It was apparent that Faustopheles wasn’t going to challenge that by-law. With a small glow of satisfaction I followed him as he stamped into the cavern. The custodian, all business, walked with me.
“In this level of the Abyss,” he lectured, “we have those who betray themselves. We are lucky enough to have spec-imens of all the known varieties, but I recommend to you as the most com-ic of all the ones who school themselves to believe in one code of conduct, and then de-vote their time to the course of action best calculated to give them a low opinion of themselves. Funny? Pal, I tell you — ”
“We have to be here,” Faustopheles interrupted him, “but we don’t have to stay long, and we don’t have to listen to you. Now where’s that Anna what’s-her-name I dropped by here not too long ago? We’ll see her and get out.”
“I’m not sure which one you have in mind,” the custodian said, dropping the professional tinniness out of his voice. “What’s her trouble, private and imaginary or social and illusory?”
“Oh, social complicated with the usual business of arguing with reality,” Faustopheles said. “She claims to be a princess or a countess or some such stuff.”
“I remember her now. She’s right over there, but you’ll have to wait around if you want to see the whole show. They’re just finishing up with her.”
“The tag end will be enough for us,” my companion stated. Beckoning to me, he strode across the floor so fast that I had to stretch to keep up with him.
I had already observed that the torture here was in the hands of individuals who all more or less resembled the custodian in appearance, mannerisms, and voice. Each with a pointer in his hand, there was one standing beside each of the victims. Some stood at ease on their platforms, as if waiting for the proper moment to commence activities; but most were in the dramatic throes of barking, using their pointers to indicate their cringing victims. They were all in a measure successful, for they commanded the attention of small but intent audiences which followed their words with morbid relish.
The inmate called Anna was very pretty, with the bearing of a fashionable young matron. She had no pride in her status then, however. She was taking the publication of her private affairs hard, and shame pressed down on her so heavily that she could barely hold herself up. Her eyes showed that she was nearing the breaking point, either of the spirit or the mind or both.
The barker, on his part, was joyously reaching the climax of his spiel. “To sum up,” he cried, touching his victim with the pointer, “this woman deliberately yielded to the lusts of the flesh — temptations to which you and I are also subject, though, of course, we have the moral strength to resist them — and now she is astonished to find that her collaborator in violating the sanctity of her marital tie is not himself a reliable domestic character.”
He broke off to smile while a buzz of excited comment rose and died among his audience. “He has become bored with her, ladies and gentlemen, and now she is in a dilemma. She cannot go back to her wronged spouse, nor can she associate on acceptable terms with you, her former friends, who prefer the society of people with a stabler standard of ethics. What will she do?”
For a moment there was silence while Anna, considering the same problem, stood looking at something. What she saw I don’t know, but she suddenly threw herself forward with a cry foretelling self-destruction. I thought she hoped to win a mortal hurt by hurling herself from the platform, but in mid-air something struck her. Bouncing terribly, like a man I had once seen hit by a speeding truck, she dropped lifeless.
As I turned numbly away, the barker was raising his voice above the tabloid-fan gasps of the spectators. “Stick around, folks, and watch Anna pay for her wan-ton indiscretion again. The next show will be pre-sented in ten minutes.”
During the course of a business I had found so disturbing Faustopheles had got over his bad humor. “Just to be sure you don’t miss it,” he chuckled, as he fell in step with me, “let me point out the most amusing aspect of that farce.”
He had overwhelmed me so often that it seemed useless to object to anything he told me, but I made a feeble effort. “There’s nothing funny about reaching a point where life has to stop because it can’t move a degree in any direction.” I wouldn’t look at the grin I knew to be on his face. In fact, I didn’t even look where I was going; and he was so intent on arguing his thesis that for once he followed my lead.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t get it. See here. To invent a spiritual passion to put a white collar around a physical urge is a commonplace folly, but Anna did better. She entered an alliance whose best feature is that it supports no burden and then decided to put all the weight of her welfare on it. Can you top that for absurdity?”
“There are two sides to anything anybody does,” I muttered. I had to hesitate there, then a faint recollection of my mathematics gave me a boost. “On one there’s the fact of the action. You can’t change that; it’s fixed. But on the other side is what it means, and that’s a variable.” Conscious that I was hampered by a lack of knowledge of the facts in this case, I was debating whether it was worth while to ask him, when I saw something that made me lose such interest in the discussion as I had.
“But it can’t be!” I exclaimed, commencing to run.
“Stop!” Faustopheles cried. Ordinarily he could have caught me; but something had distracted him, too, and he didn’t seem able to take his usual decisive line. “Don’t go there, Silverlock! We’ve got to leave now!” he called after me. “Oh, all the devils, and I among them!”
By then I had arrived at my point of attraction and was pausing uncertainly. What had drawn me was the sight of a girl, another one of the inmates, standing with her barker before a queer assemblage of people. I noted no more about them because my attention was fixed with a disbelieving dismay on the young woman.
The baby she was holding did not hide the letter ‘A’ sewed on the front of her dress. In other ways, too, she was differently clad from when I had last seen her; but that didn’t make the identification any less positive. It was Rosalette! Convinced, I began to push through the audience of queer-hatted men and over-dressed women. Meanwhile the barker was going on with his harangue.
“Now the remarkable thing about the scandalous conduct of this little lady is that she was not driven to it by any of the harsh necessities, a consideration for which makes us who have tender hearts condone with if not pardon a harlot’s course of procedure.” He paused to smirk while his listeners exchanged knowing glances. “You will all excuse me, I am sure, if I do not choose to state what that course of procedure is before a mixed audience.”
By that time I had elbowed my way to the front rank of onlookers. There Faustopheles caught up with me. He was glowering evilly, but I recalled my rights as explained by the custodian.
“I want to see this girl,” I said, shaking off his hand. While speaking, I looked again to be sure, at close range, that I actually did know her. Feature by feature it was the face I remembered, though the stony control that held them all together was something new.
“What do you think you’re going to do?” Faustopheles demanded; but I moved too quickly to be stopped.
I didn’t know what I expected to accomplish myself, as I vaulted up on the platform. I was simply obeying an impulse to stand between defilement and something I honored. Whatever I believed or did not believe about myself or other people, it had not yet crossed my mind to think ill of her. If she was in any trouble, it must be somebody else’ fault; but in any case she must not stand up there any longer to be a buckshow.
She glanced at me as I rose to confront her. Yet it was a bitterly self-contained look, with no hint of recognition.
“It’s Shandon, Shandon Silverlock,” I told her. “What are you doing here? Where’s Aucando? What’s happened?”
“He asks what has happened,” the barker said, pushing me aside and winking at the crowd. “I have not time at this juneture to teach him the entire alphabet of sophistication; but
I’ll go as far as ABC before proceeding to disclose the moral leprosy of Hester here.” With three quick taps of his pointer he indicated the letter on her dress, the infant she was holding, and the girl herself. “As for adultery, B’s for bastard, and C’s for chippie.” Picking me up by the nape of the neck, he dropped me off the platform. “Take him away, Faustopheles, I abjure you. This show is wasted on that degree of naivete.”
Baffled by the fact that the barker had used a strange name for the girl, I let myself be led off. We had gone perhaps a dozen paces before an explanation came to me. I balked.
“That’s it! She’s taking a rap that belongs to somebody else. They’re calling that girl Hester, when it’s not her name at all.”
Faustopheles was looking backward himself, so preoccupied that he once again let me call the turn. “Of course, it isn’t her name,” he mumbled.
In my excitement I didn’t think it strange that he agreed with me. “But we can help her!” I cried. “They’re bound to let her go if we just talk to them and back each other up that she’s really Rosalette.”
He whirled upon me so suddenly that I drew back. “You infernal nincompoop!” he hissed. “You idiot! How would that help Gretchen?”
While I stared back at him the barker, reaching the end of his spiel, asked: “And now what will Hester do?”
Remembering what Anna had done when such a question was put, I was leaping toward the platform when the girl spoke. “I shall bear what I have to bear.”
It wasn’t simply because the words were a denial of any will toward suicide that I stopped in my tracks. The voice was not Rosalette’s. The barker had known what he was talking about all along. Turning away in confusion, I observed that Faustopheles had kept pace with me in my lunge to the rescue. The voice, I saw by the fact that he, too, had halted, had convinced him of his mistake likewise.
He smoothed his expression so fast that I almost missed a glimpse of his agony. The relief I was experiencing kept me from realizing the implications on the instant. It was only on the second take that my mind discovered what I had seen. His house of scorn had a chink in it, and emotion had blown through it as readily as it had through the walls of despair in which I lived.
In my case I felt that it had blown for the last time. What had happened to me did not seem significant, now that it was over — stupid and humiliating rather. My mind had slipped its chain when I had let the recollection of dead feeling trample down the logic of actualities. Even if the girl had turned out to be Rosalette, that was no guarantee that she hadn’t crawled into the wrong mans bed. I felt silly about the whole business and would have been sullen, if I had been the only victim of wrong identification. As things stood, I grinned at my guide.
“You had a bad moment there, didn’t you?”
“Worse ones await me.” He was perfectly composed, and I saw that it would be a waste of time to try to get a rise out of him. All the same, the minute we had shared passion and foolishness had an effect. The dominance he had won over me was watered by the knowledge that he was vulnerable.
It wasn’t much of a dispensation. It amounted to no more than a vague feeling that it might help to find out what was behind the sign of weakness I had discovered. I didn’t succeed. I not only failed to gain back any ground but lost more. Yet at a time when I had almost come to believe that to argue with him was to dispute against fiats, a corner of my mind was freed to hold a question.
Faustopheles on his part grew more and more confident the lower we descended. As we entered the last of a series of dungeons, he met my hostility with a smile of triumph.
“You have seen the comedies whose wellspring is violation of the illusion of man’s moral worth. Now in this level, next above the Pit’s fundament, you will see the comedy of martyrdom for a fancied nobility.”
Looking around for the usual crowd of victims. I shrugged. “I don’t see anybody,” I reported.
“There’s only one inmate, partly due to the scarcity of even fancied nobility and partly due to the size of the specimen in stock.” He put one hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other. “The odd-looking formation sticking out from under that fold of rock is a clenched fist. Don’t get too near. It sometimes twitches.”
Under examination the object we were passing did resolve itself into a set of huge knuckles and hairy fingers. As we proceeded parallel to a forearm the size of a Douglas fir, it began to strain against the stone which pinned it down at the wrist. In conjunction with the groan which scarified my ears, this made me jump.
“Is there any chance of him getting loose?”
“Considering,” Faustopheles said, “that he can’t get a hand free to fend off the great bird now digging at his entrails like a hen scratching for worms, I doubt if he’ll work up the energy just to take a slap at a midge like you.”
“My God!” I breathed. The idea of being preyed on by something with the impersonal cruelty and hot voracity of a bird was peculiarly appalling. “Won’t it kill him?”
“You know better by now,” he responded. “Like everyone else, he’ll be healed for a renewal of agony. Stop right here.”
I obeyed. We had rounded the bulge of the shoulder, and I now had a clear view of the sweating, tortured face in profile. Thinking again of the bird’s cold eye and darting beak, I grimaced.
“What could he have done to deserve anything like that?”
“Enough,” my guide said, “for you to know him as your worst enemy.”
“Mine?”
“Yours and every man’s, as I will prove.” He nodded for emphasis, then raised his voice. “Speak up, Prometheus, and say why you lie here, your wisdom useless and your skilled hands helpless to keep Zeus’ eagle from fattening on your guts.”
Slowly the face turned toward us. It took a while for my eyes to assemble an impression of the vast features; but the face reminded me of Lee on Stone Mountain.
“You know my story,” the sufferer said hoarsely, when his eyes had focused on us.
“But this man with me does not,” Faustopheles retorted. “He has the right to hear it from you, and don’t fob him off with the one about bringing fire in a fennel stalk. Tell him your master stroke of evil.”
Anger surged into the fellow’s face. “That was no evil; it was the righting of evil!”
“The greater the crime, the more they like to justify it,” Faustopheles sneered. “But tell it to one of your victims here, and let him be the judge.”
The bird must have been digging in. I could feel the claws in my own vitals as the giant’s lips pressed together, his eyes closed. After a little they opened again, alert eyes that gave no sign that the intelligence behind them had been dimmed by atrocity.
“He shall judge,” Prometheus declared. Seeing my image in the huge pupils, I felt that I was being judged, too. Uneasily I concentrated on his words, as he continued. “When man became an item of creation, he was like a forge with no smith. All the mechanical properties for great doing were there — but not the spirit to aspire, the mind to conceive, and the will to direct. Men moved about the earth with the vacant eyes of sheep, driven by no compulsions other than those which urge worms through the ground or lead toads to hop from one spot to another.”
He had been speaking calmly, but now a ring of pride came into his voice. “It was I who changed all that. Unwilling to see the fine craftsmanship which had gone into the making of humanity wasted, I gave men the powers to know, to do, and to care.”
“You heard him, Silverlock!” Faustopheles gripped me and spun me to face him. “He’s accused out of his own mouth!”
Having been prepared for a totally different type of revelation, I was taken by surprise. “Is that what you meant?”
“Isn’t it enough? Your ancestors must have been scanted when Prometheus was endowing mankind with brains, but try to follow me. What is the source of your own or any man’s grief but the awareness of hopelessness, the wish to do something about it, and the knowledge there is nothing t
o be done?”
These were indeed my griefs. When I gazed back at him, speechless, he gave a victorious smile. “Why if man had been left with no desires but to take in food and to get rid of his semen in season, he would have no troubles. There would be no crazed reaching for things without substance. There would be no invented morality to make a hard, barren lot harder and more barren. Better than that, no inkling of your silly fate could rouse you from the placidity of your stupor.”
Making me face Prometheus again, he pointed. “Those are the blessings you could have had if this fellow could have minded his own business. There, for all his protestations of self-righteousness, is the author not only of your sorrows but of your infinite capacity for living with them in foreknowledge and memory. Shall we walk around and cheer for the bird that implements his punishment?”
“That wasn’t the bargain,” the giant said. “He can observe the source of my pain if he wishes; and whether he does or does not, there will be neither easing nor aggravation of my torture. But the agreement was that he should judge me for the act you condemn. I want his verdict.”
“I know what it will be,” Faustopheles said, “and so would you, if you had any gauge of values outside of experimental egotism.” Because I was standing with my head down, pondering, he shook me. “Tell him, mannikin! Here’s your one chance to throw a little of your forlorn bitterness back into the face of the alchemist who poisoned you.”
In spite of him I was not to be hurried. On the one hand was all the footless wretchedness of which Faustopheles knew me to be possessed. It should have clinched the argument, but, having caught sight of something, my mind swung heavily to consider the other side. Suppose I was, indeed, born to a greater emptiness than I now felt? Suppose I was bare of sensibilities and had no longing to do more for myself than benevolent elements could provide? It was appalling to think of, and the concept of vacuity grew more appalling the longer I dwelt upon it. Raising my head, I saw myself once more, standing a little straighter, mirrored in Prometheus’ eyes.