Ape and Essence

Dissolve to a night scene of ink-black shadows and expanses of moonlight. In the background stands the mouldering pile of the Los Angeles County Museum. Amorously interlaced, Loola and Dr. Poole enter the shot, then pass into impenetrable darkness. Silhouettes of men pursuing women, or women throwing them­selves on men, appear for a moment and vanish. To the accompaniment of the Good Friday music we hear a rising and falling chorus of grunts and moans, of explosively shouted obscenities and long-drawn howls of agonising delight.

  NARRATOR

  Consider the birds. What a delicacy in their love-making, what old-world chivalry! For although the hormones produced within the body of the breeding hen predispose her to sexual emotion, their effect is neither so intense nor of so brief a duration as that of the ovarian hormones in the blood of female mammals during oestrus. Moreover, for obvious reasons, the cock bird is in no position to enforce his desires upon an unwilling hen. Hence the prevalence among male birds of bright plumage and of an instinct for courtship. And hence the conspicuous absence of these charming things among male mammals. For where, as in the mammals, the female's amorous de­sires and her attractiveness to the male sex are wholly determined by chemical means, what need is there of masculine beauty of the niceties of preliminary court­ship?

  Among humans every day of the year is potentially the mating season. Girls are not chemically predes­tined during a few days, to accept the advances of the first male who presents himself. Their bodies manu­facture hormones in doses sufficiently small to leave even the most temperamental of them a certain free­dom of choice. That is why, unlike his fellow mammals, man has always been a wooer. But now the gamma rays have changed all that. The hereditary patterns of man's physical and mental behaviour have been given another form. Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus and the female's chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love itself.

  At this moment a radiant Loola and a considerably dishevelled Dr. Poole emerge from the shadows. A burly male, temporarily unattached, comes striding into the shot. At the sight of Loola, he stops. His mouth falls open, his eyes widen, he breathes heavily.

  Dr. Poole gives the stranger one look, then turns nervously to his companion.

  "I think perhaps it might be a good thing if we walked this way . . ."

  Without a word the stranger rushes at him, gives him a push that sends him flying and takes Loola in his arms. She resists for a moment; then the chemicals in her blood impose their Categorical Imperative, and she ceases to struggle.

  Making a noise like a tiger at feeding time, the stranger lifts her off her feet and carries her into the shadows.

  Dr. Poole, who has had time to pick himself up, makes as though to follow, to wreak vengeance, to rescue the distressed victim. Then a combination of apprehension and modesty causes him to slacken his pace. If he advances, heaven knows what he may find himself intruding upon. And then that man, that hairy hulk of bone and muscle. . . . On the whole it might perhaps be wiser. . . . He comes to a halt and stands hesitant, not knowing what to do. Suddenly two beautiful young mulatto girls come running out of the County Museum and simultaneously throw their brown arms round his neck and cover his face with kisses.

  "You great big beautiful bastard," they whisper in husky unison.

  For a moment Dr. Poole hesitates between the in­hibitory recollection of his mother, the fidelity to Loola prescribed by all the poets and novelists, and the warm, elastic Facts of Life. After about four seconds of moral conflict, he chooses, as we might ex­pect, the Facts of Life. He smiles, he returns the kisses, he murmurs words which it would startle Miss Hook and almost kill his mother to hear, he encircles either body with an arm, caresses either bosom with hands that have never done anything of the kind except in unavowable imaginings. The noises of mating swell to a brief climax, then diminish. For a little while there is complete silence.

  Accompanied by a train of Archimandrites, Fami­liars, Presbyters and Postulants, the Arch-Vicar and the Patriarch of Pasadena come pacing majestically into the shot. At the sight of Dr. Poole and the mulattos, they come to a halt. Making a grimace of disgusted abhorrence, the Patriarch spits on the ground. More tolerant, the Arch-Vicar only smiles ironically.

  "Dr. Poole!" he flutes in his odd falsetto.

  Guiltily, as though he had heard his mother call­ing, Dr. Poole drops those busy hands of his and, turning toward the Arch-Vicar, tries to assume an expression of airy innocence. "These girls," his smile is meant to imply, "who are these girls? Why, I don't even know their names. We were just having a little chat about the higher cryptogams, that's all."

  "You great big beautiful . . ." begins a husky voice.

  Dr. Poole coughs loudly and fends off the embrace that accompanies the words.

  "Don't mind us," says the Arch-Vicar pleasantly. "After all, Belial Day comes but once a year."

  Approaching, he touches the gilded horns of his tiara, then lays his hands on Dr. Poole's head.

  "Yours," he says with a suddenly professional unctuousness, "has been an almost miraculously sudden conversion. Yes, almost miraculously." Then, changing his tone, "By the way," he adds, "we've had a bit of trouble with your friends from New Zealand. This afternoon somebody spotted a group of them in Beverly Hills. I guess they were looking for you."

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "But they're not going to find you," says the Arch-Vicar genially. "One of our Inquisitors went out with a posse of Familiars to deal with them."

  "What happened?" Dr. Poole anxiously enquires.

  "Our men laid an ambush, let fly with arrows. One was killed, and the others made off with the wounded. I don't think we shall be bothered again. But just to make certain. . ." He beckons to two of his attendants. "Listen," he says. "There isn't going to be a rescue and there isn't going to be an escape. I make you responsible, do you understand?"

  The two Postulants bow their heads.

  "And now," says the Arch-Vicar, turning back to Dr. Poole, "well leave you to beget all the little mon­sters you can."

  He winks, pats Dr. Poole on the cheek, then takes the Patriarch's arm and, followed by his retinue, moves away.

  Dr. Poole stares after the retreating figures, then glances uneasily at the two Postulants who have been appointed to guard him.

  Brown arms are thrown around his neck.

  "You great big beautiful. . ."

  "No, really. Not in public. Not with those men aroundl"

  "What difference does that make?"

  And before he has time to answer, husky, musky, dusky, the Facts of Life close in on him again, and in a complicated embrace, like some half reluctant, half blissfully consenting Laocoon, he is ravished away into the shadows. With an expression of disgust, the two Postulants simultaneously spit.

  NARRATOR

  L'ombre etait nuptiale, auguste et solennelle

  He is interrupted by a burst of frenzied caterwauling.

  NARRATOR

  When I look into the fishponds in my garden,

  (And not mine only, for every garden is riddled

  With eel holes and reflected moons), methinks

  I see a Thing armed with a rake that seems,

  Out of the ooze, out of the immanence

  Among the eels of heaven, to strike at me --

  At Me the holy, Me divine! And yet

  How tedious is a guilty conscience! How

  Tedious, for that matter, an unguilty one!

  What wonder if the horror of the fishponds

  Draws us toward the rake? And the Thing strikes,

  And I, the uneasy Person, in the mud,

  Or in the liquid moonlight, thankfully

  Find others than myself to have that blind

  Or radiant being.

  Dissolve to a medium shot of Dr. Poole asleep on the drifted sand at the foot of a towering wall of con­crete. Twenty feet away one of
his guards is also sleeping. The other is absorbed in an ancient copy of Forever Amber. The sun is already high in the heavens and a close shot reveals a small green lizard crawling over one of Dr. Poole's outstretched hands. He does not stir, but lies as though dead.

  NARRATOR

  And this, too, is the beatific being of somebody who most certainly isn't Alfred Poole D.Sc. For sleep is one of the preconditions of the Incarnation, the primary instrument of divine immanence. Sleeping, we cease to live that we may be lived (how blessedly!) by some nameless Other who takes this opportunity to restore the mind to sanity and bring healing to the abused and self-tormented body.

  From breakfast to bedtime you may be doing every­thing in your power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary of his tricks and has to sleep. And, while he sleeps, the indwelling Compas­sion preserves him, willy nilly, from the suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to commit. Then the sun rises again, and our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will -- to yet another day of trick playing or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of self-knowledge, to the first steps toward his liberation.

  A peal of excited feminine laughter cuts short the Narrator's speech. The sleeper stirs and, at a second, louder outburst, starts into full wakefulness and sits up, looking around him in bewilderment, not know­ing where he is. Again that laughter. He turns his head in the direction of the sound. In a long shot from his viewpoint we see his two brown-skinned friends of the previous night emerging at full speed from behind a sand dune and darting into the ruins of the County Museum. At their heels, in concentrated silence, runs the Chief. All three disappear from view.

  The sleeping Postulant wakes up and turns to his companion.

  "What's that?" he asks.

  "The usual thing," the other answers, without look­ing up from Forever Amber.

  As he speaks, shrill squeals reverberate through the cavernous halls of the Museum. The Postulants look at one another in silence, then simultaneously spit.

  Cut back to Dr. Poole.

  "My God," he says aloud, "my God!"

  He covers his face with his hands.

  NARRATOR

  Into the satiety of this morning-after let loose a rodent conscience and the principles learned at a mother's knee -- or not infrequently across it (head downward and with shirt tails well rucked up), in condign spankings, sadly and prayerfully administered, but remembered, ironically enough, as the pretext and accompaniment of innumerable erotic daydreams, each duly followed by its remorse, and each remorse bring­ing with it the idea of punishment and all its attendant sensualities. And so on, indefinitely. Well, as I say, let those loose into this, and the result may easily be a religious conversion. But a conversion to what? Most ignorant of what he is most assured, our poor friend doesn't know. And here comes almost the last person he would expect to help him to discover.

  As the Narrator speaks this last sentence, Loola enters the shot.

  "Alfie!" she cries happily. "I was looking for you."

  Cut briefly to the two Postulants, who look at her for a moment with all the distaste of enforced con­tinence, then turn away and expectorate.

  Meanwhile, after one brief glance at those "linea­ments of satisfied desire," Dr. Poole guiltily averts his eyes.

  "Good morning," he says in a tone of formal polite­ness. "I hope you. . . you slept well?"

  Loola sits down beside him, opens the leather bag which she carries slung over her shoulder and ex­tracts half a loaf of bread and five or six large oranges.

  "Nobody can think of doing much cooking these days," she explains. "It's just one long picnic until the cold season begins again."

  "Quite, quite," says Dr. Poole.

  "You must be awfully hungry," she goes on. "After last night."

  Her dimples come out of hiding, as she smiles at him.

  Hot and blushing with embarrassment, Dr. Poole hastily tries to change the subject of conversation.

  "Those are beautiful oranges," he remarks. "In New Zealand they don't do really well except in the ex­treme. . ."

  "There!" says Loola, interrupting him.

  She hands him a thick hunk of bread, breaks off another for herself and bites into it with strong white teeth.

  "It's good," she says with her mouth full. "Why don't you eat?"

  Dr. Poole who realises that, in effect, he is raven­ously hungry, but who is unwilling, for the sake of decorum, to admit the fact too openly, nibbles daintily at his crust.

  Loola snuggles against him and leans her head on his shoulder.

  "It was fun, Alfie, wasn't it?" She takes another bite of bread and without waiting for him to answer, continues: "More fun with you than with any of the others. Did you think that too?"

  She looks up at him tenderly.

  Close shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole's ex­pression of agonising moral discomfort.

  "Alfie!" she cries, "what's the matter?"

  "Perhaps it would be better," he manages at last to say, "if we talked about something else."

  Loola straightens herself up and looks at him for a few seconds intently and in silence.

  "You think too much," she says at last. "You mustn't think. If you think, it stops being fun." The light sud­denly goes out of her face. "If you think," she goes on in a low voice, "it's terrible, terrible. It's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living Evil. When I remember what they did to Polly and her baby. . ."

  She shudders, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.

  NARRATOR

  Those tears again, those symptoms of personality -- the sight of them evokes a sympathy that is stronger than the sense of guilt.

  Forgetting the Postulants, Dr. Poole draws Loola toward him and with whispered words, with the ca­resses one uses to quiet a crying child, tries to comfort her. He is so successful that, in a minute or two, she is lying quite still in the crook of his arm. Sighing hap­pily, she opens her eyes, looks up at him and smiles with an expression of tenderness, to which the dimples add a ravishingly incongruous hint of mischief.

  "This is what I've always dreamed of."

  "It is?"

  "But it never happened -- it never could happen. Not till you came. . ." She strokes his cheek. "I wish your beard didn't have to grow," she adds. "You'll look like the other fellows then. But you aren't like them, you're quite different."

  "Not so different as all that," says Dr. Poole.

  He bends down and kisses her on the eyelids, on the throat, on the mouth -- then draws back and looks down at her with an expression of triumphant masculinity.

  "Not different in that way," she qualifies. "But dif­ferent in this way." She pats his cheek again. "You and I sitting together and talking and being happy because you're you and I'm me. It doesn't happen here. Except. . . except. . ." She breaks off. Her face darkens. "Do you know what happens to people who are Hots?" she whispers.

  This time it is Dr. Poole's turn to protest against thinking too much. He backs up his words with action.

  Close shot of the embrace. Then cut to the two Postulants, staring disgustedly at the spectacle. As they spit, another Postulant enters the shot.

  "Orders from His Eminence," he says, making the sign of the horns. "This assignment's over. You're to report back to headquarters."

  Dissolve to the Canterbury. A wounded seaman, with an arrow still sticking in his shoulder, is being hoisted in a sling from the whaleboat to the deck of the schooner. On the deck lie two other victims of the Californians' archery -- Dr. Cudworth with a wound in his left leg and Miss Hook. The latter has an arrow imbedded deeply in her right side. The doctor, as he bends over her, looks grave.

  "Morphine," he says to his orderly. "Then we'll get her down to the surgery as quickly as we can. . ."

  Meanwhile there has been a shouting of orders and suddenly we hear the noise of the
donkey engine and the clanking of the anchor chain as it is wound round the capstan.

  Ethel Hook opens her eyes and looks around her. An expression of distress appears on her pale face.

  "You're not going to sail away and leave him?" she says. "But you can't, you can't!" She makes an effort to raise herself from the stretcher; but the movement causes so much pain that she falls back again, with a groan.

  "Quiet, quiet," says the doctor soothingly, as he swabs her arm with alcohol.

  "But he may still be alive," she feebly protests. "They can't desert him; they can't just wash their hands of him."

  "Hold still," says the doctor and, taking the syringe from his orderly, he drives the needle into the flesh.

  The clanking of the anchor chain rises to a cre­scendo as we dissolve to Loola and Dr. Poole.

  "I'm hungry," says Loola, sitting up.

  Reaching for her knapsack, she takes out what is left of the bread, breaks it in two, hands the larger fragment to Dr. Poole and sinks her teeth into the other. She finishes her mouthful and is about to start on another, when she changes her mind. Turning to her companion, she takes his hand and kisses it.

  "What's that for?" he asks.

  Loola shrugs her shoulders.

  "I don't know. I just suddenly felt like that." She eats some more bread, then, after a ruminative sil­ence, turns to him with the air of one who has just made an important and unexpected discovery.

  "Alfie," she announces, "I believe I shall never want to say Yes to anyone except you."

  Greatly moved, Dr. Poole leans forward, takes her hand and presses it to his heart.

  "I feel I've only just discovered what life's all about," he says.

  "Me too."

  She leans against him, and like a miser irresistibly drawn to count his treasure yet once more, Dr. Poole runs his fingers through her hair, separating lock from thick lock, lifting a curl and letting it fall back noiselessly into its place.

  NARRATOR

  And so, by the dialectic of sentiment, these two have rediscovered for themselves that synthesis of the chemical and the personal, to which we give the names of monogamy and romantic love. In her case it was the hormone that excluded the person; in his, the per­son that could not come to terms with the hormone. But now there is the beginning of a larger wholeness.