Ape and Essence Read online

  Thumbless, eight-nippled, the child is held up be­fore the Patriarch.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Foul, foul! How shall there be atonement?

  SEMICHORUS II

  By blood.

  SEMICHORUS I

  How shall Belial be propitiated?

  This time it is the entire congregation that an­swers. "Only by blood, blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

  The Patriarch's left hand closes about the infant's neck.

  "No, no, don't. Please!"

  Polly makes a movement toward him, but is held back by the Postulants. Very deliberately, while she sobs, the Patriarch impales the child on his knife, then tosses the body into the darkness behind the altar.

  There is a loud cry. We cut to a medium close shot of Dr. Poole. Conspicuous in his front-row seat, he has fainted.

  Dissolve to the interior of the Unholy of Unholies. The shrine, which stands at one end of the arena's shorter axis, to the side of the high altar, is a small oblong chamber of adobe brick, with an altar at one end and, at the other, sliding doors, closed at present, except for a gap at the centre through which one can see what is going on in the arena. On a couch in the centre of the shrine reclines the Arch-Vicar. Not far off a hornless Postulant is frying pig's trotters over a charcoal brazier, and near him a two-horned Archi­mandrite is doing his best to revive Dr. Poole, who lies inanimate on a stretcher. Cold water and two or three sharp slaps in the face at last produce the desired result. The botanist sighs, opens his eyes, wards off another slap and sits up.

  "Where am I?" he asks.

  "In the Unholy of Unholies," the Archimandrite answers, "And there is his Eminence."

  Dr. Poole recognises the great man and has enough presence of mind to incline his head respectfully.

  "Bring a stool," commands the Arch-Vicar.

  The stool is brought. He beckons to Dr. Poole, who scrambles to his feet, walks a little unsteadily across the room and sits down. As he does so a particularly loud shriek makes him turn his head.

  Long shot, from his viewpoint, of the High Altar. The Patriarch is in the act of tossing yet another little monster into the darkness, while his acolytes shower blows upon its screaming mother.

  Cut back to Dr. Poole, who shudders and covers his face with his hands. Over the shot we hear the monotonous chanting of the congregation. "Blood, blood, blood."

  "Horrible!" says Dr. Poole, "Horrible!"

  "And yet there's blood in your religion too," remarks the Arch-Vicar, smiling ironically. " 'Washed in the blood of the Lamb.' Isn't that correct?"

  "Perfectly correct," Dr. Poole admits. "But we don't actually do the washing. We only talk about it -- or, more often, we only sing about it, in hymns."

  Dr. Poole averts his eyes. There is a silence. At this moment the Postulant approaches with a large platter, which, together with a couple of bottles, he sets down on a table beside the couch. Spearing one of the trotters with a genuine antique twentieth-century forgery of an early Georgian fork, the Arch-Vicar starts to gnaw.

  "Help yourself," he squeaks between two bites. "And here's some wine," he adds, indicating one of the bottles.

  Dr. Poole, who is extremely hungry, obeys with alacrity and there is another silence, loud with the noise of eating and the chant of the blood.

  "You don't believe it, of course," says the Arch-Vicar at last, with his mouth full.

  "But I assure you. . ." Dr. Poole protests.

  His zeal to conform is excessive, and the other holds up a plumb, pork-greasy hand.

  "Now, now, now! But I'd like you to know that we have good reasons for believing as we do. Ours, my dear sir, is a rational and realistic faith." There is a pause while he takes a swig from the bottle and helps himself to another trotter. "I take it that you're familiar with world history?"

  "Purely as a dilettante," Dr. Poole answers modestly. But he thinks he can say that he has read most of the more obvious books on the subject -- Graves's Rise and Extinction of Russia, for example; Basedow's Collapse of Western Civilization; Bright's inimitable Europe, an Autopsy; and, it goes without saying, that absolutely delightful and, though it's only a novel, that genuinely veracious book, The Last Days of Coney Island by dear old Percival Pott. "You know it, of course?"

  The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.

  "I don't know anything that's been published after the Thing," he answers curtly.

  "But how stupid of me!" cries Dr. Poole, regretting, as so often in the past, that gushing loquacity with which he overcompensates a shyness that, left to itself, would reduce him almost to speechlessness.

  "But I've read quite a bit of the stuff that came out before," the Arch-Vicar continues. "They had some pretty good libraries here in Southern California. Mined out now, for the most part. In future, I'm afraid, well have to go further afield for our fuel. But meanwhile we've baked our bread and I've managed to save three or four thousand volumes for our Semi­nary."

  "Like the Church in the Dark Ages," says Dr. Poole with cultured enthusiasm. "Civilization has no better friend than religion. That's what my agnostic friends will never. . ." Suddenly remembering that the tenets of that Church were not quite the same as those pro­fessed by this, he breaks off and, to hide his em­barrassment, takes a long pull at his bottle.

  But fortunately the Arch-Vicar is too much pre­occupied with his own ideas to take offence at the faux pas or even to notice it.

  "As I read history," he says, "it's like this. Man pitting himself against Nature, the Ego against the Order of Things, Belial" (a perfunctory sign of the horns) "against the Other One. For a hundred thou­sand years or so the battle's entirely indecisive. Then, three centuries ago, almost overnight the tide starts to run uninterruptedly in one direction. Have another of these pig's feet, won't you?"

  Dr. Poole helps himself to his second, while the other begins his third.

  "Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum, man begins to make headway against the Order of Things." The Arch-Vicar pauses for a moment to spit out a piece of cartilage. "With more and more of the human race falling into line behind him, the Lord of Flies, who is also the Blowfly in every individual heart, inaugurates his triumphal march across a world, of which he will so soon become the undisputed Master."

  Carried away by his own shrill eloquence and for­getting for a moment that he is not in the pulpit of St. Azazel's, the Arch-Vicar makes a sweeping gesture. The trotter falls off his fork. With a good-humoured laugh at his own expense, he picks it up from the floor, wipes it on the sleeve of his goat-skin cassock, takes another bite and continues.

  "It began with machines and the first grain ships from the New World. Food for the hungry and a bur­den lifted from men's shoulders. 'Oh God, we thank Thee for all the blessings which in Thy Bounty. . .' Etcetera etcetera." The Arch-Vicar laughs derisively. "Needless to say nobody ever gets anything for noth­ing. God's bounties have their price, and Belial always sees that it's a stiff one. Take those machines, for example. Belial knew perfectly well that, in finding a little alleviation from toil, flesh would be subordinated to iron and mind would be made the slave of wheels. He knew that if a machine is foolproof, it must also be skillproof, talentproof, inspirationproof. Your money back if the product should be faulty, and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality! And then there was that good food from the New World. 'Oh God, we thank Thee. . .' But Belial knew that feeding means breeding. In the old days, when people made love, they merely increased the infantile mortality rate and lowered the expectation of life. But after the coming of the food ships, it was different. Copulation resulted in popula­tion -- with a vengeance!"

  Once again the Arch-Vicar utters his shrill laugh.

  Dissolve to a shot through a powerful microscope of spermatozoa frantically straggling to reach their Final End, the vast moonlike ovum in the top left-hand corner of the slide. On the sound track we hear the tenor voice in the last move
ment of Liszt's Faust Symphony: La femme eternelle toujours nous eleve. La femme eternelle toufours . . . Cut to an aerial view of London in 1800. Then back to the Darwinian race for survival and self-perpetuation. Then to a view of London in 1900 -- and again to the spermatozoa -- and again to London, as the German airmen saw it in 1940. Dissolve to a close shot of the Arch-Vicar.

  " 'Oh God,' " he intones in the slightly tremulous voice that is always considered appropriate to such utterances, " 'we thank Thee for all these immortal souls.'" Then, changing his tone, "These immortal souls," he goes on, "lodged in bodies that grow pro­gressively sicklier, scabbier, scrubbier, year after year, as all the things foreseen by Belial inevitably come to pass. The overcrowding of the planet. Five hundred, eight hundred, sometimes as many as two thousand people to a square mile of food-producing land -- and the land in process of being ruined by bad farming. Everywhere erosion, everywhere the leaching out of minerals. And the deserts spreading, the forests dwindling. Even in America, even in that New World, which was once the hope of the Old. Up goes the spiral of industry, down goes the spiral of soil fertility. Bigger and better, richer and more powerful -- and then almost suddenly, hungrier and hungrier. Yes, Belial foresaw it all -- the passage from hunger to im­ported food, from imported food to booming popula­tion and from booming population back to hunger again. Back to hunger. The New Hunger, the Higher Hunger, the hunger of enormous industrialised proleta­riats, the hunger of city dwellers with money, with all the modern conveniences, with cars and radios and every imaginable gadget, the hunger that is the cause of total wars and the total wars that are the cause of yet more hunger."

  The Arch-Vicar pauses to take another swig from his bottle.

  "And remember this," he adds: "even without syn­thetic glanders, even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world they lived in. They couldn't escape. He had them skewered on both His horns. If they managed to wriggle off the horn of total war, they would find themselves impaled on starvation. And if they were starving, they would be tempted to resort to war. And just in case they should try to find a peaceful and rational way out of their dilemma, He had another subtler horn of self-destruction all ready for them. From the very beginning of the industrial revolution He foresaw that men would be made so over-weeningly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of reality. And that's precisely what happened. These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature. Conquerors of Nature, indeed! In actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and were about to suffer the consequences. Just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before the Thing. Fouling the rivers, killing off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea, burning up an ocean of petroleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress," he repeats, "Progress! I tell you, that was too rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind -- too fiendishly ironical! There had to be Outside Help for that. There had to be the Grace of Belial, which, of course, is always forth­coming -- that is, for anyone who's prepared to co­operate with it. And who isn't?"

  "Who isn't?" Dr. Poole repeats with a giggle; for he feels that he has to make up somehow for his mis­take about the Church in the Dark Ages.

  "Progress and Nationalism -- those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress -- the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what's going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Remember that phrase of Karl Marx's: 'Force is the midwife of Progress.' He might have added -- but of course Belial didn't want to let the cat out of the bag at that early stage of the proceedings -- that Progress is the midwife of Force. Doubly the mid­wife, for the fact of technological progress provides people with the instruments of ever more indiscrim­inate destruction, while the myth of political and moral progress serves as the excuse for using those means to the very limit. I tell you, my dear sir, an undevout historian is mad. The longer you study modern history, the more evidence you find of Belial's Guiding Hand." The Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, refreshes himself with another drink of wine, then continues. "And then there was Nationalism -- the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the only true god, and that all other states are false gods; that all these gods, true as well as false, have the mentality of juvenile delinquents; and that every conflict over prestige, power or money is a crusade for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The fact that such theories came, at a given moment of history, to be universally accepted is the best proof of Belial's existence, the best proof that at long last He'd won the battle."

  "I don't quite follow," says Dr. Poole.

  "But surely it's obvious. Here you have two notions. Each is intrinsically absurd and each leads to courses of action that are demonstrably fatal. And yet the whole of civilised humanity decides, almost suddenly, to accept these notions as guides to conduct. Why? And at Whose suggestion, Whose prompting, Whose inspiration? There can be only one answer."

  "You mean, you think it was. . . it was the Devil?"

  "Who else desires the degradation and destruction of the human race?"

  "Quite, quite," Dr. Poole agrees. "But all the same as a Protestant Christian, I really can't. . ."

  "Is that so?" says the Arch-Vicar sarcastically. "Then you know better than Luther, you know better than the whole Christian Church. Are you aware, sir, that from the second century onward no orthodox Christian believed that a man could be possessed by God? He could only be possessed by the Devil. And why did people believe that? Because the facts made it im­possible for them to believe otherwise. Belial's a fact, Moloch's a fact, diabolic possession's a fact."

  "I protest," cries Dr. Poole. "As a man of science. . ."

  "As a man of science you're bound to accept the working hypothesis that explains the facts most plausi­bly. Well, what are the facts? The first is a fact of experience and observation -- namely that nobody wants to suffer, wants to be degraded, wants to be maimed or killed. The second is a fact of history -- the fact that, at a certain epoch, the overwhelming majority of human beings accepted beliefs and adopted courses of action that could not possibly result in anything but universal suffering, general degradation and whole­sale destruction. The only plausible explanation is that they were inspired or possessed by an alien con­sciousness, a consciousness that willed their undoing and willed it more strongly than they were able to will their own happiness and survival."

  There is a silence.

  "Of course," Dr. Poole ventures at last to suggest, "those facts could be accounted for in other ways."

  "But not so plausibly, not nearly so simply," insists the Arch-Vicar. "And then consider all the other evi­dence. Take the First World War, for example. If the people and the politicians hadn't been possessed, they'd have listened to Benedict XV or Lord Lansdowne -- they'd have come to terms, they'd have nego­tiated a peace without victory. But they couldn't, they couldn't. It was impossible for them to act in their own self-interest. They had to do what the Belial in them dictated -- and the Belial in them wanted the Communist Revolution, wanted the Fascist reaction to that revolution, wanted Mussolini and Hitler and the Politburo, wanted famine, inflation and depres­sion
; wanted armaments as a cure for unemployment; wanted the persecution of the Jews and the Kulaks; wanted the Nazis and the Communists to divide Poland and then go to war with one another. Yes, and He wanted the wholesale revival of slavery in its most brutal form. He wanted forced migrations and mass pauperization. He wanted concentration camps and gas chambers and cremation ovens. He wanted saturation bombing (what a deliciously juicy phrase!). He wanted the destruction overnight of a century's accumulation of wealth and all the potentialities of future prosperity, decency, freedom and culture. Belial wanted all this and, being the Great Blowfly in the hearts of the politicians and generals, the journalists and the Common Man, He was easily able to get the Pope ignored even by Catholics, to have Lansdowne condemned as a bad patriot, almost a traitor. And so the war dragged on for four whole years; and after­ward everything went punctually according to Plan. The world situation went steadily from bad to worse, and as it worsened, men and women became progres­sively more docile to the leadings of the Unholy Spirit. The old beliefs in the value of the individual soul faded away; the old restraints lost their effectiveness; the old compunctions and compassions evaporated. Everything that the Other One had ever put into people's heads oozed out, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the lunatic dreams of Progress and Na­tionalism. Granted the validity of those dreams, it followed that mere people, living here and now, were no better than ants and bedbugs and might be treated accordingly. And they were treated accordingly, they most certainly were!"

  The Arch-Vicar chuckles shrilly and helps himself to the last of the trotters.

  "For his period," he continues, "old man Hitler was a pretty good specimen of a demoniac. Not so com­pletely possessed, of course, as many of the great national leaders in the years between 1945 and the beginning of the Third World War, but definitely above the average of his own time. More than almost any of his contemporaries, he had a right to say, 'Not I, but Belial in me.' The others were possessed only in spots, only at certain times. Take the scientists, for example. Good, well-meaning men, for the most part. But He got hold of them all the same -- got hold of them at the point where they ceased to be human beings and became specialists. Hence, the glanders and those bombs. And then remember that man -- what was his name? -- the one that was President of the United States for such a long time. . . ."