by Philip Wylie
Gaunt nodded. “A thought.”
“A good example of how mistaken and superpersonal our thinking is. The universe is brilliant. Only man’s view is dark. I decided a chapel should be brilliant also.
Light is true and natural—as the Bible tried to say. Life is light. Light is life. We are alive. All the gloomy churches, the dark monks’ cells, are places for devil worship.
Denial of life, of light. Nobody has a true sense of reality in such abominable environs.
So this little chapel is my effort to make a suitable cell for my kind of meditation. For communication. The black-robed clergy has sung a fearsome, enslaving litany of death to the living for a thousand years and more. It’s time to stop revering the grave and commence to worship Light again.”
“What happened?” Gaunt asked after a moment.
“That’s peculiar too. I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to try it.”
Gaunt gazed again at the polychromatic walls, gleaming softly, honeycombed so the senses were confused and yet, as Jim had intended, given a feeling of repose and balance, of integrated relationship. The strange chamber seemed also to possess an immense energy but energy in peaceful fixation, energy applied nowhere, doing nothing.
“In tao,” he murmured.
Jim nodded a time or two. “Autohypnosis is what most of my psychological colleagues would call it.”
“No doubt.” Jim almost left it at that. But soon he said, in a defensive tone,
“Actually, they wouldn’t try to sum up the whole of human speculation on the nature of Nature, make a room-sized symbol of that, and sit in it to see what happened.”
“No. They’d think that would be like going to a witch doctor. Or a spiritualist. A medium.”
“Funny! And typical of every civilization. People always imagine that whatever they believe is it. Nobody else, so far as they are concerned, ever knew anything truer or more real than whatever they happen to think. Nobody ever hit on a valid, different idea.
Millenniums of reflection and experiment—especially in the Orient—are tossed aside with a word, by some Columbia Ph.D. in Behaviorism. ‘Mysticism,’ he says. Knowledge, in his opinion, is a gathering river; if you’re at his contemporary bend in it, you know all.
A few selective glances backward and you’ve mastered the whole flow. He lives now; he is ‘educated’; ergo, a smarter man never breathed. Phooie! It’s entirely possible—even logical, in many ways—to assume that mankind may once have learned, and already has forgotten, the most penetrating and. important parts of wisdom. There are other routes to learning than the measurement of objects, which is science. There are other sorts of knowing than the mathematical. We may have regressed. We may by now be cerebral dinosaurs, using our brains as those big animals finally used their bodies, merely to deal and ward off terrible blows. The brain could have been meant for something else, and it could have known what it was meant for, long ago. Not to have one war after another, for hundreds of centuries, as we’ve done. Not to promulgate ideas of shame and guilt, either, as has been done steadfastly in Jesus’ name for’ two thousand years. Not to scrape up and waste every usable molecule of matter on the planet—which men have done since history shows a record. We might have been intended for something different altogether!
Anyhow, that’s the feeling I got in here. One feeling-amongst many.”
Gaunt was no longer inclined to patronize Jim’s effort. The more he considered and the more he listened the more he realized that, of all the attempts he had seen in all his trips, all the sweating of the scientists, the thunder of huge machinery, the flash of electron beams and swing of telescopes, this room represented the most original endeavor. And it took nerve. For Jim Elliot was anything but superstitious, anything but credulous; he had engaged on the experiment with the indubitable realization that it was very near the edge of folly.
Because he knew Jim well and knew Jim was satisfied by his reaction to the prismatic chamber, Gaunt said quietly, with a twinkle in his eyes, “And the sixty-four dollar question?”
Jim shook his head. “Nothing. I haven’t got the slightest hint. I’ve got an immense impression of things wrong with humanity. But as to what happened to the women—no.”
“I’ll try it.”
“Will you?”
Gaunt looked at tile curving walls and smiled gently. “Sure. Why not? I’ll pray in your chapel, Jim, and see what answer this poor dumb brain hears.”
That next night Gaunt sat in the strange place. He had many sensations, many fantasies, many bizarre ideas; of these, some had never before passed through his head.
But nothing was explained to him and no new course of behavior suggested itself to him.
When, toward morning, Jim looked in to see what he was doing, he found the philosopher lying on the floor, asleep.
17
A LADY RECOVERS BUT A MULTITUDE FALLS ILL.
Paula Gaunt washed her hair and put on a dress. It was the first time she had worn a dress in months and she enjoyed the feeling it gave her. With Kate gone, she had an afternoon of sewing and mending to do and dinner to prepare. Both were occupations she had evaded in the past. So she was a little surprised to find her mind was planning the work on the children’s clothes and the meal with discernible if slight pleasure. It was not aptitude but inclination that she had lacked.
Before she went downstairs she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. Her hair was definitely gray, in spots, now that she no longer dyed it; but she was still attractive. A college boy wouldn’t want her if he were a normal college boy. A man of fifty, looking at her smooth skin, her bright eyes, her vigorous body, might see she was desirable, even without beige-copper hair. That, she knew now (as now she knew so many thing about herself), had not been kept dyed primarily to make herself appealing to men. She had maintained its color because, somewhere within herself, she’d felt it gave her a burning, acquisitive look, a look of incomplete satisfaction. It was a challenge and a dare, an appeal and a threat. It was part of the concealed, unknown masculineness of her.
But that part of Paula had been assimilated into her aware mind; she had no further need for unconscious expression.
She was satisfied to be a woman.
That was a great achievement. Not many women she’d known were satisfied; yet, of the dissatiate, few had any inkling of the causes of their restlessness. Paula had grown beyond adolescence, not with a psychiatrist’s help, but by the harder road of experience, candor and self-analysis.
She would live out her days unable to do more than recognize the sensations of maturity: there were no men. She would in any case have lived them amongst the arrested adolescents who composed the American population. As it was now, she would live in a regressing world. That was tragic. But in her uncorruptibility she had a surer power than what is called “strength” by most persons. Such “strength” is masochistic, the willful flagellation of a spirit in perpetual conflict; Paula’s new power flowed of its own accord from an inner self where conflict no longer occurred.
She went downstairs and gathered up the school dresses, dresses ripped, worn through, with seams open or alterations needed. She took them out on the porch and sat in the reed divan. Her needle began to dart like a bee and the sun moved down the sky, elongating shadows on the field where Negro women hoed.
When the phone rang, Paula sighed and put down her sewing.
“Yes?”
“This is Dorothy Billings, Paula.” The voice was urgent.
“Hello, Dot. What’s doing?”
“It’s cholera.”
“What’s cholera?”
“I forgot. You skipped the confidential meeting. A lot of people around the waterfront have been getting sick, lately. And dying. The polio was about all the doctors could handle. And this thing was mostly niggers, at first anyhow. Their wells were always filthy. But it’s spreading and we got the lab reports this forenoon. Cholera. That means a new organization and I was told to call you right away�
�”
“What do you do for it?”
“That’s the point. We can’t get the new drugs now. Not in any quantity.” Dorothy Billings’s voice rose higher. “It’s an epidemic! Or the start of one! But we’ve got to handle it with old-fashioned medicine! Horrible! There’s to be a secret meeting in two hours—”
Paula felt her heart beat faster. Her brain began ticking off names of women who could handle the new catastrophe, forming committees, getting up imaginary substations, seeing herself in command. In command. Old warhorse. Old firehorse. Old fool! For part of a minute she wanted to be at the head of things, running them, battling cholera. Paula, the boss and the hero of the plague. Hero. Not even heroine. The short interval ended and the desire died away.
“I know absolutely nothing about cholera—what to do—or how to organize. The doctors must take charge.”
“But—Paula—! We’re counting on you! Lots of women are scared to pieces.
Some have already left the city!”
“I’ve got more to do than I can decently manage, right now.”
“You mean you won’t come to the meeting?”
“I’m busy.” The woman faltered. “We thought you’d head up the squads—”
“I head up too many already.”
“But this is a plague, Paula! An epidemic—!”
“They’re having ‘em lots of places. Miami’s begged for one, for decades. It hasn’t even got sewage disposal! In a couple of years more, it might have had. Too late. So what?”
“But we just naturally assumed you’d take over—”
“If I’m really needed, I’ll do what I can. Right now, I’m doing other things.
They’re important too. You’ve got plenty of organizers. It’s water, isn’t it? You boil it.
You cook the food. Find out how to protect people. The doctors will know. Then tell everybody.”
Paula went back to her sewing.
For a time her hands trembled. But her mind was calm. Cholera was merely one more thing, one in scores. An expectable disaster. Disease was rising everywhere as the drug supply dwindled. Disease spread owing to the paucity of physicians, the crowding, and the dismal living conditions.
After a time Bella Elliot walked up the drive and along the steppingstones beneath the thrinax palms to the porch.
“Hi, Paula!”
“Hello, Bella. Come on in! I’m mending.”
Bella smiled as she always smiled. Sun fell on her brown hair, making it opalescent; a breeze from the southeast stirred her curls. She was wearing a white tennis dress, just washed and neatly ironed. She examined the children’s clothes, picked up a dress, found thread and needle, and began to sew.
“Long time no see,” said Paula.
“Yes.” Bella stitched. “You look lovely today.”
“So do you. Every day.”
Bella blushed faintly. “There’s cholera downtown. You hear?”
“Just now. “
“I’ve been there for the Red Cross. You know. In the war, I was a Gray Lady.”
“I know.” Paula bit a thread. “They wanted me to head up a posse of some kind. I refused.”
“I should think you would!” Bella exclaimed sympathetically. “With all you have to do!”
“A lot of women won’t be so charitable. They’ll say I was afraid. Bella, the old jive has gone out of me. The knight-in-armor attitude. Age creeping up, I suppose.”
Bella’s hazel eyes were intent but affectionate as they studied her friend. “A good thing. There are plenty of people running away into hiding. And plenty left to take charge of the show down there.” She made a knot and set a dress aside. “There! That’ll be good until whoever wears it plays ducky-on-a-rock. I saw Kate when her sister came for her.
She stopped and said good-bye.”
It was Paula who Hushed now. Flushed, sewed a moment, studied her handiwork, and shrugged. “I sent her away. Kate was a disturbing factor around here. She disturbed me, personally, in a way I didn’t know I could be disturbed.”
“Yes.”
Paula looked up sharply. ‘‘You mean, you knew?”
“I guess I always did. You don’t mind my saying I was glad when I found out she was going to move away and live with her sister?”
“Nope.” Paula thought it over and laughed. “Darling, you certainly give out a lot of wrong impressions! In an innocence contest, you’d take first place.”
Bella laughed too, then. “The mousy type! If I didn’t have bright eyes and shiny hair, even Jim wouldn’t have ever seen me. Poor Jim! But, after all, Paula! I was on a psychoneurotic ward for years during the second war. If there’s anything I don’t know about what’s inside people—men or women—it’s just because even crazy people haven’t discovered it yet. Besides, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a siege of crushes myself. You outgrow it—”
“In some cases,” Paula answered dryly, “at a ripe old age.”
They smiled at each other.
Before the Disappearance, each had been the “best” friend of the other. For two years they had drifted apart. Now, gazing into each other’s eyes, smiling in a certain way, they were what they had been for so long. Paula sighed gently.
But Bella chuckled. “Let’s have a highball. I’ve got something strange to tell you.”
Over the drink, Bella began, “I’ve been dreaming. About the men.”
‘Who doesn’t?”
“I don’t mean that kind of dreaming. Something odd. It’s been going on for weeks and weeks and weeks! First it wasn’t even about the men. I just kept dreaming, every night, of a huge, bright ornament, like a Christmas-tree gadget. A star, all colors, but as big as a house.”
“It sounds attractive.”
“It was. Then I saw Jim, inside it. Then, a few nights later, Gordon. Then Jim and Gordon. And, one night, your Bill!”
Paula started. “Bill? Wrapped up in a colored star?”
“Something of that sort. I can’t describe it. But it seemed as if they were all trying to talk to me. And then, nights went by. Pretty soon I began to see lots of people. And places, Paula! My house and your house and Miami and everything. Only—” she paused and her voice dropped—“it was different.”
“How?”
“Well, I’ll explain. Though I haven’t told a soul, because I’m simply terrified of what it may mean. Paula! Both our places were all tangly and overgrown. It looked as if ours had been kept up for a while and then not. But yours was a mess!” She nodded toward the long rows of vegetables where the pines and palmettos had once grown.
“Nothing like this. Trees down. Vines. And your gardener was doing work indoors, for Bill.”
“For Bill? I don’t understand.”
“Keeping house, a little. Doing the wash. And Bill, in the dreams, was writing all the time. Do you know what on? Reports on the work of all the scientists in the country, trying to get us back!”
“Bella!”
“Well— wouldn’t Bill be doing something like that? I mean if what happened to us also happened to them? Miami was entirely different, Paula! No fires had burned down the blocks and blocks of buildings. But in every dream it looked dreadfully tacky.
Not much traffic. Men lounging around. And pansies, going in bunches, dressed up as women. And loads and heaps of new laws and rules and ordinances that my poor Jim keeps studying. You know how neat his offices were? In my dreams, with Miss Keltner and Miss Beelan gone, they’re a shambles! And most of the men are bad-tempered, like dogs gone a little wild. They get into fights. A lot of them carry guns. They steal things, in broad daylight. Jim is so worn and haggard and frightened all the time! So is your Bill.
They’ve had a lot of strikes and, I guess, rebellions. Because sometimes I see what Jim reads in his newspaper. It’s only four pages thick. And it’s usually about revolts. Even the National Guard rebelled, somewhere, and shot up a whole town. Gordon still goes to school. He has a man teacher. But they pick up all the schoolb
oys in a bus now, and the bus driver always has a man next to him with a rifle. Little boys aren’t safe any more.
Imagine!” Bella shuddered.
Paula looked at her thoughtfully. “And you think what you’ve dreamed is real?”
“Paula, I don’t know! That’s why I decided to tell you—as soon as I realized you were your old self again.”
“A new self,” Paula replied moodily. “Not that it matters any more.” She shrugged. “How could our world also be their world? And different? And separate?”
Bella shook her head. “I just think, most of what I dream is so logical. It’s what would happen if it were them, instead of us. Of course, there are some things I dream about that simply couldn’t be.” She smiled mischievously. “Like, I dreamed once that Reverend Connauth called on Jim, and you know what he was doing? He was boasting, positively boasting, of having had a lurid affair with a blonde, years ago, when he was first married to Berthene! That couldn’t have been anything but my nasty mind—!”
“Yes, it could!” Paula said in a suddenly tense tone. “Because he did have!
Berthene told me, one day when I was in the dumps. Told me, to get my mind off myself.
It did too. I was dumfounded—and touched. The minister really had that affair, Bella, and you didn’t know about it or imagine it was possible! In a world without women—! Who knows? Even a clergyman might get boasting of a thing like that! Bella, I can hardly dare to think it, but your dreams might be true! They may be somewhere—even here—alive, separated, like us! Oh, darling!” Paula burst into tears.
“I hoped you’d think that. I was afraid to tell you, though—”
The other woman controlled herself. “What else?” she asked excitedly. “What else did you dream?”
