156
It was the day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers
were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible
significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to
witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the
center of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk
in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was
concerned to talk only about himself.
"You've always been such a help," Bob assured me, as he made ready, not
without relish, to tell the latest installment of his history.
And meanwhile he owed thirty-three thousand
dollars to the Government
for arrears of income tax. But when he asked his
producer for that extra two hundred and fifty dollars a week which had been as
good as promised him, there was only a long and pregnant silence.
"What about it, Lou?"
Measuring his words with a solemn emphasis, Lou Lublin gave his answer.
"Bob," he said, "in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself
could get a raise."
The tone was friendly; but when Bob tried to insist,
Lou had banged his
desk and told him that he was being un-American. That finished it.
Bob talked on. But what a subject, I was thinking, for a great religious
painting! Christ before Lublin, begging for a raise of only two hundred and fifty
bucks a week and being turned down flat.
"Well, if you've finished your coffee," said Bob, "let's go."
We rose and walked out into the sunshine. Bob took my arm and squeezed
it.
"You've been enormously helpful," he assured me again.
"I wish I could believe it, Bob."
"But it's true, it's true."
We walked on for a little in silence -- Over the entrance to
the largest of them a great bronze plaque bore the inscription, Lou Lublin
Productions.
"What about that salary raise?" I asked. "Shall we go in and have another
shot at it?"
Rob uttered a rueful little laugh, and there was another silence.
*************************
157
A loud hooting made us both jump.
"Look out!"
Bob caught my arm and pulled me back. From the courtyard in the rear of
the Story Department a two-ton truck emerged into the roadway.
"Why don't you look where you're going?" shouted the driver as he passed.
"Idiot!" Bob yelled back; then, turning to me, "Do you see what it's loaded
with?" he asked. "Scripts." He shook his head. "Taking them to the incinerator.
Which is where they belong. A million dollars worth of literature." He laughed
with melodramatic bitterness.
Twenty yards up the road, the truck swung sharply to the right. Its speed
must have been excessive; centrifugally propelled, half a dozen of the topmost
scripts spilled out into the road.
I picked up the nearest of the scripts. " 'A Miss is as Good as a Male,
Screenplay by Albertine Krebs.' "
Bob remembered it. It stank. "Well, what about 'Amanda'?" I turned over
the pages. "It must have been a musical. Here's some poetry.
" 'Amelia needs a meal,
But Amanda needs a man. . ."
Bob wouldn't let me go on.
"Don't, don't! It made four and a half million during the Battle of the
Bulge."
I dropped "Amanda" and picked up another of the spread-eagled volumes.
This one, I noticed, was bound in green, not in the Studio's standard crimson.
" 'Ape and Essence,' " I read aloud from the hand-lettered front cover.
" 'Ape and Essence'?" Bob repeated in some surprise.
I turned to the flyleaf.
" 'An original Treatment by William Tallis, Cottonwood Ranch, Murcia,
California.' And here's a note in pencil. 'Rejection slip sent 11-26-47. No self
addressed envelope. For the Incinerator' -- twice underlined."
"They get thousands of these things," Bob explained.
Meanwhile I was looking into the body of the script.
"More poetry."
"Christ!" said Bob in a tone of disgust.
" 'Surely it's obvious,' " I began reading:
"'Surely it's obvious.
Doesn't every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's.
**************************
158
There was a silence. We looked at one another questioningly.
"What do you think of it?" Bob said at last.
I shrugged my shoulders. I really didn't know.
"Anyhow, don't throw it away," he went on. "I want to see what the rest is
like."
"Tallis," Bob was saying to himself, as we entered, "William Tallis. . ." He
shook his head. "Never heard of him. And anyhow, where's Murcia?"
The following Sunday we knew the answer -- knew it not merely in theory
and on the map, but experimentally,
by going there, at eighty miles an hour, in
Bob's (or rather Miriam's) Buick convertible. Murcia, California, was two red
gasoline pumps and a very small grocery store on the southwestern fringe of the
Mojave desert.
But meanwhile we had reached our destination. Between the trees along
the ditch I saw a white frame house under an enormous cottonwood, with a
windmill
to one side of it, a corrugated iron barn to the other. The gate was
closed. Bob stopped the car and we got out. A white board had been nailed to the
gatepost. On it an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermilion.
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.
THIS MEANS YOU, KEEP OUT.
"Well, we've evidently come to the right place," I said.
Bob nodded. We opened the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten
earth and knocked at the door of the house. It was opened almost immediately by a
stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue cotton dress and a very
old red jacket. She gave us a friendly smile.
"Car broken down?" she inquired.
We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see Mr.
Tallis.
"Mr. Tallis?"
The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her head.
"Didn't you know?" she said. "Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago."
"Do you mean, he's dead?"
"Passed on," she insisted, then launched out into her story.
******************************************
159
Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year.
"I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?"
The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she meant to leave it
there.
"Had he been sick for a long time?" I asked.
"Not sick at all," she answered. "Though he always did say he had heart
trouble."
And that was why he had passed on. In the bathroom.
She found him there
one morning, when she came to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from
the store. Stone cold. He must have laid there all night. She had never had such a
shock in all her life. And then what a commotion on account of there not being
any relatives that anybody knew about! The doctor was called and then the sheriff.
And then all the books and papers and clothes had to be packed up
and seals put on the boxes.
Well, that was the nearest we ever got to Tallis in the flesh. In what
follows the reader can discover the reflection of his mind. I print the text of "Ape
and Essence" as I found it, without change and without comment.
****************************************
160
II
The Script
Titles, credits and finally, to the accompaniment of trumpets and a chorus
of triumphant angels, the name of the PRODUCER.
The light grows a
little less dim and suddenly we become aware that the audience is composed
entirely of well-dressed baboons of both sexes and of all ages from first to second
childhood.
NARRATOR
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority --
Most ignorant of what he is most assur'd.
His glassy essence -- like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
Cut to the screen, at which the apes are so attentively
gazing. In a setting
such as only Semiramis or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could have imagined we see a
bosomy young female baboon, in a shell-pink evening gown, her mouth painted
purple, her muzzle powdered
mauve, her fiery red eyes ringed with mascara.
Swaying as voluptuously as the shortness of her hind legs will permit her to do,
she walks onto the brightly illuminated stage of a night club and, to the clapping
of two or three hundred pairs of hairy hands, appreaches the Louis XV
microphone. Behind her, on all fours and secured by a light steel chain attached to
a dog collar, comes Michael Faraday.
Meanwhile the baboon-girl has reached the microphone.
Turning her
head, she catches sight of Faraday on his knees, in the act of straightening his bent
and aching back.
"Down, sir, down!"
The tone is peremptory; she gives the old man a cut with her coral-headed
riding switch. Faraday winces and obeys, the apes in the audience laugh
delightedly.
She blows them a kiss, then, drawing the microphone toward her, she
bares her formidable teeth and starts to sing, in an expiring bedroom contralto,
the
latest popular success.
Love, Love, Love --
Love's the very essence
Of everything I think, of everything I do.
Give me, Give me, Give me,
Give me detumescence.
That means you.
Close-up of Faraday's face, as it registers astonishment,
disgust,
indignation and, finally, such shame and anguish that tears begin to flow down the
furrowed
cheeks.
Montage shots of the Folks in Radio Land, listening
in.A stout baboon housewife frying sausages, while the loudspeaker brings
her the imaginary fulfillment and real exacerbation of her most unavowable
wishes.
A baboon baby standing up in its cot, reaching over to the portable on the
commode and dialing the promise of detumescence.
A middle-aged baboon financier, interrupting his reading of the stock
market news to listen, with closed eyes and a smile of ecstasy. Give me, give me,
give me, give me.
Two baboon teen-agers, fumbling to music in a parked car. "That mean
you -- ou." Close-up of mouths and paws.Cut back to Faraday's tears.
The audience applauds tumultuously. NARRATOR
This new bright day is the twentieth of February, 2108, and these men and
women are members of the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition to North
America.
Spared by the belligerents of the Third World War -- not, I need hardly
say, for any humanitarian reason, but simply because, like Equatorial Africa, it
was too remote to be worth anybody's while to obliterate
-- New Zealand
survived and even modestly flourished in an isolation which, because of the
dangerously
radioactive condition of the rest of the world, remained for more
than a century almost absolute. Now that the danger is over, here come its first
explorers,
rediscovering America from the West.************************************************
161
The scene darkens; there is a noise of gunfire. When the lights come upagain, there squats Dr. Albert Einstein, on a leash, behind a group of baboons inuniform.The Camera moves across a narrow no-man's land of rubble, broken treesand corpses, and comes to rest on a second group of animals, wearing differentdecorationsand under another flag, but with the same Dr. Albert Einstein, on anexactly similar string, squatting at the heels of their jack boots. Under the tousledaureole of hair, the good, innocent face wears an expression of painedbewilderment. The Camera travels back and forth from Einstein to Einstein. Closeshots of the two identical faces, staring wistfully at each other between thepolished leather boots of their respective masters."Is that you, Albert?"
one of the Einsteins hesitantlyinquires.The other slowly nods his head."Albert, I'm afraid it is."
Overhead the flags of the opposing armies suddenly begin to stir in thefreshening breeze. The colored patterns open out, then fold in again uponthemselves, are revealed and once more hidden.NARRATOR
Surely it's obvious.
Doesn't every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's.
NARRATOR
Athletic in tweeds, but at the same time brightly intelligent behind her hornrimmed
glasses, Miss Ethel Hook, of the Department of Botany, reminds them that
there was, almost certainly, a widespread employment
of plant diseases. She turns
for confirmation of what she says to her colleague, Dr. Poole, who nods
approvingly.
Well, here he is, our hero, Dr. Alfred Poole D.Sc. Better known to his
students and younger colleagues as Stagnant Poole. And the nickname, alas, is
painfully apt. For though not unhandsome, as you see, though a Fellow of the
Royal Society of New Zealand and by no means a fool, in the circumstances of
practical life his intelligence seems to be only potential.
As the Narrator speaks, we dissolve to the alfresco picnic of the baboonsand their captive Einsteins. They eat and drink, with gusto, while the first two barsof "Onward Christian Soldiers"
are repeated again and again, faster and faster,louder and louder. Suddenly the music is interrupted by the first of a succession ofenormous explosions. Darkness. A long-drawn, deafening noise of crashing,rending, screaming,moaning. Then silence and increasing light, and once again itis the hour before sunrise, with the morning star and the delicate, pure music.The Camera comes down over a large rectangular graveyard. There are four men, heavily bearded and more than a little dirty, and twoyoung women, all of them busy with shovels in or around an opened grave.Suddenly a spade strikes something hard. There is a cry of delight, a flurryof concerted activity. A moment later a handsome mahogany coffin is hoisted tothe surface of the ground."Break it open."
"O.K., Chief."
We hear the creaking and cracking of rent wood."Man or woman?"
"Man."
"Fine! Spill him out."
With a yo-heave-ho they tilt the coffin and the corpse rolls out onto the
sand. The eldest of the bearded gravediggers kneels down beside it and starts
methodically to relieve the thing of its watch and jewelry.
Seeing that
tomorrow is Belial Day. . .
"I'll try them on," says the Chief.
With some difficulty they divest the cadaver of its trousers, coat and shirt,
then drop it back into the grave and shovel the earth back over its one-piece
undergarment. Meanwhile the Chief takes the clothes, sniffs at them critically,
then doffs the pearl-gray jacket which once belonged to the Production Manager
of Western-Shakespeare Pictures Incorporated, and slips his arms into the more
conservative tailoring that goes with malt liquors and the Golden Rule.
Close shot of the Chief, grotesque in the borrowed jacket of a man whose
arms were much shorter and whose belly was much larger than his own. The
sound of approaching footsteps makes him turn his head.
In a long shot from his viewpoint we see Dr. Poole, his hands tied behind
his back, trudging wearily through the sand. Behind him walk his three captors.
*****************************************************
162
The Chief stares at them in astonished silence as they approach.
"What in Belial's name?" he brings out at last.
There is a long silence, broken finally by the Chief.
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes, I speak English," Dr. Poole stammers.
"Good. Untie him; hoist him up."
They hoist him -- so unceremoniously that he lands on all fours at the
Chiefs feet.
"Are you a priest?"
"A priest?" Dr. Poole echoes in apprehensive astonishment.
He shakes his
head.
"Then why don't you have a beard?"
"I. . . I shave."
"Oh, then you're not. . ." The Chief passes a finger across Dr. Poole's chin
and cheek. "I see, I see. Get up."
Dr. Poole obeys.
"Where do you come from?"
"New Zealand, sir."
Dr. Poole swallows hard, wishes his mouth were less dry, his voice less
tremulous with terror.
"New Zealand? Is that far?"
"Very far."
"You came in a big ship? With sails?"
Dr. Poole nods and adopting that lecture-room manner,
which is always his refuge when personal contacts threaten to become too difficult, proceeds to
explain why they weren't able to cross the Pacific under steam.
"There would have been no place to refuel. It's only for coastwise traffic
that our shipping companies are able to make use of steamers."
"Steamers?" the Chief repeats, his face alight with interest. "You still have
steamers? But that must mean you didn't have the Thing?"
Dr. Poole looks puzzled.
"I don't quite catch your meaning," he says. "What thing?"
"The Thing. You know -- when He took over." Raising his hands to his
forehead, he makes the sign of the horns with extended forefingers. Devoutly,
his subjects follow suit.
"You mean the Devil?" says Dr. Poole dubiously.
The other nods.
"But, but. . . I mean, really. . ."
"Yes, He got control," the Chief explains. "He won the battle and took
possession of everybody. That was when they did all this."
With a wide, comprehensive gesture he takes in the desolation that was
once Los Angeles. Dr. Poole's expression
brightens with understanding.
"Oh, I see. You mean the Third World War. No, we were lucky; we got off
without a scratch. Owing to its peculiar geographical situation," he adds
professorially, "New Zealand was of no strategic importance to. . ."
The Chief cuts short a promising lecture.
"Then you've still got trains?" he questions.
"Yes, we've still got trains," Dr. Poole answers, a little irritably. "But, as I
was saying. . ."
"And the engines really work?"
"Of course they work. As I was saying. . ."
Startlingly the Chief lets out a whoop of delight and claps him on the
shoulder.
"Then you can help us to get it all going again. Like in the good old days
before. . ." He makes the sign of horns. "We'll have trains, real trains." And in an
ecstasy of joyous anticipation, he draws Dr. Poole toward him, puts an arm round
his neck and kisses him on both cheeks.
Shrinking with an embarrassment that is reinforced by disgust (for the
great man seldom washes and is horribly foul-mouthed) Dr. Poole disengages
himself.
"But I'm not an engineer," he protests. "I'm a botanist."
"What's that?"
"A botanist is a man who knows about plants."
"War plants?" the Chief asks hopefully.
"No, no, just plants. Things with leaves and stalks and flowers -- though of
course," he adds hastily, "one mustn't forget the cryptogams. And as a matter of
fact the cryptogams are my special pets. New Zealand, as you probably know, is
particularly rich in cryptogams.
. ."
"But what about the engines?"
"Engines?" Dr. Poole repeats contemptuously. "I tell you, I don't know the
difference between a steam turbine
and a diesel."
"Then you can't do anything to help us get the trains running again?"
"Not a thing."
Without a word the Chief raises his right leg, places his foot against the pitof Dr. Poole's stomach, then sharply straightens the bent knee.*******************************************************************
163
NARRATOR
An inch from the eyes the ape's black paw
Eclipses the stars, the moon, and even
Space itself. Five stinking fingers
Are all the World.
"Don't mind us," says the Arch-Vicar pleasantly. "After all, Belial Day
comes but once a year."
"Go and see if Dr. Poole is in the experimental garden," he orders.
The Familiars bow, squeak, "Yes, Your Eminence," in unison, and go out.
The Arch-Vicar sits down and graciously motions to the Director to follow
his example.
"I don't think I told you," he says; "I'm trying to persuade our friend here to
enter religion."
"I hope Your Eminence doesn't mean to deprive us of his invaluable help
in the field of food production," says the Director anxiously.
The Arch-Vicar reassures him.
"I'll see that he always has time to give you the advice you need. But
meanwhile I want to make sure that the Church shall benefit by his talents and. . ."
The Familiars re-enter the room and bow.
"Well?"
"He isn't in the gardens, Your Eminence."
The Arch-Vicar frowns angrily at the Director, who quails under his look.
"I thought you said this was the day he worked in the laboratory?"
"It is, Your Eminence."
"Then why is he out?"
"I can't imagine, Your Eminence. I've never known him to change his
schedule without telling me."
There is a silence.
************************************************************
164
"I don't like it," the Arch-Vicar says at last. "I don't like it at all." He turns
to his Familiars. "Run back to Headquarters and have half a dozen men ride out on
horseback to find him."
The Familiars bow, squeak simultaneously, and vanish.
"And as for you," says the Arch-Vicar, turning on the pale and abject
figure of the Director, "if anything should have happened, you'll have to answer
for it."
"Feet sore?" he asks solicitously.
"Not too bad."
She gives him a brave smile, and shakes her head.
"I think we'd better stop pretty soon and eat something."
"Just as you think best, Alfie."
He pulls an antique map out of his pocket and studies it as he walks along.
"We're still a good thirty miles from Lancaster," he says. "Eight hours of
walking. We've got to keep up our strength."
"And how far shall we get tomorrow?" Loola asks.
"A little beyond Mojave. And after that I reckon it'll take us at least two
days to cross the Tehachapis and get to Bakersfield." He returns the map to his
pocket. "I managed to get quite a lot of information out of the Director,"
"Thank Bel. . . I mean, thank God," says Loola.
There is another silence. Suddenly Loola comes to a halt.
"Look! What's that?"
She points and from their viewpoint we see at the foot of a very tall Joshua
tree, a slab of weathered concrete, standing crookedly at the head of an ancient
grave, overgrown with bunch grass and buckwheat.
"Somebody must have been buried here," says Dr. Poole.
They approach and, in a close shot of the slab, we see, while Dr. Poole's
voice reads aloud the following inscription:
William Tallis
1882-1948
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed, thou shouldst now depart!
Cut back to the two lovers."He must have been a very sad man," says Loola.
"Perhaps not quite so sad as you imagine," says Dr. Poole.
There is a silence. Then Loola hands him a hard boiled egg. He cracks it on
the headstone and, as he peels it, scatters the white fragments of the shell over the
grave.
*******************************************************
