“A rose is a rose is a rose . . .” murmured Anna.
“Eh? How did you know what this transcription was about? Oh, you were just quoting Gertrude Stein? Well, I’ve read about her, and she proves my point. She admitted that she wrote under autohypnosis, which we’d call a light case of schizo. But she could be normal, too. My husband never is. He goes on like this all the time. This was transcribed from one of his monologues. Just listen:
“‘Behold, Willie, through yonder window the symbol of your mistress’ defeat: the rose! The rose, my dear Willie, grows not in murky air. The smoky metropolis of yester-year drove it to the country. But now, with the unsullied skyline of your atomic age, the red rose returns. How mysterious, Willie, that the rose continues to offer herself to us dull, plodding humans. We see nothing in her but a pretty flower. Her regretful thorns forever declare our inept clumsiness, and her lack of honey chides our gross sensuality. Ah, Willie, let us become as birds! For only the winged can eat the fruit of the rose and spread her pollen . . .’”
Mrs. Jacques looked up at Anna. “Did you keep count? He used the word rose’ no less than five times, when once or twice was sufficient. He certainly had no lack of mellifluous synonyms at his disposal, such as ‘red flower,’ ‘thorned plant,’ and so on. And instead of saying ‘the red rose returns’ he should have said something like ‘it comes back’.”
“And lose the triple alliteration?” smiled Anna. “No, Mrs. Jacques, I’d reexamine that diagnosis very critically. Everyone who talks like a poet isn’t necessarily insane.”
A tiny bell began to jangle on a massive metal door in the right-hand wall.
“A message for me,” growled Grade. “Let it wait.”
“We don’t mind,” said Anna, “if you want to have it sent in.”
“It isn’t that. That’s my private door, and I’m the only one who knows the combination. But I told them not to interrupt us, unless it dealt with this specific interview.”
Anna thought of the eyes of Willie the Cork, hard and glistening. Suddenly she knew that Ruy Jacques had not been joking about the identity of the man. Was The Cork’s report just now getting on her dossier? Mrs. Jacques wasn’t going to like it. Suppose they turned her down. Would she dare seek out Ruy Jacques under the noses of Grade’s trigger men?
“Damn that fool,” muttered Grade. “I left strict orders about being disturbed. Excuse me.”
He strode angrily toward the door. After a few seconds of dial manipulation, he turned the handle and pulled it inward. A hand thrust something metallic at him. Anna caught whispers. She fought down a feeling of suffocation as Grade opened the cassette and read the message.
The Security officer walked leisurely back toward them. He stroked his moustache coolly, handed the bit of paper to Martha Jacques, then clasped his hands behind his back. For a moment he looked like a glowering bronze statue. “Dr. van Tuyl, you didn’t tell us that you were already acquainted with Mr. Jacques. Why?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
Martha Jacques said harshly: “That answer is hardly satisfactory. How long have you known Mr. Jacques? I want to get to the bottom of this.”
“I met him last night for the first time in the Via Rosa. We danced. That’s all. The whole thing was purest coincidence.”
“You are his lover,” accused Martha Jacques.
Anna colored. “You flatter me, Mrs. Jacques.”
Grade coughed. “She’s right. Mrs. Jacques. I see no sex-based espionage.”
“Then maybe it’s even subtler,” said Martha Jacques. “These platonic females are still worse, because they sail under false colors. She’s after Ruy, I tell you.”
“I assure you,” said Anna, “that your reaction comes as a complete surprise to me. Naturally, I shall withdraw from the case at once.”
“But it doesn’t end with that,” said Grade curtly. “The national safety may depend on Mrs. Jacques’ peace of mind during the coming weeks. I must ascertain your relation with Mr. Jacques. And I must warn you that if a compromising situation exists, the consequences will be most unpleasant.” He picked up the telephone. “Grade. Get me the O.D.”
Anna’s palms were uncomfortably wet and sticky. She wanted to wipe them on the sides of her dress, but then decided it would be better to conceal all signs of nervousness.
Grade barked into the mouthpiece. “Hello! That you, Packard? Send me – ”
Suddenly the room vibrated with the shattering impact of massive metal on metal.
The three whirled toward the sound.
A stooped, loudly dressed figure was walking away from the great and inviolate door of Colonel Grade, drinking in with sardonic amusement the stuporous faces turned to him. It was evident he had just slammed the door behind him with all his strength.
Insistent squeakings from the teleset stirred Grade into a feeble response. “Never mind . . . it’s Mr. Jacques . . .”
Chapter Five
The swart ugliness of that face verged on the sublime. Anna observed for the first time the two horn-like protuberances on his forehead, which the man made no effort to conceal. His black woollen beret was cocked jauntily over one horn; the other, the visible one, bulged even more than Anna’s horns, and to her fascinated eyes he appeared as some Greek satyr; Silenus with an eternal hangover, or Pan wearying of fruitless pursuit of fleeting nymphs. It was the face of a cynical post-gaol Wilde, of a Rimbaud, of a Goya turning his brush in saturnine glee from Spanish grandees to the horror-world of Ensayos.
Like a phantom voice Matthew Bell’s cryptic prediction seemed to float into her ears again: “. . . much in common . . . more than you guess . . .”
There was so little time to think. Ruy Jacques must have recognized her frontal deformities even while that tasselated mortar-board of his Student costume had prevented her from seeing his. He must have identified her as a less advanced case of his own disease. Had he foreseen the turn of events here? Was he here to protect the only person on earth who might help him? That wasn’t like him. He just wasn’t the sensible type. She got the uneasy impression that he was here solely for his own amusement – simply to make fools of the three of them.
Grade began to sputter. “Now see here, Mr. Jacques. It’s impossible to get in through that door. It’s my private entrance. I changed the combination myself only this morning.” The moustache bristled indignantly. “I must ask the meaning of this.”
“Pray do, Colonel, pray do.”
“Well, then, what is the meaning of this?”
“None, Colonel. Have you no faith in your own syllogisms? No one can open your private door but you. Q.E.D. No one did. I’m not really here. No smiles? Tsk tsk! Paragraph 6, p. 80 of the Manual of Permissible Military Humor officially recognizes the paradox.”
“There’s no such publication – ” stormed Grade.
But Jacques brushed him aside. He seemed now to notice Anna for the first time, and bowed with exaggerated punctilio. “My profound apologies, madame. You were standing so still, so quiet, that I mistook you for a rose bush.” He beamed at each in turn. “Now isn’t this delightful? I feel like a literary lion. It’s the first time in my life that my admirers ever met for the express purpose of discussing my work.”
How could he know that we were discussing his “composition,” wondered Anna. And how did he open the door?
“If you’d eavesdropped long enough,” said Martha Jacques, “you’d have learned we weren’t admiring your ‘prose poem’. In fact, I think it’s pure nonsense.”
No, thought Anna, he couldn’t have eavesdropped, because we didn’t talk about his speech after Grade opened the door. There’s something here – in this room – that tells him.
“You don’t even think it’s poetry?” repeated Jacques, wide-eyed. “Martha, coming from one with your scientifically developed poetical sense, this is utterly damning.”
“There are certain well recognized approaches to the appreciation of poetry,” said Martha Jacques doggedly. “Yo
u ought to have the autoscanner read you some books on the aesthetic laws of language. It’s all there.”
The artist blinked in great innocence. “What’s all there?”
“Scientific rules for analyzing poetry. Take the mood of a poem. You can very easily learn whether it’s gay or sombre just by comparing the proportion of low-pitched vowels – u and o, that is – to the high-pitched vowels – a, e and i.”
“Well, what do you know about that!” He turned a wondering face to Anna. “And she’s right! Come to think of it, in Milton’s L’Allegro, most of the vowels are high-pitched, while in his Il Penseroso, they’re mostly low-pitched. Folks, I believe we’ve finally found a yardstick for genuine poetry. No longer must we flounder in poetastical soup. Now let’s see.” He rubbed his chin in blank-faced thoughtfulness. “Do you know, for years I’ve considered Swinburne’s lines mourning Charles Baudelaire to be the distillate of sadness. But that, of course, was before I had heard of Martha’s scientific approach, and had to rely solely on my unsophisticated, untrained, uninformed feelings. How stupid I was! For the thing is crammed with high-pitched vowels, and long e dominates: ‘thee,’ ‘sea,’ ‘weave,’ ‘eve,’ ‘heat,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘feet’ . . .” He struck his brow as if in sudden comprehension. “Why, it’s gay! I must set it to a snappy polka!”
“Drivel,” sniffed Martha Jacques. “Science – ”
“ – is simply a parasitical, adjectival, and useless occupation devoted to the quantitative restatement of Art,” finished the smiling Jacques. “Science is functionally sterile; it creates nothing; it says nothing new. The scientist can never be more than a humble camp-follower of the artist. There exists no scientific truism that hasn’t been anticipated by creative art. The examples are endless. Uccello worked out mathematically the laws of perspective in the fifteenth century; but Kallicrates applied the same laws two thousand years before in designing the columns of the Parthenon. The Curies thought they invented the idea of ‘half-life’ – of a thing vanishing in proportion to its residue. The Egyptians tuned their lyre-strings to dampen according to the same formula. Napier thought he invented logarithms – entirely overlooking the fact that the Roman brass workers flared their trumpets to follow a logarithmic curve.”
“You’re deliberately selecting isolated examples,” retorted Martha Jacques.
“Then suppose you name a few so-called scientific discoveries,” replied the man. “I’ll prove they were scooped by an artist, every time.”
“I certainly shall. How about Boyle’s gas law? I suppose you’ll say Praxiteles knew all along that gas pressure runs inversely proportional to its volume at a given temperature?”
“I expected something more sophisticated. That one’s too easy. Boyle’s gas law, Hooke’s law of springs, Galileo’s law of pendulums, and a host of similar hogwash simply state that compression, kinetic energy, or whatever name you give it, is inversely proportional to its reduced dimensions, and is proportional to the amount of its displacement in the total system. Or, as the artist says, impact results from, and is proportional to, displacement of an object within its milieu. Could the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet enthral us if our minds hadn’t been conditioned, held in check, and compressed in suspense by the preceding fourteen lines? Note how cleverly Donne’s famous poem builds up to its crash line, ‘It tolls for thee!’ By blood, sweat, and genius, the Elizabethans lowered the entrophy of their creations in precisely the same manner and with precisely the same result as when Boyle compressed his gases. And the method was long old when they were young. It was old when the Ming artists were painting the barest suggestions of landscapes on the disproportionate backgrounds of their vases. The Shah Jahan was aware of it when he designed the long eye-restraining reflecting pool before the Taj Mahal. The Greek tragedians knew it. Sophocles’ Oedipus is still unparalleled in its suspensive pacing toward climax. Solomon’s imported Chaldean arthitects knew the effect to be gained by spacing the Holy of Holies at a distance from the temple pylae, and the Cro-Magnard magicians with malice afore-thought painted their marvellous animal scenes only in the most inaccessible crannies of their limestone caves.”
Martha Jacques smiled coldly. “Drivel, drivel, drivel. But never mind. One of these days soon I’ll produce evidence you’ll be forced to admit art can’t touch.”
“If you’re talking about Sciomnia, there’s real nonsense for you,” countered Jacques amiably. “Really, Martha, it’s a frightful waste of time to reconcile biological theory with the unified field theory of Einstein, which itself merely reconciles the relativity and quantum theories, a futile gesture in the first place. Before Einstein announced his unified theory in 1949, the professors handled the problem very neatly. They taught the quantum theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the relativity theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On the Sabbath they rested in front of their television sets. What’s the good of Sciomnia, anyway?”
“It’s the final summation of all physical and biological knowledge,” retorted Martha Jacques. “And as such, Sciomnia represents the highest possible aim of human endeavor. Man’s goal in life is to understand his environment, to analyze it to the last iota – to know what he controls. The first person to understand Sciomnia may well rule not only this planet, but the whole galaxy – not that he’d want to, but he could. That person may not be me – but will certainly be a scientist, and not an irresponsible artist.”
“But Martha,” protested Jacques. “Where did you pick up such a weird philosophy? The highest aim of man is not to analyze, but to synthesize – to create. If you ever solve all of the nineteen sub-equations of Sciomnia, you’ll be at a dead end. There’ll be nothing left to analyze. As Dr. Bell the psychogeneticist says, overspecialization, be it mental, as in the human scientist, or dental, as in the sabre-tooth tiger, is just a synonym for extinction. But if we continue to create, we shall eventually discover how to transcend – ”
Grade coughed, and Martha Jacques cut in tersely: “Never mind what Dr. Bell says. Ruy, have you ever seen this woman before?”
“The rose bush? Hmm.” He stepped over to Anna and looked squarely down at her face. She flushed and looked away. He circled her in slow, critical appraisal, like a prospective buyer in a slave market of ancient Baghdad. “Hmm,” he repeated doubtfully.
Anna breathed faster; her cheeks were the hue of beets. But she couldn’t work up any sense of indignity. On the contrary, there was something illogically delicious about being visually pawed and handled by this strange leering creature.
Then she jerked visibly. What hypnotic insanity was this? This man held her life in the palm of his hand. If he acknowledged her, the vindictive creature who passed as his wife would crush her professionally. If he denied her, they’d know he was lying to save her – and the consequences might prove even less pleasant. And what difference would her ruin make to him? She had sensed at once his monumental selfishness. And even if that conceit, that gorgeous self-love, urged him to preserve her for her hypothetical value in finishing up the Rose score, she didn’t see how he was going to manage it.
“Do you recognize her, Mr. Jacques,” demanded Grade.
“I do,” came the solemn reply.
Anna stiffened.
Martha Jacques smiled thinly. “Who is she?”
“Miss Ethel Twinkham, my old spelling teacher. How are you, Miss Twinkham? What brings you out of retirement?”
“I’m not Miss Twinkham,” said Anna dryly. “My name is Anna van Tuyl. For your information, we met last night in the Via Rosa.”
“Oh! Of course!” He laughed happily. “I seem to remember now, quite indistinctly. And I want to apologize, Miss Twinkham. My behavior was execrable, I suppose. Anyway, if you will just leave the bill for damages with Mrs. Jacques, her lawyer will take care of everything. You can even throw in ten per cent, for mental anguish.”
Anna felt like clapping her hands in glee. The whole Security office was no match for this fiend.
&nb
sp; “You’re getting last night mixed up with the night before,” snapped Martha Jacques. “You met Miss van Tuyl last night. You were with her several hours. Don’t lie about it.”
Again Ruy Jacques peered earnestly into Anna’s face. He finally shook his head. “Last night? Well, I can’t deny it. Guess you’ll have to pay up, Martha. Her face is familiar, but I just can’t remember what I did to make her mad. The bucket of paint and the slumming dowager was last week, wasn’t it?”
Anna smiled. “You didn’t injure me. We simply danced together on the square, that’s all. I’m here at Mrs. Jacques’ request.” From the corner of her eye she watched Martha Jacques and the colonel exchange questioning glances, as if to say, “Perhaps there is really nothing between them.”
But the scientist was not completely satisfied. She turned her eyes on her husband. “It’s a strange coincidence that you should come just at this time. Exactly why are you here, if not to becloud the issue of this woman and your future psychiatrical treatment? Why don’t you answer? What is the matter with you?”
For Ruy Jacques stood there, swaying like a stricken satyr, his eyes coals of pain in a face of anguished flames. He contorted backward once, as though attempting to placate furious fangs tearing at the hump on his back.
Anna leaped to catch him as he collapsed.
He lay cupped in her lap moaning voicelessly. Something in his hump, which lay against her left breast, seethed and raged like a genie locked in a bottle.
“Colonel Grade,” said the psychiatrist quietly, “you will order an ambulance. I must analyze this pain syndrome at the clinic immediately.”
Ruy Jacques was hers.
Chapter Six
“Thanks awfully for coming, Matt,” said Anna warmly.
“Glad to, honey.” He looked down at the prone figure on the clinic cot. “How’s our friend?”
“Still unconscious, and under general analgesic. I called you in because I want to air some ideas about this man that scare me when I think about them alone.”
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 8
