Babel Tower (46 page)

“Judges are scarlet,” observed Turdus Cantor, “and cardinals too have arrogated to themselves that rich colour.”

“Also the Whore of Babylon,” said Samson Origen. “The original Scarlet Woman on her scarlet beast, swallowing the stars.”

“Though our sins be as scarlet,” observed Turdus Cantor, “they shall be washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Who is himself woolly-white, with bleaching blood, a paradoxical beast.”

“A man in a uniform,” said Samson Origen, “or a man in a robe, for they are the same things, is not a man, but a cipher, but a function, but a walking idea; his clothes walk and speak for him. And undercover, who knows who he is, or what he does.”

Culvert, all alive with enthusiasm, joined their group and begged that they all take parts in the coming Rite or Play for the New Year on the
Shortest Day. Colonel Grim, he said, was to be the
sage femme,
or Wise-woman, or Midwife to the New Year, and was to wear a specially designed gilded mask and a great coif. And Turdus Cantor was wanted as godparent to the New Year, and he would be clad as an old beldame with a black mask and white woolly hair. And the Lady Roseace would be godfather to his godmother and their names were to be Logos and Ananke, and they were to sing sweetly together at the birth.

“Sweet singing is beyond me,” said Turdus Cantor. “My old voice is cracked.”

“Then you shall have pan-pipes,” said Culvert. “And there will be gongs, and cymbals, and clanging bells, and zithers and flutes.”

“And what do you hope to bring about with all this?” asked Samson Origen.

And Culvert told him how he hoped to make the rhythm of the people’s blood hum to the rhythm of the turning earth and light the fire of the new Sun in all their hearts. And Culvert told Samson Origen that he desired him to be a Pythoness in the Rite and wear a double mask facing backwards and forwards. And Samson Origen said he would not play, he would not take part, he would neither dance, speak, sing nor mum. “I will watch,” said Samson Origen, adding “as long as one man watches and only watches, what you have is art, and intelligent, as opposed to religion, and terrible.”

“I do not want you to watch,” said Culvert.

Their eyes locked.

“But you do not want to make me act against my will,” said Samson Origen. “And my will is to watch, my pleasure is in watching and only in watching. I believe in detachment, Culvert, in the solitary strong mind, as you know. I have seen the Krebs dance for the new Sun, and it is not pretty and not instructive.”

“Tell me how they dance,” said Culvert, and his eyes glittered.

So Samson Origen, in an even tone, in quietly polished sentences, sipping his hot wine with cinnamon, told his three companions of the great seasonal feasts of the Krebs, of the building of fires and the binding of prisoners, of the brewing of fermented milk with sour barley and pigs’ blood, of the drumming of the women, of their wailing voices and averted faces, of the great horns belling and coughing and sounding, of the gongs and the cymbals, the castanets and the tambourines, the bladders and the rattles, and of the long, snaking lines of dancers, all moving as one, stamping with flat feet, rolling their oiled buttocks, faster and faster, of the frightened beasts
who were driven into the circle round the fire and torn apart slowly by fingernails and teeth, living haunch from haunch, rib from rib, gut from bloody gut, until the Krebs were clothed in bloody hides and crowned with bleeding horns, or with the heads of wolf or wildcat, bear-cub or hind, wild ass or mongoose. And the fire would burn brighter and brighter and sputter with fat from the roasting creatures, and then the prisoners would be brought in, and meet the same fate as the beasts, ripped apart and roasted, licked and tasted. And Samson Origen told of the election of the King of the Day who must lord it over all, and was carried on their black shoulders on a wooden throne in the firelight, and crowned with jewels and fed on wine and honey, whose hands and feet were kissed and slavered over, whose rich robes were embroidered in scarlet and golden silks. And he told how, when the sun came over the dark hills at the edge of the plain, this King was whipped, and roasted and torn to fragments and devoured. Samson Origen told this tale coldly, marshalling his facts, but he saw Culvert’s eyes bright and wet, and saw the hot rheum in Turdus Cantor’s old eyes. Those of Colonel Grim were dry as his own, he saw, and the pulses in his neck and brow were steady as ever.

“And do the Krebs have a God,” asked Culvert, “in whose name they roast and consume this unfortunate being?”

“They do,” said Samson Origen. “But they may not speak his name, under pain of death, and I do not know it. But the names of his masks are legion: there is a black horse, and a flaming fire, a great worm and a white kid, all of which at different times they dance for and dress themselves to simulate.”

“Have you seen this thing?” asked Culvert.

“I have,” said Samson Origen. “I watched, endeavouring to feel neither fear nor excitement.”

“And did you observe the face of the King of the Day? Did he show fear?”

“He showed smiling vacancy, whether from extreme fear or because he was drugged and unaware, I do not know.”

“Or happy, perhaps, in the mystery.”

“I think not. You may entertain that idea, but I think not.”

 … So the feasting and dancing, the japes and the singing, went faster and hotter and more lusty. Up and down the staircases and along the corridors they danced, in great human eels, yet not human, for there were bears and boars, horned goats and silly sheep, cunning cats and
sly foxes, ravening wolves and hooded crows prancing there, with sweaty human legs and tails, often enough, and little or nothing else, save that the women wore gourds and codpieces and the men wore apple-stuffed breasts, and swishing skirts. And all over the Tower were the brave little snail-lights. And there was no Babo, but at the head of the table was Culvert in the scarlet robes of a priestess, with long, blond curls on his head, and a red mouth and painted fingers. And beside him was the Pope, or Priest, or Bishop, mitred and with a gilded mask, and Colonel Grim, clothed as a beldame, and Roseace and Turdus Cantor as Logos and Ananke, she in a black, studious suit with a silver hawk-mask, and he in many-coloured female robes, with the face of a snake in gold and green. And when the Longest Night was drawing to its thickest, the Yule Log was ignited with great ceremony, and huge trays of snails were put to roast on it, and boiling oil was dripped into their cavities, so that hundreds of tiny boneless bodies writhed and winced and boiled together. And when dawn approached, the ceremony began on the high dais. It was a long and tedious ceremony, for Culvert had not yet got the knack of ceremonies, and did not understand that a mass of men must move, and exult, and engage and if necessary suffer and scream together and as one, if a ceremony is to weld a people. He wished, their Projector, to be all things to all men, Scapegoat and Whore, Mother and Father, Life and Death, Punished and Punisher, and, as will be subsequently clear in this narrative, his folk were not whole-heartedly implicated in his symbolic strutting and groaning, nor were they exempt from that modern saturnalian emotion which is most destructive of religio-aesthetic passion, embarrassed laughter.

He had devised a ceremony in which his eyes were bound, his robes were parted and his posterior fiercely whipped by the officiating Pope, or Priest, or Bishop, to whom he gave a stack of white willow wands and urged her to ruddy them truly and not in jest, for real and not faked blood was required to flow in their new world. Now the Pope under the flammiform cornute mitre was none other than the Lady Mavis, who was quite as reluctant as Samson Origen to perform any role in the Carnival rites, but had not that gentleman’s cold blood, or his certainty of rectitude. And Culvert had overridden her demurrings and diffidences with accusations that she was not prepared to sacrifice her private desires for the general life. And when she retorted that it had not been part of the project to enforce people to submit their individual beings to the general will, but to
harmonise both equally, he accused her of equivocation and bad faith. It was clear, he said, that she hankered for old orders, for bourgeois fustiness and the servile respect of servants, for hypocrisies and respectabilities and niceties that had been swept away by openness and truth. It was true also, said he, that she inclined still towards the vices induced by that stultifying and crippling institution, the Family. Truly, said Culvert to the Lady Mavis, it appeared to him that perhaps she should consider returning to the world outside. And she thought of the burned and salted fields of her home, of the gibbets and the death cells, of the roving bands of hungry soldiers, and wept bitterly. She thought also of her vision of
fêtes champêtres
and beribboned hats under sheltering trees, and wept more strongly. And she was afraid, for her history had taught her that fear was reasonable and appropriate, and she said she would play a small part. And her child too, the little Felicitas, Culvert insisted, should play a part, she should be the New Year, the Birth of the Sun, a candle to light the whole community to brighter days. Her terror pleased him, for she had always in the past looked at him with a kindly, indulgent, critical look, as though he might grow into a good man in some distant future when he should have discarded certain follies. It pleased him to make her the instrument of his ritual chastisement, for she would hate in principle to see any man whipped for any reason, and yet she would desire, in part, to whip himself for his treatment of her, and yet, too, she would hate that in herself.

And so it proved, for the hand that was raised to whip the white (if pimpled) posterior of the Whore trembled greatly, and fell lightly. Lay on, said Culvert between his teeth, or it will go ill with you. Lay on, said Colonel Grim, in his character of
sage femme,
lay on lustily or you will never be free, and you may reasonably do, dear lady, what both of you desire you to do. Lay on, said the Lady Roseace, laughing behind her hawk-mask, let him see what a Fury a woman can be, when aroused to righteous wrath.

So the Pope laid on, softly, hesitatingly, and then, as Culvert’s blood began to blossom, more and more furiously, cutting his backside into a trellis of weals, and continuing even when Culvert’s frenzy of pleasure and pain had reached its sighing, sinking climax, so that Reason and Ananke had to pull her back from her task. And then she sat down on the stage, her head nodding under her mitre, and howled like a beaten child. And Reason and Ananke brought great tubs of red winelees, and poured them over Culvert’s scarlet posterior, so that the
stage was a sea of blood and wine. And out into this red liquid, between the straddled legs, crept a naked child, with a candle, the little Felicitas, who had been cowering under the throne in the stink and turbulence and juices, and now did as she was told, a blood-red naked child, holding aloft a lighted candle, and quite unable to control her bitter weeping. And the people murmured, because both Pope and New Year were so miserable and howling. And Culvert rose in his robes, suddenly deflated, and his eyes darted daggers. And one pair of hands, Samson Origen’s, clapped twice, softly. And outside, over the woods, the watchmen saw the first red slip of the new sun, for Culvert’s timing had been impeccable.

Tales have been told earlier in this narrative of the delicate and indelicate doings in the Dormitories devised by Culvert. That wise man’s conception of childhood was, it is to be feared, somewhat idealistic in its paradisal vision, for he saw the small human creatures in those vaulted sleeping places as rays of pure energy, as beings made of pure, warm, uncorrupted flesh and instincts full of creative kindness, of high inventiveness, of playful spontaneity when not thwarted, perverted and deformed by sick adult inhibitions—prohibitions sprouted from a sick society with stunted desires. It is true that the playfulness, spontaneity and inventiveness of the Lattermen, as the heads of the latrine corps were called, had flourished exceedingly amongst the beds and couches in the juvenile Harem. “To the free judgement of their peers,” Culvert had said, “the community would trust the correction of the little peccadilloes, the omissions and hesitancies, of the youthful aspirants to freedom, for they would best know what was appropriate, and how to weigh the offence against the atonement, which might be a small thing, a brief abstention from chocolate, or perhaps a small service, the cleaning of another child’s shoes.”

What punishments the Lattermen devised in the dark hours has been told, as far as I dare tell. Jojo, Adolphus, Capo and the Grinner have been duly celebrated for the sweet humiliations, the atmosphere of apprehension, the wonderful arbitrariness they devised, so that boys and girls could be induced to punish themselves with sickly fears, and obsessive dreads, not knowing when the jolly mockery might begin, or the process of accusation be set in motion, day or night. For these bright boys were as adept at invading the essence of the closed grey soft matter in the young skull, or the bloody rhythm of the little heart, as they were at invading the beds, and mouths, and
bottoms, of the little sleeping figures. And on the day after the Rite of the Solstice they pronounced themselves most dissatisfied with the behaviour of the child Felicitas, and that on two counts; first, that she had
shown herself off
in taking a central rôle in the Rite, she had
sucked up
and abased herself in order to procure this putting of herself on view, all naked with her silly candle. And secondly, that having displayed her meagre little body in this ostentatious way, she had
wept like a baby
and spoiled the whole jolly occasion; she had mightily
let everyone down.

So they stood the little thing in the middle of the Dormitory, and pulled off her nightgown, and laughed at her nakedness. They wore the pretty masks they had all pranced in during the Carnival, Owls and Pussycats, Tadpoles and Newts, toothy Rabbits and snouty Bears, and pushy little Lambs, and they danced round her, pointing and poking and criticising her little belly and thighs and her trembling little knees. And then Jojo pronounced that she would not be punished
now
for her misdemeanours, but would be given time to think, and reflect, and that the judges would come when they were ready, and do to her what they would do, though they would not say now what it would be.