The Sinful Ones (21 page)

“But he didn’t. And then things began to get much worse.”

Carr gave her another drink. “How do you mean?”

Jane looked up at him. Now that she was caught up in her story, she looked younger than ever, and then unevenly blond hair, heavy lipstick, and tight black dress seemed ludicrous, as if she’d fixed herself that way for an adolescent joke.

“We were stuck, that’s what it amounted to, and we began to rot. I suppose that’s the meaning of decadence—it never springs from action but from avoiding action. At any rate, all those things he said, that had at first delighted me because they matched my thoughts, now began to terrify me. Because, you see, I believed that those queer thoughts of mine were just quirks of my mind, and that by sharing them with someone Id’ get rid of them. I kept waiting for him to tell me how silly and baseless they were. But he never did. Instead, I began to see from the way he talked that my queer thoughts weren’t illusions at all, but the ultimate truth about the real world. Nothing did mean anything. Snores actually were a kind of engine-puffing and printed words had no more real meaning than wind-tracings in sand. Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were, except perhaps for a few ghostlike kindred souls. You were all alone.

“I had discovered his great secret, you see, in spite of all his attempts to hide it from me. Though I didn’t tell him that I knew.

‘Now the walks in the park did begin to affect the rest of my life. Not so much as to change its pattern, of course, but its moods. All day I’d be plunged in gloom. My father and mother seemed a million miles away, my classes at the academy the most unbearable stupidity in the world. I couldn’t read books although I studied the words ever so closely. I didn’t understand some of the things I said, the mere appearance of a building or a street could frighten me, and sometimes in the middle of my practicing I’d snatch my hands away as if the keys had bitten me. Though, as I say, this didn’t change the pattern of my life and of course no one noticed—how could they, parts of a machine in a machine world?—except Gigolo my cat.”

She looked at Carr strangely. “Some animals are really alive, you know, just like some people. Perhaps they catch it from the people. They look at you when you’re outside the pattern, and then you know.”

“I know,” said Carr. “Gigolo looked at me once.”

“And not only cats,” Jane said.

“What do you mean?” Carr asked uneasily. He had remembered Miss Hackman’s references to “the beast.”

“Nothing in particular,” Jane said after a moment. Carr didn’t tell her his thoughts.

“Anyway,” Jane continued, “Gigolo knew. Sometimes he acted afraid and spat at me, and sometimes he came purring to me in a most affectionate way—then sometimes he watched at the windows and doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park. He, in a way, least of all—because I think he realized the change in me, but still wanted to save his pleasant dream.”

She took a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact, for once he’d come with me a little way out of the park, and I was pleased at that—well, just then I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. That made me glade too, for it was the first time I remembered anyone seeming to look at both of us together, and I was always hoping that something would break in on us and get us unstuck. I called my friend’s attention to the young man. He peered around through his thick glasses.

“The next minute he had grabbed me tight above the elbow and was marching me ahead. He didn’t speak until we got around the corner. Then he said in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘They’ve seen us. Get home.’

“I started to ask questions, but he only said, ‘Don’t talk. Go on quickly. Don’t look back.’ He said it in such a fierce strange way that I was frightened and obeyed him.

“In the hours afterwards my fear grew. I pictured ‘them’ in a hundred horrible ways—if only he’d said more than that one word! I dimly sensed that I had transgressed an awful barrier and I felt a terrible guilt. I went to sleep praying never to see the small dark man again and just be allowed to live my old stupid life the way I was meant to live it.

“Some time after midnight I awoke with my heart jumping, and there was Gigolo standing on the bedclothes, spitting at the window. I snapped on the light and it showed me, pressed to the dark pane, the smiling face of the young man I’d seen across the street that afternoon. You know him, Carr. The one they call Dris—Driscoll Aimes. He had two hands then. He used them to open the window.”

Carr looked around the room. He leaned forward.

“I jumped up and ran to my father’s and mother’s room. I called to them to wake up. I shook them. And then came the most terrible shock of my life. They wouldn’t wake, no matter what I did. Except that they breathed, they might have been dead. I remember pounding my father’s chest and digging my nails into his arms.

“I knew then what I’d half guessed for some time—that most people weren’t really alive, but only smaller machines in a bigger one. They couldn’t understand you, they couldn’t help you. If the pattern called for sleep, they slept, and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

“Sometimes I think that even without Gigolo’s warning snarl and the sound of footsteps coming swiftly through the bathroom, I would have rushed out of the apartment, rather than stay a moment longer with those two living corpses who had brought me into the world.”

Her voice was getting a little high.

“I darted down the stairs, out of the entry, and into the arms of two other people who were waiting there. You know them, Carr—Miss Hackham and Mr. Wilson. But there was something they hadn’t counted on. Gigolo had raced down the stairs with me and with a squalling cry he shot past my legs and sprang into the air between them, seeming to float on the darkness. It must have rattled them, for they drew back and I managed to dark past them and run down the street. I ran several blocks, turning corners, cutting across lawns, before I dared stop. In fact I only stopped because I couldn’t run any farther. But it was enough. I had lost them.

“But what was I to do? There was I in the streets in just my nightdress. It was cold. The windows peered. The streetlights whispered. The shadows pawed me. There was always someone crossing a corner two blocks away. I thought of my closest friend, a girl who was at any rate a little closer to me than the others, a girl named Margaret who was studying at the academy. Once in a while I’d gone out with her and her boy-friend. Surely Margaret would take me in, I told myself, surely Margaret would be alive.

“She lived in a duplex just a few blocks from our apartment. Keeping away from the streetlights as much as I could, I hurried over to it.

“Her bedroom window was open. I threw some pebbles at it, but nothing happened. I didn’t like to ring. Finally by climbing up on the porch I managed to step from it to her window and crawl inside. She was asleep, breathing easily.

“By this time I was trying to tell myself that my father and mother had somehow been drugged as part of a plan to kidnap me. But not for long.

“For you see, I was no more able to rouse Margaret than my parents.

“I dressed in some of her clothes and climbed out the window and walked the streets until morning.

“When morning came I tried to go home, but I went carefully and cautiously, spying out my way, and that was lucky, for sitting in a parked automobile not half a block from our door, was Mr .Wilson. I went to the academy and saw Miss Hackman standing at the head of the steps. I went to the park and there, where my small dark man used to wait for me, was Dris.

“That’s all. Since then I’ve lived as you know.”

She slumped back in her chair, breathing heavily, still knitting her fingers.

“But I don’t know,” Carr objected.

“You know enough. I stole my food. I stole other things. Shall I tell you about my shoplifting? Shoplifting from necessity? Shoplifting for fun? And shoplifting just to keep from going crazy? I stole my sleeping places too. Remember that boarded-up mansion I let you to the first night? I sometimes slept there. I made myself a kind of home on the third floor. And then there was a place on the south side, a queer old castle designed by some crazy millionaire, with cement towers and a sunken garden and theosophical inscriptions and ironwork in mystic designs, all abandoned half-built and fenced with rusty wire. And sometimes I slept in the stacks of the library and places like that. Just an outcast, a waif in the life-machine. Oh, Car, you can’t imagine…yes, perhaps now you can…how utterly alone I was.”

He nodded. “Still, at least there was one person,” he said slowly. “The small dark man.”

“That’s right. There was Fred. We did happen to meet again.”

“I suppose you lived together?” Carr asked softly.

She looked at him. “No we didn’t. He helped me find places to live, and we’d meet here and there, and he taught me how to play chess—we played for hours and hours—but I never lived with him.”

Carr hesitated. “But surely he must have tried to make love you,” he said. “I know what you told me about him, but after you had run away and there were only two of you together, outcasts, waifs…”

She looked down at the floor. “You’re right,” she said, uncomfortably. “He did try to make love to me.”

“And you didn’t reciprocate?”

“No.”

“Don’t be angry with me, Jane, but under the circumstances that seems strange. After all, you have only each other.”

She laughed unhappily.

“Oh, I would have reciprocated,” she said, “except for one thing, something I found out about him. I don’t like to talk about it, but I suppose I’d better. A few weeks after I ran away and we met again—now both of us knowing where we stood—we had an appointment to meet in another park. I came on him unawares and found him holding a little girl. She hardly seemed conscious of him. She was standing there, flushed from running, her bright eyes on her playmates, about to rush off and join them, and he was sitting on the bench behind her, and he had his arms around her, stroking her, tenderly, but with a look in his eyes as if she were so much wood. Sacred wood, perhaps, but wood.” Jane sucked in her breath. “Another time I watched him on the outside stairs of an apartment, late at night. There was a young woman beside him, a rather flashily dressed girl. I’d been supposed to meet him but was late. He didn’t see me. I watched him from the shadows. He had his hand on her breasts. After a moment she went inside, and he went in with her. But all that time he didn’t look once at her face, and his hand kept moving slowly. After that I couldn’t bear to have him touch me. In spite of his gentleness and courtesy and understanding, there was a part of him that wanted to take advantage of the life-machine for his private, cold satisfaction—take advantage of the poor dead mechanisms merely because he was aware and they weren’t—take advantage in the way those others take advantage, to play like gods—devils, rather—with the poor earthly puppets? Well, there was a small part of Fred that was like them.” She hesitated. “Even then I might have yielded if he hadn’t approached me in such a guilty way.”

“What…The child in the park. Was she aware of him?”

“I think so. A little, anyway. As the animals are. She was not in fear. Just puzzled at first. Then the little girl seemed to experience a kind of strange shuddering ecstasy. Not her own.
His
 ecstasy reflected in her. And not just simply physical ecstasy of the perverted kind which can be comprehended even if abhorred—but a mental thing, a cruel perversion of the mind. The perversion of power—”

“And the woman, what about her?”

“She seemed unaware that she was being—loved. Physically, by someone. But there was a wickedly ecstatic look to her, as if she were dreaming some deep evilness.”

“Huh…nice guy!”

“Understand,” she went on hurriedly, “the rest of him was really fine—the most comradely sympathy, the highest ideals. He even had, I think, the quixotic notion that he wouldn’t be worthy of me until he had somehow rescued me to my safe life again.”

“But that’s impossible,” Carr interrupted, looking at Jane dully. “Once you’re outside the pattern—” (As he uttered those words he felt well up within him the longing of a living an for a once meaningful world, now forever meaningless) “—how can you ever get back?”

“Oh, but you can,” Jane said quickly. “You were back in the pattern, conscious but a part of it, from the time I gave you the powders until you ran away from that party. Even without drugs, it can be done. You’re born with a feeling for the rhythm of life as the machine wants it. You learn to sense it. You automatically do and say what you’re supposed to. You can—”

The phone rang. For a moment they both sat very still. Carr looked at Jane. Then he slowly reached over and lifted the phone from the cradle. As he did so, the familiarity of the action took possession of him, drawing him back without his realization toward the pattern of his old life.

“That you, Carr?”

“Yes.”

“This is Tom.”

“Hello, Tom.”

“Look, have you anything on for the night after tomorrow?”

“Why…no.” Carr caught his breath in surprise. Only now did he realize that he had been answering automatically. He was talking to a machine, he reminded himself—a machine to which dates, and girls and words and all the rest of it, were only a mechanical function.

“Swell. How about coming dancing with the three of us?”

“Who do you mean?” (Still, to Carr’s amazement, his answers came almost without his bidding.)

“You know, Midge’s girl-friend.”

“Midge’s girl-friend?”

“Sure, you know—I’ve told you about her half a dozen times.”

“I remember,” Carr said.

“Well, are you coming?” (There suddenly seemed to be a phonograph sound, a machine chug, in the voice coming over the phone.)

Carr hesitated. “I don’t know.” (How was he supposed to answer, he asked himself?)

“Oh, for God’s sake!” (Again the machine-chug.)