her head nodded, over and over.
“It was bad enough for you to destroy yourself, Emily. But you have destroyed two other girls, younger than you are. Why?”
“I—it’s hard to explain,” she whispered. “You have to know what it’s like. After awhile—they—want more money from you. And you begin to steal from your mother’s purse; you take little things and sell them; you steal from the shops, too. Then there never is enough money for—for—So, they ask you—” She swallowed desperately. “You’ve got to have it, that’s all. It’s like something eating you; you’ve got to feed it, or you’ll die. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I know only too well,” said the stranger. “I was the first to feel it. I was the one to whom you came, Emily, for your first pleasure. The first pleasure which finally became not pleasure only but a wild necessity. Was life so frightful for you that you were driven to it?”
Her face slyly lit up. She lifted her head eagerly, assent ready in her eyes, on her lips. But her glance struck, not on the stranger, but on the Man in the alcove. The malicious radiance receded abruptly from her face; she dropped her eyes again.
“It is only an Image,” said the stranger. “Only you and I are real, Emily. Speak.”
“No, my life was all right,” she muttered. “It—I mean, I only wanted some fun. Everybody talked about it; it was fun; something I hadn’t tried yet. I’d tried about everything else. You know?”
“Yes, I know. Did I not suggest all of it to you from the very beginning, you unloving, undisciplined, selfish, pampered, degraded wretch! Life had palled on you; it was so effortless, so easeful, so sheltered. Have you, in truth, not a legitimate accusation to hurl at your parents? I believe you have, Emily. They gave you all they could, and that should be accounted against them, as a blasphemy. They should have withheld; they should have demanded in return. They should have said to you, ‘This far shall you go and no further.’ But they did not say that to you. They thought that to deprive you of anything, even for the salvation of your soul, was unjust to you. Tell me, Emily. Were they stupid or were they cruel?”
The girl pondered on his words. Her face had become wizened, haglike, the hair fallen about it. She shook her head like an animated toy, and did not answer.
“Were there no realities in your world that you had to buy dreams, to steal for them, to corrupt for them?”
She frowned vaguely, as a sleeper frowns when his body notifies him that it is disturbed. “I think,” she murmured, “that it was because—because it was something different. Something to heighten sensation, something to make you free—?”
“Of what did you desire to be free, Emily?”
Her lips moved over and over, soundlessly, and sucked in and out. The light in the alcove glowed on her stunned face and in her lifeless eyes. Then she whimpered, “I guess—of myself. There wasn’t anything in me. I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to fight for—I guess. But I wanted a lot of other things, you know? I can’t explain it; I was restless all the time. Everything was dull as death. School; home; fun. I had to have something better.”
“Even sexual encounters bored you finally, did they not?”
She shivered. “My parents never knew about that. They don’t know about this, either.”
“No. You were very clever. But they will soon know.”
She gave a shrill cry, and let her head fall.
“How banal is evil!” said the stranger. “How ordinary. How undistinguished, colorless, commonplace! How low, base, silly. It has no splendor; it is not even frightful, for if it possessed frightfulness it would also possess terror, and terror increases in proportion to its abundance. Evil dulls all the senses and reduces man to less than beasthood, for beasts lack the capacity to be evil. It finally deprives man of His awful gift of free will.”
“True,” said the Man who Listens. “But not always. You will recall David the King, for instance. And he was only one.”
“Look on this woman, this degenerate, debased woman who has no valid excuse for her crimes against herself or others, except ennui. No pain drove her to this pass, no sorrow, no extremity of despair. She is the embodiment of the banality which is evil. Therefore, she is beyond your salvation. She cannot even declare that love brought her to this place in her existence, as love brought the Magdalene. She is not even worthy to be stoned. She is a nothingness.”
“She is a soul,” said the Man.
The girl had heard this exchange in the throbbing of her drug-induced madness. She had slowly lifted her head and had listened, her faded lips parted, her eyes moving from
one to the other. Finally her gaze fixed itself on the Man in the alcove.
“I heard you!” she said. “You aren’t just an Image, are you? You really are, aren’t you?”
“Yes, dear child.”
“You hear only your imagination, Emily,” said the stranger. “It is truly only an Image, a dream, fashioned by man of the stuff made by man or grown by earth.”
Emily stared at the Man.
She saw a great alcove, twice the height of a man, and as wide as the stature of a tall human being. It arched like a shell of light—and in that shell reared a tremendous Crucifix of smooth carved wood, faintly trembling with radiance. On the Cross was nailed the God-Man, carved of ivory, white as the moon, vaster than any man who had ever lived, more muscular, more masculine, and perfect in every sinew and line and curve. He lived; He appeared to move in His agony. From the heroic and serene forehead dripped drops of bright blood, and from the hands and the wounded side and the crossed Herculean feet. But above all was the majesty of the mighty face, the face of youth imbued with humanity and yet with the aloof, impersonal and remote splendor of divinity.
Pity and mercy, contemplation and force, seemed to pour like the rays of the sun upon the shriveled girl who looked upon that face, and power and fortitude. The self-willed Sacrifice hung upon the Cross, straining yet resigned, offered up by Himself, at once a King and a Lamb. Government lay on His shoulder, and humiliation strained from His body.
But it was upon His eyes that the girl lingered most fully, the great and tender eyes, glowing in their sockets, the just and tormented yet smiling eyes.
The stranger moved closer to the girl and there were two vast and crepuscular shadows rising from his shoulders, and they stirred like wings, for he was an archangel, the most puissant of all the angels, the most grand, though the glistening robes he wore were blackly shining and the sword at his side pulsed like lightning. Only his face and his hands were white, as white as death and as cold. In the folds of his garments there appeared to be glints of fire. His face was beautiful and stern and implicit with a misery and sorrow and anger beyond the understanding of man, and rage and hatred sparkled in his eyes.
“It does not live,” said Lucifer. “It is an Image. Man obliterated Him long ago and drove Him from his imaginings and from the filthy little alleys of his existence. You will observe that it is fashioned only of wood and ivory and paint. It has no verity. You and I, Emily, are the only reality. In truth, you have no reality of your own. I am all that is and all that ever will be.”
“I heard His voice,” the girl said. “I heard what you said to each other.”
“You heard only my voice, not His, for has not your generation declared that He has no voice, and that He never lived? If He endures at all it is in hidden places where the fearful pray or in the sickly brains of poets. What has He to do with your world, and mine?”
For the first time the girl felt an utter terror, beyond anything she had ever known in her short existence. She grasped the arms of the chair; she turned her feverish eyes upon Lucifer. Her mouth opened and closed, and she saw all he was, and her fogged soul crouched in dread and loathing.
“Yes,” she said. “You do exist. You aren’t a fable, a lie. You do have reality.”
“I am the reality you have made, woman, and the countless myriads of those like you, through the uncountable centuries, from the beginning of time.”
One word caught her frantic thoughts, which were hurrying through her skull like frantic mice. “I—I am not a woman, an adult. I am only eighteen years old; that’s all I am.”
“You have the body and the soul of a woman; you can marry and conceive and bear children. It is I who told your mentors that you were a ‘child,’ and not responsible for your actions and your desires and your perversions and your degradation. How eagerly they listened to me! How eagerly they all listen, the betrayers of men. But, above all, how delightedly you have listened, woman.”
She shrank from him, naked and alone, abandoned and shivering in a cold she had never felt before.
“My child,” said the Man on the Cross, “why did you come to Me?”
She had heard Lucifer’s voice, like the clashing of steel. Now she heard a Voice like the voice of a father, not the weak father at home whom she knew gave her gifts in craving for an affection she did not possess to give to anyone.
“He spoke!” she cried, and pointed to the Cross. “He spoke! I heard Him!”
“You hear Me because you sought Me,” said the Man.
She pushed herself to her feet for her awful terror of Lucifer had fallen on her like a curse again, and she did not know where to run. She looked at the Man, then she tottered to Him and fell in a small heap below Him.
“You are mad,” said Lucifer, and he stood behind her and the murky shadow of his wings lay on her body. “You have been mad for over a year, and the only relief is your drug, the drug of dreams and fantasy and far and beautiful places and strange voices. That is the only heaven you will ever know. Come with me.”
But the girl reached out and grasped the feet of the Man above her and it seemed to her distracted mind that they were not ivory but pulsing flesh.
“Save me,” she groaned. “Oh, God, save me!”
“It does not exist,” said Lucifer. “Only I exist.”
“Tell me, My child,” said the Man. “Speak.”
She laid her head on His feet. Her whisper was shrill in the room. “Everything was so empty. Just one day after another, of fun and food and money and clothes and—doing what I shouldn’t. It made me dirty, but everybody was doing it. For kicks, for laughs, for a ball. Why not? I said to myself. What else is there but what I’ve got? Just growing older, out of my teens, and being like my mother, and marrying like my mother. And,” she murmured, “having kids like me, and living in a flat house like ours full of gadgets, and having a new car every year. Just—nothing. And then I’d be old, like my grandmother, and there wouldn’t be any fun any longer. How could I stand it?”
“And no one ever told you there was anything else?”
“There wasn’t anything else. Oh, some of my teachers told me that I had to ‘advance the cause of humanity,’ but why? I had to think of myself, didn’t I? I wasn’t just living for other people. I didn’t want what they wanted!” Her cry was a scream of despair. “So, there was a way; it was fun and wonderful and when you had it you were beautiful and ten feet tall and you walked on clouds and everybody admired you and thought you—were glamorous. Nothing mattered but that.”
“Look at Me, My child. Lift your eyes to Me.”
The girl’s face was dripping with sweat and tears. Slowly she raised her head and encountered again the living eyes of the Man.
“You heard nothing,” said Lucifer, “but only your madness and your own thoughts.”
“Long have I known you,” said the Man. “Long have I followed you, and saw your emptiness and saw those who gave you that emptiness and not the bread of life. You are one of My little ones, betrayed by a plentitude of worthless gifts, by false tongues who told you you were important, more than any other generation, and that you were more valuable than all else that lived. I saw the degradation heaped on your immortal soul by those who should have been your protectors, who should have shown you the way of life and not the way of a materialistic ruin. I saw the fine buildings built for you, where no discipline was imposed upon you, and where your mind was not truly polished but darkened with sophistries.
“Above all, I saw your pain.”
“You have never had a pain; you do not know sorrow or despair; you have not been honed on any stone,” said Lucifer. “You have your pleasure, and your pleasure still awaits you. Cease this lying to yourself and thinking your own thoughts, for they have no reality.”
But Emily looked up imploringly at the Man’s tender face. “I did not look for anything else,” she said. “I won’t lie to you. I felt there was something else, but everybody said it was superstitious. I—became si
ck. I had to have someplace where I could be more than just Emily Hoyt, looking for fun all the time.”
“And you came to Me, and I am He you sought.”
She nodded her head with despairing eagerness. “I didn’t know just—who, or what. No one ever told me. But yesterday, one of my instructors—Everybody laughs at him. They call him the Mess, because he isn’t like the others. He stopped me in the hall, and he said, ‘Emily, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you’re very sick. Why don’t you go to the Man who Listens, on the hill downtown?’
“I thought he was kidding,” said the girl, holding tighter to the Man’s feet. “But I began to think. Here I was, getting ’way down in my life, such as it was, and killing myself. And then,” she faltered, “there was Charlotte and Bette, younger than me. It was like I’d just seen them for the first time, and that they were human beings like me, and sick like me. But the worst thing is that I—I had done that to them. It was like having sunglasses taken off and you saw everything in a big glare, and it burned your eyes. And I remembered all the dreams I’d been having this last week or so. Not the beautiful, romantic dreams, and the fun and feeling important. The terrible dreams.”
She laid her head on His feet again. “Save me,” she said. “Help me save Charlotte and Bette, too, more than me.”
“Lying and contemptible fool!” said Lucifer. “Weak fool, who must run to insensate wood and bone to whimper out your sins!”
“Save me,” Emily beseeched, and her shaking hands rose upon the body of the Man and touched His knees. She looked over her shoulder at Lucifer and she screamed and shuddered.
“Tell me he isn’t really there, that I’m dreaming it!” she cried to the Man.
“He exists,” said the Man, sadly. “He will always exist. It is not a dream.”
“Then tell me what I must do, to get away from him!” the girl said.
“Think in your heart what you must do,” said the Man.
She pondered, thinking, and the light was on her face but her shoulders and body lay in the shadow of evil. She began to tremble. She said, “No, how can I do that? The police, and telling my parents. They—they might put me in jail. They’ll tell everybody. I’ll be expelled, maybe. I’m a criminal; everybody will know what I’ve done to myself and the other girls. There won’t be any place to go—”
No One Hears but Him Page 27
