Read Online Facial Justice by L. P. Hartley - Free Book Online

Nobody had to say "Look!" If an unusual sound made itself heard above the general uproar, everyone listened simultaneously. And if anybody laughed, everybody laughed, without asking what it was about. They were like a flock of birds, telepathic to each others' thoughts. Thoughts, but were they thoughts? Were they not rather manifestations of instinct, of a common consciousness, which reacted to stimuli in precisely the same way, and excluded thought? The Dictator wants to replace intelligence by instinct, someone had said. Perhaps he was right. With nothing outside one to invite comparison, indeed with the whole idea of comparison frowned upon and virtually forbidden, what was there left to think about? If personality expresses itself by acts of discrimination, and discrimination, besides being taboo, has no material to work on, what becomes of personality? It shrinks, it atrophies, it dies. Oh this flatness, within and without! Yet once Jael would not have minded it, did not mind it; she had accepted it with everything else that made up the Horizontal View of Life, of which, at lectures and on the radio, everyone heard so much. Of course, there were jokes about it, cartoons depicted patients and delinquents in all stages of nonerectness, at every slope and angle, bending, kneeling, going on all fours, stretched out, prone or prostrate; many of them were improper, for in matters of sex the Dictator was not puritanical, he thought that indecency was an aid to relaxation. But, for all that, the Horizontal View of Life, or On the Level as it was sometimes more familiarly called, was generally accepted. Without knowing why, Jael looked up. Everyone was looking up. Straight ahead, through the window beside the driver, she saw something breaking the line of the horizon, something sticking up. It might have been a puff of smoke, but it was too solid for that and did not move. Somebody said, "There it is!" in a tone of awe, and a silence fell. The next moment the tower disappeared behind the driver's head, but it had left its presence in the coach, a most disturbing presence, like a thought that had found its way into one's mind and would not be expelled. Soon the tower reappeared; sometimes it was on one side of the coach, sometimes on the other, sometimes straight ahead, but always it was growing larger, and as it grew so did the thought grow in Jael's mind. When the tower was halfway up the window and perhaps only a mile or so away, for the stonework of its structure was becoming visible, somebody called out, "Let's go backl" "Yes, let's," cried someone else, and Jael, from some inner compulsion, was going to say the same, when the thought seemed to swell in her and choke her utterance. "No, no," she heard herself saying, "we must go on!" and when she had said this others took it up. "We must go on!" The sense of public disagreement was almost new to Jael; in an assembly she expected to feel what everybody felt: now she wanted her will, her private, personal will to prevail; she felt other wills arrayed against her, trying to thwart her will. "Go on! Go on!" They went on; she had carried the day. Now they had reached the foot of the hill on which the tower stood, this monstrous mound of earth which had somehow survived the bombs. Of the tower itself, only the lower part was visible, blocking the windows, shutting out the light. "It will fall on us!" a man cried, but still the coach went on, painfully climbing upward, until suddenly, when no one was expecting it to, it stopped. "Ely Cathedral," the conductor said. But nobody got out; nobody moved; they seemed to be frozen in their places. Then Jael felt a loosening of her limbs, as though an enchantment was letting go its hold, and she stumbled out and stood under the tower, and looked up. The western transept had been broken away, only the tower remained, and its immense height filled her mind with awe and terror. She thought she might be going to faint but the feeling passed, and