The Great Fog (12 page)

“He turned to me, his head sideways, but I am afraid I looked at him blankly. ‘Well,' he said, not wishing to expose my dullness, ‘it's quite obvious that if a creature has a profound sensitiveness to emotional states—these, I may tell you, we now know, are a form of radiation—and if he can, through his own nervous system, also pick up the wave lengths of the earth's magnetic field, what would you expect?'

“Again I could only look stupidly expectant.

“‘You are probably aware,' he continued with courteous patience, ‘that the homing instinct of birds can be thrown out completely when they fly near a radio station.'

“At last I thought I began to see light. ‘Do you mean—?'

“‘That's it exactly,' he said. ‘Of course, we can't get words, nor do we need to. But we get the impulses. I have, you see, a very shrewd and, indeed, rather sad view of the progress you, our companions as the advanced scouts of life, have made. And that brings us back to your problem, your place in this.'

“It was a question. It was
the
question. My mind had gone through another of those sudden reversals that, as in the beginning, I had found the most trying element in the strangeness of my adventure. First I had thought them human; then I had thought of them as deadly birds; then I had had to switch back again and realize that they were alternative humans, alternatives to humanity. Now I had gradually, day after day, come to feel that here was an innocent retirement, a real city of refuge, among creatures of a simple virtue and with freedom from all man's problems, childishly ignorant of progress and struggle and adventure and doubt. And now, in a moment, I had to face up to the fact that here were body-minds standing up to risks, under pressures, making experiments, exposed to dangers beside which our old-fashioned revolutions and battlefields were just nursery naughtiness.… Again he read my thought, ‘I think you're right, and don't feel that I think you're running away. As I have said, I'm not at all sure your physique could stand this mysterious, highly charged climate, and though we, on our part, would be quite ready to let you try, for we should all gain knowledge and we all believe that we—the bird leaders, and you, the mammal leaders, must one day converge and direct the life process in its further advance; yet, it is for you to choose, and your deepest wish may be your soundest guide.'

“As we continued our discussion we had come back to our old places. We were in the administrative building in his inner office. He was pacing up and down with a pendulum's steadiness. I was perched, crouched up in the window niche. We were silent. Then he came over to me and put out his queer massive hand. It was as strong as stone, and one could feel the great vitality in him.

“‘Goodby. I know enough to know that there is no chance or accident. You came here and have learned. And we have learned, too. The process we serve comes from behind all material appearance and thence it returns again. We shall all have learned—all the more if for the moment we don't quite know what to make of this particular piece of knowledge.'

“So I was to go back. I felt, I own, a moment's self-centered relief. It was better to go back to one's own kind than to live with strangers, however kind, however wise. Better to be with one's own than even with the good and the enlightened. But I take a little credit to myself that in the middle of my self-interest there did cross my mind a thought for these extraordinary hosts of mine.

“‘One question,' I said, getting up and feeling a kind of strength come to me just by asking it. But I didn't get far enough to put it into words.

“‘Thank you,' he said, ‘I had hoped you would ask that. It is, isn't it? If we let you go out, you will tell the world, and the world will come, and we shall be destroyed.' ‘Yes,' I said, ‘that's it; that's pretty sure, isn't it?'

“‘I hope we'd let you go,' he said, ‘even if the risk were all you think, for why should your side always fail when given knowledge and our side always fail when using trust? But, as it happens, that choice at present is not put before us. No one can enter this place unless we wish it. First of all, no one will ever suspect this place is here.'

“‘But surely they will fly over it?' I asked.

“‘Probably, but if they do, they will look down on such a close cloud pack that they will mistake it for a snowfield.'

“‘But then they'll come across the snow with motor sleds,' I suggested.

“‘No, I repeat. It's impossible for anyone to enter this place unless we wish it. That is one of our simplest initial discoveries, made when we were seeking the balance I told you of, between the radioactivity of parts of the ground here and of the cosmic radiation that pours in on this spot. As you've seen, we use them for our work to balance one against the other. But to prevent intrusion we could use them together. Then no one could enter. The semicircular canals of the ear on which the balance of all mammals depends work through a liquid acting as a spirit level. Tip that to the slightest degree, and it is impossible for the person so touched to stand straight. He has no choice but to lie on the ground in hopeless vertigo. If we direct a band of a particular radiation to the crater rim, no one can cross that frontier, and, if we choose, we have only to alter the wave length a little while he lies there and his whole nervous system will be put out of gear. All memory, all will, and all consciousness, must vanish. But no permanent damage is done. The moment we raise the barrage, the man can recover, though probably he will have a great deal of amnesia and so will not be able to remember why he had come. Of course, if he was too long exposed, his recovery would be dubious.'

“‘You're safe,' I said. ‘I think so,' he replied. ‘I think life intends us to work on our own a little longer, so that we may have more to give when the time comes for our meeting.'

“And then I saw the third eyelid flutter across that bright, seemingly expressionless eye. ‘And of course,' the level quacking went on, ‘of course, we have the psychological defense before there will be any need for the defense of advanced physics. You see, if you will run over your story in your mind, you will realize that no one will believe you, anyhow.'”

“That's the question,” said my yarner, suddenly getting up. He put out his hand.

“Well, thank you for letting me tell you my story. No, of course, I don't want anything. I only want you to answer one question; you don't believe a word of it? You're the dozenth person I've told the story to. I tell it once a year, on the anniversary of my ejection from paradise. ‘Eden on Ice,' I call my story. You'll own that, beside it, Shangri-La isn't even small beer?”

“Yes,” I said anxiously, hurriedly. “Yes, it leaves Tibet and all that cold or tepid or—”

“Yes,” he said, “I knew you'd say that; they all do. But the question, you know, isn't that. The question I ask all of them is, just this,
DO YOU BELIEVE A WORD OF IT
?”

He looked at me with a straining anxiety I found more painful every moment. This man, this harmless nice fellow, desperately wanted me to believe this was a true story. It would mean, literally, an immense amount to him if I could truthfully say I believed it. I tried. The words stuck. It just couldn't be. I didn't have anything to say.

“The bird was a prophet, too,” he said. “I didn't know it would mean so much. I think I'd rather have had an albatross around my neck. Good night.”

And he was gone. But if he ever had had an albatross around his neck, then I was his wedding guest—certainly after a strange night, in which my dreams were lit by low clouds on which baleful fires flickered and sank.

“A sadder” if not “a wiser man I rose the morrow morn.”

“DESPAIR DEFERRED …?”

Miss Potts put down Pollard's summary of Kretschmer's
Psychophysical Types
. For the fifth time she had read the passage beginning, “The Picnic type invariably associates a full and rounded physique with a cheerful, resilient disposition.” But, as her eye scanned the line, her ear listened to something quite different. It continued to echo with something she had been discussing half an hour ago when she had left the common room.

Miss Potts was not “Picnic.” She was hawklike. Her body was not upholstered so as to be resilient. Her forte was not bounce, but grip. Indeed, her mind, like a bird's claws, once it had taken hold, found it very hard to let go. She was tall, distinguished, her friends said, and she sometimes said it to herself when trying to arrange herself in front of the mirror. She whispered it only to stop the other whisper which she knew her not-friends sometimes exchanged: that she was gaunt; “awfully nice, of course, but really rather overtense, don't you think?” After all, it's no use simply waiting to bounce back if you are not pneumatic. You've just got to hang on and see that you are not pelted off your perch. But then you must fix your mind and not let it slip. She must concentrate her attention on this science of personality. That would give her detachment. Perhaps she'd do better with the passage about the type nearest her own. She turned to the description of the Asthenic type. It was—in its successful examples—very retentive. It didn't just bob up and come back. This type stuck it out. But then, of course, it could concentrate its attention. And that, it was quite clear, Miss Potts couldn't do.

This time she didn't even put the book down. She simply let it sag on her lap. Her eyes went out of focus; her ear, like a badly adjusted phonograph, slipped back into the old groove of the record and ground out the same passage with exasperating repetition. “Well” (what a queer word with which to start things, last fossil of an extinct optimism), “well, it's really all up. We've got to face facts. There's nothing more we can do.” She had come away from the common room when for the third time the discussion, so affable and so futile, so reasonable and frank on the surface, so just-under-the-surface panicky, had come around to that helpful conclusion.

The common room at Batscombe School was, Miss Potts was used to thinking, perhaps the best clearinghouse for intelligent views in the whole country. When she had joined the school staff she had felt that, in a way, she had reached, if not the top of the tree, at least quite a remarkable elevation. Where else would you meet birds of so many feathers, of such wide ranges of flight, and so voluble? Everything was discussed: nothing was taboo. Here was the peak of progressive education.

Miss Potts came from St. Margaret's, Oxford. She was the elder daughter of a widowed lawyer, who had been proud of his angular child. “Bits of her mind,” he used to say to himself, “are almost a man's.” So, when she wanted to take up education seriously, off she went to Oxford. Yet Oxford didn't quite do. The air, ten years ago, had been full of rumors that the older universities were really out of date. Miss Potts threw in her lot with the Progressives. Oxford even scorned psychology. So, once the break was made, Miss Potts went all out for Freud and Freedom. But though bits of her mind may have been masculine, nearly all her body was feminine. However progressive, the mixture is very seldom conducive to peace of mind. Miss Potts wanted to be free, but free for what? Free to be alone? Hardly; indeed, to be frank, not at all. Free, of course, to find linking easy. And that was far more easily said than done. Even when she had settled in Batscombe—with the highest if most discreetly screened hopes—she found, at least for herself, at least for distinguished women with largely masculine minds, that there was a great deal more talking than doing. Again and again, as she brightly, candidly, openly discussed the psycho-physical problem with some very intelligent young male master—for Batscombe was, of course, rigidly coeducational—she saw what a gap yawned between words and acts. Indeed, as she pressed on (for wasn't she a psychologist, trained to observe?), she could not doubt that she saw in young Harold's face that slight rigidity of the cheek muscles which unmistakably indicate the stifled but all-the-more exhausting yawn and, even worse, that slight swivel of the eye as that young, none-too-well-educated Miss Brown ran in laughing loudly.

After three years Miss Potts had discussed the whole of life with everyone. And, as far as it meant living, as far as it meant having any more actual experience than at an Anglican girls' school, it was just as though she had never been a Progressive, had never read a line of Freud, had never discussed anything but topics proper to a maiden aunt. This, at Batscombe, was serious. That is not to say it was not a laughing matter. That was precisely why it was so serious. For, if you did not have an affair at Batscombe, it was almost as bad as though, at a good old-fashioned “finishing school,” your French accent was too English. Those whose accent and idiom were perfect made amusing little
mots
about you behind your back. Yet Batscombe was in the first flight of progress and Miss Potts had gone on drawing an astringent comfort from that. Granted, she might not have made the grade among the residents themselves, yet there she was. The intellectual, scholastic world, if unwillingly, looked up to Batscombe, she was sure, and anyone on its staff was a distinct figure, above the crowd. And even if you could not cash in on all the liberties you preached, well, after all, wasn't there something finer in that anyhow? Though you might not get any of the beer, you could play skittles with other pompous people's convictions and scornfully tell them what you thought of their “opium.”

Indeed, once or twice, when she had been asked during vacations to address small groups of inquirers at Hampstead, she had tried (and brought off, she believed), as a sort of peroration for Progressives, those long passages from Shaw and Russell. One was G.B.S.'s aphorism: He who seeks for new liberties for others will not, before they are openly granted for all, prejudice his case with the public by prematurely availing himself of a special license. She culminated with “Bertie's” grand slam: “Only on the Foundation of an unyielding Despair can the Soul's habitation be built.”