Doppelgangers (15 page)

“Well, you can't stay quite still in this new world—at least not yet; the pendulum must be let swing slowly to rest. And that is what I am doing. I am becoming the conductor of the great slow movement, the great choragus, or dance leader of the sacred dance that finally becomes a perfect posture. I have come out and I spend my time leading this vast pattern. It seems stupid and vain to those who don't understand. I am initiating half the world to a new service, a new ritual, a new communion. I'm not only blending them, fusing them into a larger unit, into a real mankind—a thing which no one has ever succeeded in doing before. I'm blending them, fusing them as part of humanity, of human history. That, and that alone, will insure the other brazings holding fast. I'm making them understand themselves, their place, their part, not only on the world's map as it is now, but in the world's story.

“The old reformers were always talking of teaching history to the people—and in a way they were right—though I noticed that historians weren't, as a matter of fact, better citizens of the world, less provincially prejudiced, than the man in the street. And all the old dictators before the end saw that something has to be made of mankind's past story if you are to educate the present generation to develop man's future and see their destiny in it. But, you see, there were two mistakes. The first was to leave people just to get it out of books. Life—the present—will always beat the book which mumbles about the past; the past must be made to live here and now in the lives of the living. The second was to make the story, which can't fail to be a big thing now we can see back so far, end in a provincialism which was just sheer anticlimax—the bathos of a Nordic Nuremberg as the culmination of mankind.” He let out a gust of laughter. “The anticlimax of one of those monster Moscow Mechanist-Marxian Masques bellowing away all about man being an economic instrument—why, history itself laughed the whole charade out of court.

“But I'm making the masses—and don't they fall for it!—actually live through history, live it out in its fullness. I'm still only at the beginning of this experiment, and it's taking, I must own, more out of me than anything I've done before. Making a revolution is just child's play, or a boy's romp, beside taking on and explicating evolution. I expect you have thought about it when you were in one of the great rallies.”

The remodeled man realized how much, in every sense, the Mole had kept them in the dark and misrepresented this strange effort, for clearly he feared it, and mightn't he have been right in doing so?

But Alpha was running on, and he must not get left behind.

“None of you can really have an idea of what I'm heading to. I'm going to show to mankind, and make him know it's true, because he'll actually experience it in himself and with his whole generation, that history is still living in him. I'll show them the real inevitability of what I've done. They'll not merely know—they'll feel—seeing is believing but feeling is knowing—that all history is still living in them—that all of them are needed, the whole of mankind in all its types united, in order to express history. They will see and feel that the whole of the past is pressing down into them so that they must know it that they may express it—no silly antiquarianism here, no revivalism, Gothic, Classic, Nordic, Roman, no: but the whole past brought to flower in a present which has more room to express this immense promise than ever before.

“In these great rallies I'm aiming more and more and getting closer and closer to making the vast masses realize that they are now this, and can now be this, because the past had been thus. They are—if they will become and expand into One—they are the past's fulfillment. All its rivers flow into this, the estuary leading to the ocean. They are the latent word which all the letters of the past make. And as they come together and under my conductorship say it, affirm it, utter it, that is the creative word, the Logos without which the eonic message of complete meaning can never be completed and made able to continue its utterance down through the ages.”

He had become excited, and the words had rolled off his tongue like a peroration. But a moment after he half sighed, and the sigh turned into a yawn.

“Others think that I do it out of exhibitionist fun. You wait you, of all people, will be able to judge; I'm tired out and so I pick an understudy. Somehow those great hypnotized audiences draw something out of one—or it may be the actual position one has to take; again you will be able to judge. I think, myself, it is more the former than the latter.” He seemed to muse. Suddenly he yawned again immensely. The listener heard the powerful jaw crack like a fraudulent medium's toe joint. “That's enough for you to know. Now you have your general bearings. Sleep over that. I must sleep. Off with you now. I'll give you your next lesson in a couple of days if I can manage it; for I must have you ready in the next week or two. I just must have a rest and time to think things out.”

The host rose; the guest followed suit. As he turned round at the door the guest saw his host was already half through another that led evidently to his bedroom.

He certainly was glad for the next three days to be able to think over what he had heard. What a load of news for the Mole. But would the Mole be able to take it? Was it true? Partly, no doubt. Was the intention of making this change to peaceful methods of consent true? Perhaps. But, even so, would the Mole and his idealists—would he himself have consented to such a drugged, such a psychologically debauched, state for mankind? Wasn't this picture at its best—granting that Alpha at all meant what he said—a confession of defeat—that humanity could not be raised from a certain low level, that equality was a myth, progress an illusion, and evolution had come to an end?

All our drive had come from the faith that the peoples were deluded and deceived and that once we showed them the nobility of sacrifice and the grandeur of fight against tyranny they needs must love the highest when they saw it; they would want ardors and endurances rather than comforts and amusements. But had we shown them a life of clean heroism? Was our fighting any less dirty than Alpha's? And, while
he
might now be turning to methods less brutal and cruel than those to which every underground has to resort before it can come to the surface, weren't we still down in the sewers of liquidations and eliminations—the long Latinized words for murder without trace and treason without repentance—where we were trying to sap and drain the towering structure above us?

Hadn't, then, every structure a base in the blind mud and only when it got through the crust could it build something that went on and tried to find the sky? That would mean that only if you let things grow past their violent stage would they ever become constructive. You couldn't force them past. And that again would mean that you must work with what is and only encourage it to grow better out of its less bad developments—that to attack it was to keep on making it return to violence and also to keep yourself down at the same root-and-drain level.

He must be frank with these questions. He was alone. Had anyone ever before—would anyone ever again—be so alone, so stripped! He was now the decisive figure for mankind, able to throw his unseen weight on either side and poised on the very center of the vast beam that stretched perhaps to the horizons of history. As it now trembled, he could swing up or down as he, the midget rider, inclined.

His thought turned from the two machines, and the two antagonistic minds, to the prize they fought for—mankind. There, too, was it simple? If the psychophysical revolution were really here, if Sheldonism were right, then your best service to threefold humanity was to give each layer the life it loved best and worked best in. We had outgrown the silly sentimental anthropomorphic notion of thinking of birds and animals as manikins and trying to make them happy and safe as we define happiness and safety. That was simply to try to give them our anxious sense of time when they were really in an animal immortality of an always almost wholly present moment, a vivid instantaneity of totally-focused living, direct, unreflected, unrefracted being.

Well, mustn't we face the same thing about mankind—three types in one species, a huge threefold symbiote? He remembered how much, when he was being taught biology, his simple, generous mind had revolted when the teacher began pointing out the conventional moral, even when they were only studying the lichens—how, though they were a single creature, yet they were two: they worked in with each other by combining quite different lives—that there was an alga that could live on air and a fungus that could eat the rock, and these two utterly different creatures made a fast-bonded, most successful, widely varied, and powerful form of living creature. They needed each other but only because they never became like each other. Of course, the lesson was: leave people to be what they feel they are happy in being, only point out what their mind-body indicates they would be most happy in doing. He had revolted from that—but wasn't his revolt mere emotionalism, that reaction back to the past, which psychology had now shown is the young person's natural reaction to anything new? It is the young who are the blind conservatives from the time when the child, with scrupulous ritual, insists that the “Story of the Three Bears” shall be told every night with precisely the same detail, so wearying to the fresher-minded adult. Anyhow, now his middle age—his suddenly imposed middle age—and this vast opportunity question had come on him together. He must think the matter out in the fresh light of maturity.

He went through his daily drill in ritual automatically, but that was what was expected of him. They taught him nothing new. He was simply keeping supple and imposed the patterns of carriage and attitude he'd been taught. He hardly needed conscious attention, these exercises were so like those limbering ones done by a pianist as a routine preliminary. He kept on watching the door of his deep mind to see if an answer was going to be delivered to all the questions he had sent down for judgment. But nothing came, save a great sense of waiting. Perhaps, he thought, some things can be determined only by doing. When I actually am in use, then perhaps I shall again see as clearly as I used, or at least feel. Not that the numbness was unpleasant. It felt like a waking dream in which you are aware just because of the bizarreness of the scenes that flit across the mind that the body is really at rest lying warmly covered up in bed.

He didn't even keep any tale of the number of days; their quality was so vague that he couldn't say when it was that the inner door late one afternoon again opened and Alpha called, as carelessly as an old friend who shares the same apartment, “Wash up, now; dinner will be ready in a quarter of an hour.” When he had done as he was told he found the door ajar, went through it, and caught sight of a trusty just leaving the dishes on the table. A few minutes later, Alpha himself came in from his study, waved him to the same seat he had had before, and sat down opposite him. They spoke little through the main part of the meal, and it was worth giving attention to. Then Alpha broke the silence to offer him some wine.

“Alcohol has always been the problem of Western man as opium is of the East, though I think alcohol leads and has always led. So I set my chemists to work on the molecule of those ferments. It was, of course, only to do what had been done eighty years ago on opium—to get the toxic and habit-forming element out of the molecular ring. We have succeeded, but only quite lately, and it's not on the market yet. It could, of course, have been done a couple of generations ago, but those without the responsibility weren't interested and those with responsibility hadn't time. But I saw we must tackle drink as soon as we could.

“One day I'll get onto sex. Meanwhile, like a wise man, I let it have its head in those who haven't got a head; and, with those who have, I give them so much to do that they use up the gonadal energy and so avoid having that kind of bad conscience—which is really an evolutionary forecast. It haunts them because they are using a basic energy just to give them the orgasm (right enough in the viscerotonics) when they ought to have ecstasy. Why, even the toughs know that sex isn't the thing for them—that a plunge in ice-cold water or battling a blizzard is more fun than any girl. Only the fat visceroes can touch sex and enjoy it without tearing it to pieces trying to find in the bag that enduring ecstasy which isn't there. The viscero is so close to life that he knows a lot; he knows how to forget, how to follow up and damp out the pleasant little glow of lust by sleep and food. Put out the fire before going to bed and always keep it in the grate!

“But now, all that can and must wait. Try this wine—I'm told they have a method of detection of the molecule atoms that give a bouquet so they can build up a flavor that is too fine for any human taste-bud to judge—as we can now make and record and visually gauge sounds too delicate for the ear to hear—as you know with your voice, which is now so like mine that anyone listening to us would think it was a monologue spoken by a two-headed monster!”

He laughed and filled his double's glass and then his own.

“Yes,” he said judicially, “I shall be able to give a
cordon bleu
to that young chemist. He's done it. I used to be no mean judge of the old raw, natural stuff that we used to squeeze out of grapes. The best
has
been kept unto the last, in man's long banquet, after all. And it will give those who like it a lift as well. It is a true stimulant, this superalcohol, instead of being a depressant—that has been my aim all the while.

“‘Your objective,' I've said to these boys, ‘is the seventh cortex of the brain. There lies your citadel. Try to win that over to me; don't batter it down. Get it to come over to our side.' They respond to that stuff. Always reward.

“I learned that from experimental rats, and the emotional life of most of us is very near theirs. Eight per cent learned best, were most inventive, when they were both punished and rewarded; that, of course, was the old liberal formula. Then came the old violent dictatorships—for as the state became more powerful it punished more and rewarded less—and the results were praised and my rats confirmed the finding. Learning and invention went up to fifteen per cent with the punishment-pressed rodents. But when, in the interests of pure science, we had to see what would happen if one gave sheer unrelieved reward—why, then the good results leaped up to one hundred per cent.