The Chamber of Life by Green Peyton (best short novels .TXT) 📖

her head and look up at me over her shoulder, then quickly look away again.

"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated look—as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.

"They have been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has been determined and arranged by the artists."

"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"

"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had never been before."[Pg 40]

"It must have been a terrific labor."

"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a determinist here."

We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.

It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.

During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning, surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and, flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused. The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between[Pg 41] night and day. Then the darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.

"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in bewilderment.

"I seemed to stumble—" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us confused.

After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions, like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From time to time I heard inexplicable noises—the whirring of motors, the skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright, the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man. For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp,[Pg 42] and a milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak. Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close to my ear.

"For God's sake, look where you're going...."

I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward me, was a single figure—Selda. Behind me there was nobody. I went to meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an echo of that muffled, hoarse voice that I had never heard before.

That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked at him inquiringly.

"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.

"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.

"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.

We bowed slightly to each[Pg 43] other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped aboard our ship in silence.

That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.

We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:

"So I must go."

She didn't look at me, but answered quietly, "Yes, you must go."

"I don't want to go," I cried, "I want to stay here!"

"Why?" she asked me, averting her face.

"Don't you know?" I said swiftly. "Haven't you understood long ago that I love you?" She shook her head.

"Love is something that we don't know here—not until we have been married and lived with our men. Sometimes not then." But she looked at me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. Suddenly the impulse I had been resisting ever since the morning on the mountain[Pg 44] became insupportable, and I caught her in my arms almost roughly. Her face was close to mine, and she closed her eyes. I kissed her, forgetting everything but the knowledge that I had stumbled upon the sort of love that doesn't pass away, no matter how long a man lives.

After a while, though, she drew away as if she resisted not my desire, but her own.

"No—" she said in a low voice, "no...."

"But Selda!" I stammered, "I love you—I want to marry you." She shook her head.

"No," she said again, "didn't you understand? I am scheduled to marry Edvar."

At first I didn't know what she meant.

"Scheduled?" I repeated dully. "I don't understand."

"It has been arranged for years. Don't you remember what Edvar told you about our marriages here, the very first day you came? I was destined to marry Edvar long before any of us were born, before our parents, even, were born. It's the way they order our lives."

"But I love you," I cried in amazement. "And you love me, too. I know you love me."

"That means nothing here," she said. "It happens sometimes. One has to accept it. Nothing can be done. We live according to the machinery of the world.[Pg 45] Everything is known and predetermined."

Suddenly, in the midst of what she was saying, close behind me there sounded even above the roaring of the waterfall a raucous noise like the hooting of a taxi horn. It was followed by a shrieking of brakes, and a hoarse voice near by shouted something angry and profane. A rush of air swept by me, and I heard faintly the sound of a motor moving away, with a grinding of gears. I looked at Selda.

"Did you hear that?"

She nodded, with wide, frightened eyes. "Yes. It's not the first time." Suddenly she rose, frowning, as if with pain. "Come," she added, "now we must go back."

There was nothing else to do. We went back silently to the airship, and turned its nose toward the city.

But when I left her at her apartment, promising to see her later, I had one last hope in my mind. I went to the Bureau.

The Bureau was a vast system of halls and offices, occupying two floors of the great building. I was sent from one automatic device to another—there were no human clerks—in search of the representative who had spoken to me before. Finally I found him in his apartment,[Pg 46] down the corridor only a hundred feet or so from my own. He was pouring over a metal sheet on his table, where innumerable shifting figures were thrown by some hidden machine, and he was calculating with a set of hundreds of buttons along its edges. He spoke to me without pausing or looking up, and throughout my interview he continued with his figuring as if it had been entirely automatic—as perhaps it was.

"What is it, Baret?" he said I felt like a small child before the principal of the school.

"I have come to ask you whether it is necessary for me to go," I answered. He nodded slightly, never looking up.

"It is necessary," he said. "Your visit was pre-arranged and definite." I made a gesture of remonstrance.

"But I don't want to go," I insisted. "I like this place, and I am willing to fall into its life if I can remain under any conditions."

"It is impossible," he objected angrily.

"I have never been told why or how I came here. You said you would tell me that."

"I have never been told myself. It is a matter known to the men who handled it."

"If I went to them, surely they could find some way to let me stay?"[Pg 47]

"No," he said coldly, "the thing was as definite as every event that takes place here. We do not let things happen haphazardly. We do not alter what has been arranged. And even if it were possible to let you stay—which I am inclined to doubt—they would not permit it."

"Why not?" I asked dully.

"Because there is no place for you. Our social system has been planned for hundreds of years ahead. Every individual of today and every individual of the next six generations has his definite place, his program, his work to do. There is no place for you. It is impossible to fit you in, for you have no work, no training, no need that you can fill. You have no woman, and there are no women for your children or your children's children. You are unnecessary. To fit you in, one would have to disrupt the whole system for generations ahead. It is impossible."

I thought a moment, hopelessly.

"If I made a place?" I suggested. "Suppose I took someone else's place?" He smiled, a faint, cold smile.

"Murder? It is impossible. You are always under the control of the Bureau in some way, whether you are aware of it or not."[Pg 48]

I turned away, a little dazed. The whole thing was inevitable and clear as he put it. I knew there was nothing to be done.

I left his apartment, and went down the corridor to the landing stage. No one interfered with my movements, and my commands were not questioned. I ordered a plane, and gave my name to the girl in charge.

"Your destination?" she asked.

I said, "I am only going for pleasure."

"Your return?"

"Expect me in an hour."

I had watched Selda pilot the planes for so many weeks that I was familiar with the controls. I rose swiftly, circled the building, and headed north toward the mountains. I hadn't the courage to see Selda again. It was only a little while before I came to the place by the river where we had spent the morning. I slowed down, and flew over it, just above the waterfall.

There was a landing-spot by the river just beyond the top of the fall. I came to rest there, and left the machine.

I stood looking at the river for a moment. I don't remember that any thoughts or emotions came to my mind. I simply stood there, a little dazed, and very quiet, with a vague picture of[Pg 49] Selda before my eyes. It was a dream-like moment.

Then I slipped over the river's bank, into the water, and the swift current, catching me up and whirling me around dizzily, carried me toward the edge of the waterfall.

And